Personality and Pop Culture

Recently, while cleaning out my old LP collection, I decided there were a handful of albums I wanted to convert and keep on MP3. The two rarest albums in my collection were the soundtrack to the 1966 film, Our Man Flint and the original cast album to the 1967 ABC-TV Stage 67 musical television special On the Flip Side, staring Ricky Nelson. I call these albums rare merely because I have never met anyone else who owned or liked them. I had to sell my record collection in 1970 to pay for my first attempt at moving away from home. In 1989, I found out how rare they were when I bought them for a second time. They weren’t expensive, just hard to track down. I was also able to find the two The Man from U.N.C.L.E. soundtrack LPs on a 2-for-1 CD, as well as many of the James Bond movie soundtracks. That told me there were enough people out there that loved old 1960s spy movie soundtracks to make a market for it. How many of those people also loved a long forgotten Ricky Nelson TV special?

While listening to these two albums as I recorded them with Audacity, and I wondered just how many people in the world also owned this odd pair of LPs. And if there were any, would they be like me in any way? Would we share personality traits? If I listed my Top 100 works from the vista of pop culture I treasured – books, movies, albums, television shows – on some computer system to match my list with other people’s favorites, would people whose lists overlapped with mine, be a lot like me? I’m sure such a test would be more scientific than astrology, but how much so?

The baby boomers I grew up with all listened to the same Top 40 radio during the early and mid-sixties, and we often loved the same TV shows and movies into high school. Shared books were not a common thing – I seldom met other bookworms. Sharing music, movies and TV shows didn’t make us alike but it did make us feel like a cohesive group, even though we were tens of millions of individual personalities. As FM radio came in, and album rock became popular, everyone split into different musical genres. High school gave the illusion we were all alike because we clung together in cliques that shared similar interests. By the time we went to college we realized even our friends we shared everything with were really very different.

Now I’m wondering if we worked backwards, cross-tabbing our lifetime pop-culture favorites, would we discover any statistical revelations about our personalities. I often meet middle-age boomers, generally male, whom I can strike up lively conversations with a drop of a couple names. I know a number of Bob Dylan fans. I know a fewer number of Bob Dylan and Philip K. Dick fans. Getting it down to Dylan, PKD and Jack Kerouac and that makes me wonder about the relationship between personality and pop culture.

I’m going to make a list of my major pop culture landmarks and if you, the accidental browser, stumbles upon this page and share a love for many of these works, zap me a communiqué. Also, if anyone knows of a website or study that works with this idea, also let me know. I was born in 1951, so items before then were discovered later in life. These are movies and television shows I’ve watched many times. The books, except for the ones after 2000, which I’m just now feeling like rereading for the first time, are ones which I have read many times. Many of them I’ve also gotten unabridged audio editions to experience these novels in a new way. And I will watch any and all movie versions made from these stories. These are works that I also read about and study. All of these works are ones I could write thousands of words about. They each have a personal story behind them. This list is just an odd fraction that could be used in the theoretical personality matching system I mention above.

• Portrait of Marchesa Balbi by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (painting 1621)
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (novel 1813, film & TV many)
  
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (novel 1861, film many)
• Paris Streets, Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte (painting 1877)
• Treasure Island (novel 1883, film 1934)
  
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (novel 1895, film 1960, 2002)
  
• Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie (novel 1902, film many)
  
• Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs (novel 1912, film 1932)
  
• Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey (novel 1912)
  
• The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum (novel 1913)
  
• Mark Twain’s Autobiography (1924)
  
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (novel 1926)
  
• City Lights (film 1931)
  
• Grand Hotel (film 1932)
  
• The Wizard of Oz (film 1939)
  
• The Maltese Falcon (film 1941)
  
• High Barbaree (novel 1945, film 1947)
  
• Battleground (film 1949)
  
• Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (novel 1949)
  
• The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein (novel 1952)
  
• Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein (novel 1953)
  
• Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein (novel 1955)
  
• Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein (novel 1956)
  
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac (novel 1957)
  
• The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein (novel 1957)
  
• Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein (novel 1958)
  
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (novel 1962)
  
• “The Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire (song 1965)
  
• “Stop in the Name of Love” by The Supremes (song 1965)
  
• “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan (song 1965)
  
• Our Man Flint (film and soundtrack 1966)
  
• Star Trek (TV series 1966-1969)
  
• Mindswap by Robert Sheckley (novel 1966)
  
• “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany (short story 1967)
  
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (novel 1968)
  
• “Cowgirl in the Sand” by Neil Young (song 1969)
  
• “Fresh Air”/”What About Me” Quicksilver Messenger Service (songs 1970)
  
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig (nonfiction 1974)
  
• The Big Chill (film 1983)
  
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (novel 1985)
  
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (novel 1985, TV miniseries)
  
• Replay by Ken Grimwood (novel 1987)
  
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series 1987-1994)
  
• Northern Exposure (TV series 1990-1995)
  
• Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (novel 1992)
  
• Tombstone (film 1993)
  
• Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (novel 1995, film 2000)
  
• His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (novel trilogy 1995-2000)
  
• Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling (novel series 1997-2007)
  
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series 1997-2003)
  
• The Matrix (film 1999)
  
• Freaks and Geeks (TV series 1999-2000)
  
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel (novel 2001)
  
• Positively 4^th Street by David Hajdu (nonfiction 2001)
  
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (novel 2002)
  
• Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett (memoir 2004)
  
• The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls (memoir 2005)
  
• Lost (TV series 2004- )
  
• Heroes (TV series 2005- )