Folk Culture v. Pop Culture (and the Role of Consumer Capitalism)

What Mr. Holdsworth points out here is that the individual taste profiling of consumer capitalism has, in effect, metabolized pre-existing folk traditions and perverting them for its own ends.  This has ended up contributing to an "anti-culture" that is not held in common [Commonality here with Deneen's thesis in "Why Liberalism Failed"]. 

Below the level of politics, what pop culture fostered was not a unity of a people-- but division.  What we got was a Balkanized constellation of sub-cultures: reddits and comicons and hipsterdom.

*An important point raised by Mr. Holdsworth is the Church's accommodation of 'pop culture' since the 1970s and 1980s will necessarily be spiritually vapid and emotionally self-gratifying because it doesn't integrate community through tradition (that is, the practices that attest to our common origins).  This pious aspect of "folk culture" as an inter-generational inheritance is what makes traditional music, true folk para-liturgical traditions (the focus of this blog) so oriented towards the promotion of piety both in the love of God and one's country.  Let us all partake in the recovery of these traditions, be they real or invented.  The latter is also important potentially to redeem through alignment with our liturgical self-fashioning (which is authentic and sacramental).  Ultimately what matters in the prospect of a Christian culture is that these traditions are by their very nature oriented towards a lending and a passing down.  Something that makes constant 'cultural references' is going to be lost to people five generations from now if it doesn't speak to the Eternal...