- [Kyle Voiceover] Hi. My name is Kyle,
which you may already know, but, ahem,
for the last eight or nine years,
I've been doing this web series that I've been calling "Brows Held High".
I've changed a lot since I've started, but the name has stayed the same.
But I've never sat down and really explored the actual term
at the root of my show's title:
highbrow.
What does this actually mean?
What is this thing around which I built my entire brand?
This thing which I've made fun of, and promoted, and explored.
What does highbrow mean?
Why do we apply the phrase "highbrow"
to things like opera and classical music
and movies that are more likely to play at the Film Forum than at the Regal Union Square.
That's a local New York reference there.
So I looked it up.
Are you ready?
You ready for this?
It comes
from phrenology.
Phrenology: the pseudoscience of skull measurements
used by 19th century bigots
to scientifically justify various forms of institutional racism.
According to one-height-fits-all brow source Wikipedia,
"highbrow" first appeared in print in 1884
and was popularized by a writer named Will Irvin, who
I'm guessing was a white dude.
Highbrow came first,
then low and middlebrow,
until we had a super easy peasy way
to rank and judge any and all forms of human art, craft, taste, and recreation.
See, according to phrenologists,
the brow is the center of comparison, the center of taste.
So individuals with high brows have more capacity
to compare and contrast different concepts,
and therefore develop and appreciate more subtle cultural sensibilities,
while those with low brows
cannot
for
some
REASON.
Isn't that a fun fact?
Isn't that a wonderful thing to discover?
Wouldn't it have been great to have known that before I built my entire fucking online CAREER AROUND IT?
(Kyle sighs)
Why is it always skulls?
But lately, this has really bugged me, a lot.
Am I perpetuating elitist, classist, racist nonsense
simply by implying that there is such a thing as highbrow?
I think that's why my YouTube channel isn't Brows Held High
but my name and the acronym "BHH".
Because I don't know how I can justify the title,
like how KFC can't call the stuff that they sell "chicken".
It really is a troublesome label.
It's a classist label,
and a heavily-coded racist label.
Even though we've mostly abandoned phrenology as a culture,
the implication's still the same.
It implies that there's a hierarchy within human culture,
that there is a high culture and a low culture.
It feeds into this notion that certain forms of art,
that is, certain ways that people express themselves,
are more deserving of respect than others,
and taking that implication further,
that certain people are more deserving of respect than others,
just because they belong to a certain tradition,
a certain culture,
a certain society,
a certain
class
of people.
And in truth, they are not more deserving of respect or attention than others.
How much respect familiarity with a certain artwork can get you.
And what's more: in an age where information is free-flowing,
where the old barriers of money and education
and other forms of gatekeeping have been broken down by the internet,
cultural capital is more available than ever.
It's something that you can actively choose to do,
choose to nurse and foster within yourself.
You are smart enough to get quote unquote "highbrow art"
if you just give it a chance.
Huh.
Maybe that's why the brows are held high.
They aren't there because you're born that way,
it's because it's something that you do.