This reminds me of David Foster Wallace's musings on the next literary movement beyond postmodernism. You can, of course, substitute
literary with other cultural phenomenon:
The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.
--From "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (1993), David Foster Wallace
A friend of mine recently and possibly inadvertently hit this chord as well when he let the various threads of real-world issues intermingle with our pop-cultural obsessions. In the one stream, he was reeling over the information and images coming out of Japan in the aftermath of such sublime destruction. In the other, he was, of course, being bombarded by the noise of the entertainment-industrial complex, much of which is responsible for manufacturing the product we know as Charlie Sheen.
What a horrific admixture.