Is the MCU our new folk culture?

Originality is a relatively recent phenomenon – so are we returning to the age of the ‘standard’?

Obviously it isn’t, no. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is not our new folk culture, and this blog is a great example of Betteridge’s law, where the answer to any question posed in a headline is “no”, because otherwise it wouldn’t be posed as a headline. I’d have just said “The MCU is our new folk culture.”

But!

There is an idea I retreat into when I feel depressed at the dearth of original new intellectual properties represented among blockbusters; at musicians cannibalising better-known songs from the 80s and 90s; at the relative lack of originality in publishing (if I have to read another novella about an unnamed, waifish millennial who has an unfulfilling email job and a boyfriend she secretly hates, well… it would be wise to restrict my access to industrial fertilizer). Whenever I am frustrated by the announcement of “Phase 836” or whatever of Disney/Marvel’s all-conquering and all-encompassing pop cultural project, or whenever I see one of those ridiculous trailers where Harrison Ford goes all red, I sigh and think back to this idea.

Studio execs: “What if we made the dark, gritty thing darker and grittier??”

The idea is this: that actually, original stories and works of art were a very 20^th-century phenomenon, a product of avant-garde modernism, and much of human history has been characterised by retellings of a standard collection of tales, featuring recognisable stock characters and heroes, with whom audiences were already familiar.

The most obvious examples of these are things like the medieval European cycle plays and the Norse eddas. In the Middle Ages, open-air plays would take on a format populated with stock types, or they would be retellings of older myths and stories. Very often, these miracle plays would simply recount Bible stories which audiences, such as they were, would recognise quickly. Elsewhere, canonical heroes would appear in different collections of stories and poems again and again: Sigurd appears in the Volsunga Saga, the Song of the Nibelungs and the Poetic Edda, as well as on runestones in Sweden and carved crosses in Britain. Those works of art span hundreds of years and thousands of miles. Much like King Arthur, he is a legendary character interpreted in different ways across different mythologies, whose central nature nonetheless stays the same.

You can see where I’m going with this. Is this what has happened with film and TV, now? That we just have a set of IPs – Superman, Batman, whatever – and new people writing and playing them, over and over again? In the last 50 years we have versions of Batman by Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, Robert Pattinson… why’s it that different from Olivier, Branagh, Rory Kinnear or Andrew Scott all playing Hamlet (itself a reworking of an older Danish story from the Gesta Danorum)? To borrow a term from music, these are cinematic ‘standards’ – recognisable named roles but with an individual spin to each performance.

I personally dislike them, because to me, every superhero film is broadly the same (no peril, muddy CGI, jokes that actually aren’t funny if you think about them for even one second). But perhaps Iron Man just plays the role for us that King Arthur would have for a Plantagenet serf. They’re both heroic stock characters you can drop into a work of storytelling who will be immediately recognised by an audience. They need no cultural set-up.

The same logic can be applied to music. Once upon a time, songs were only folk songs – there was no other sort – and this was basically true up to the 1960s. Lots of the jazz classics were interpretative. Everyone sang a version of ‘Mack the Knife’, or ‘Girl From Ipanema’ – Bobby Darin, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong. In the British Isles, during the 1970s folk revival, you might have had different versions of the Child Ballads performed differently by different artists (Shirley Collins once said you couldn’t write a folk song; if you could, it wouldn’t be a folk song). Folk musicians weren’t covering these songs, per se, because the songs didn’t really belong to anyone. They were standards.

Fast forward to 2022, “I’m Good (Blue)” by David Guetta and Bebe Rexha reached number one in 20 countries. That’s a very slightly better performance than Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”, which only hit the top in 18 countries in 1999, a year after its initial release. Good for Guetta and Rexha, because their song was a deliberate cannibalisation – and I mean that very neutrally – of Eiffel 65’s original. Even before the song’s release, Eiffel 65 members Jeffrey Jey, Massimo Gabutti and Maurizio Lobina were given writing credits, in an acknowledgment of the shared DNA.

