Another example of a bit of microculture that is fading completely from view, yet which was thriving when I was a teenager: the idea, amongst “adults”, that popular culture is non-productive and a waste of time. My evidence-base for this is the school concerts that I performed in as a teenager: parades of dance and music that went on for hours. What music was used for these? A small part of “high culture” music—a senior pupil playing a bit of Mozart on the clarinet. But, this was a fairly small component—as was the amount of genuine popular music (in the broad sense) of the time. Mostly, the concerts were dominated by what we might term light music—not just in the narrow sense of the word, but in the sense of things like show tunes, film music, old pop music, sanitized versions of folk songs, et cetera. Gradually, some things would move from “popular culture” into “light culture”; an example of this was ABBA. Real popular-culture music was not admitted; there was an argument one year about whether a (very good) rock band that the pupils had formed should be allowed to play (eventually, they were allowed to play outside the hall during the interval).
A kind of “light culture” existed whose advocates probably looked up to, but didn’t really like traditional “high culture” (certainly not in large doses) yet who saw “popular culture” as being genuinely destructive and dangerous.
I don’t think that we would be having these sorts of distinctions today. The distinction between “light culture” and “popular culture” is fading. The idea that popular culture rots the brain, or takes time or moral energy away from better things, is fading. In a world where a member of the Shadow Cabinet can describe Beyoncé as one of the “cultural highlights” of the last decade, and mean it entirely genuinely, things have changed enormously.