Opinion: A dive into the popular culture pool

Joanne McNeill.

During mass global grief festivals for celebrities recently deceased I frequently have no idea who many of these seemingly famous people are.

It's the same with the Oscars, peopled largely with red carpet anonymities.

Of course I knew of David Bowie though. Possibly only non-Earthlings cannot sing along with Major Tom.

Perhaps this strange disconnection from popular culture has arisen because I can't abide movies, commercial radio and women's magazines and am increasingly impatient with television possibly for the same reason I dislike movies, which is resentment at the implicit expectation I will sit still and behave like a captive audience.

Consequently much of what informs popular culture passes me by until deaths hit social media or pop cultural metaphors enter the vernacular, annoying the hell out of me.

For instance, recently I had to give in and look up Kardashians.

It turns out they surfaced initially with the 1996 trial of US footballer OJ Simpson on a charge of murdering his ex-wife.

His defence lawyer was one Rob Kardashian, whose family featured subsequently in a US reality TV show. Apparently they are renowned for curvaceous bodies, a predilection for alliteration (primarily around the letter K) and for romantic liaisons - with musical megastars in genres which seldom feature on RNZ Concert and a former gold-medal winning Olympic decathlete (famous sportspeople is another trivia quiz category of which happily I remain abysmally and blissfully ignorant) who transformed from male to female.

Jumping the shark is another example.

Bare with me you cool hipsters already in the know, but after extensive research I can reveal it's nothing like premature ejaculation or jumping the starting gun and no blood, pretty teeth dear or animal rights are involved.

The phrase was uttered originally by the flatmate of US media personality John Hein when they were students watching an episode of TV sitcom Happy Days where the character Fonzie performed a waterskiing jump over a caged shark. This they considered a cheap and unnecessary gimmick signalling a betrayal of the show's edge and thereby its downfall (although other aficionados disagree).

It came to mean the defining moment when creative evolution begins to decline.

Later Hein started a popular "jump the shark" website, to which fans contributed, identifying similar pivotal moments in various TV shows. After the site was sold to a corporation however, reportedly it jumped the shark itself when the new owners censored negative comments thereby losing former integrity.

The death of Bowie elicited such widespread mourning partly because of the music and partly because of his ground-breaking contribution to gender bending polemic but also because it was a shock since he avoided the tabloid "battle with cancer" cliche by keeping his fatal disease private.

He was cremated immediately without ceremony, prompting speculation his death was staged to promote his final work, the album Blackstar from which, if he has indeed died, the single Lazarus is a deathbed evocation of considerable courage.

Remember, the Biblical Lazarus was miraculously resurrected though.

Should a similar Bowie resurrection occur at this emotionally sensitive post-mortem point in his creative career he might easily be accused of jumping the shark.