Sampling and remixing, of course, have been around for years, but this was more of an interpolation – a good-natured hijacking of a tune from another song. There’s loads of it around at the moment, though the peak of the interpolation phenomenon seems to have been in 2023. That year, Ella Henderson recorded a version of Robert Miles’s “Children” with Switch Disco called “React”, which hit number four in the UK charts.¹ Norwegian DJ Alan Walker interpolated Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone”, with the creatively titled “Better Off (Alone, Pt III)”. And Nicki Minaj and Kim Petras released a reworked version of the same song called “Alone” in the same year. DJ Khaled has long been a master of this too: “Wild Thoughts” interpolated Santana’s “Maria Maria” way back in the murky days of yore (2017).

These are all deliberate and conscious borrowings rather than samples – which in the good old days were illicit ways for hip-hop DJs to chop and screw around with other records – or stolen/overly similar melodies in other songs, as was the case with Olivia Rodrigo and Paramore, and Dua Lipa and INXS, both of whom were forced to extend songwriting credits to the respective bands after they released songs that sounded too similar to theirs. Nor are these remixes per se – they basically still sound the same. The melodies are unchanged. The point is that many of these artists agree royalties with the original songwriters in advance, because they know that they will appeal if audiences already recognize something they like in them. They need the easy attention grab that a recognisable hook offers. And there are few better known hooks you can hear in a club than “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” or “Better Off Alone”.

Fans are aware of this. In a comment on Reddit’s r/popheads under a thread entitled “I’m so fucking tired of old melody interpolations”, which claimed that artists were using lazy, uncredited interpolations for easy songwriting wins, a user succinctly explained the appeal of the phenomenon:

Are you sure it isn't credited? Interpolation are [sic] being credited more and more, not less, which comes with a nice pay check for the original songwriter. It can be a win win -- instant success with a familiar hook for the new artist & cash and a boost in attention for the older one. It's not always great but some can be really creative and intentional.

It’s a healthy way to look at the budding return of the standard, I suppose.

The late cultural theorist and blogger Mark Fisher would call all of this “hauntology”. In his essay “Lost Futures”, in which he decries the lack of forward-looking creativity in pop culture and media², Fisher came up with the term and used it to describe a certain recent tendency to prefer the old and the familiar to the shock of the new. Every new trend, Fisher said, was now just a reimagining of an older one. The Seventies were back in, or the Nineties, or whatever – kids were either using flip phones again or wearing shirts with ruffs and wide collars. The specifics didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were recognisible to the adults who had experienced them the first time around.

Fisher was in his mid-forties when he wrote this:

“Rather than the old recoiling from the ‘new’ in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era [i.e. Fisher himself] are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in popular music culture. It was through the mutations of popular music that many of those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the passage of cultural time. But faced with 21^st-century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared.”

Fisher being Fisher, he put this down to the effects of 21^st-century capitalism, suggesting that consumers are too tired, overworked and overwhelmed to engage on a mass level with cultural forms that are too new or challenging. I’m not sure I quite agree – I think it’s more that the attention economy is forcing musicians back towards older songs that are immediately recognisable, in order to stand out in an intensely crowded field.³

Need to grab the kids’ attention quickly and get them onto the dancefloor? Drop a song whose hook they know from somewhere, even if they can’t quite place it – maybe it’s even from a football chant – and add some contemporary vocals. Voila. The same goes for films: why go to the trouble of creating a whole new world, of introducing characters and their motivations and theif conflicts, when you have an oven-ready setting in Gotham City? Why invent a new villain when – sigh – everyone aready loves the Joker? Tropes, stocks, standards: there’s nothing new under the sun.

This was a bit of a half-digested take that I have been groping towards for a while. I’m not sure how well I’ve articulated it… let me know what you think in the comments!

1. Henderson in particular loves singing on an interpolation. In 2024, she released “Alibi” with Rudimental, a song which is essentially a drum’n’bass cover of “Gangsta’s Paradise” with different lyrics.

2. This is a horrible paraphrasing of his argument, I’m aware, but the essay itself is pretty complicated and 30 pages long. You should absolutely read it in full, though.

3. It’s also worth noting that even in the decade since Fisher was writing, the struggle to win the attention of consumers has intensified that much more. His was a pre-TikTok world…