In the wake of burst bubbles, it’s have-nots who are chic

Just when you thought the stock market was rebounding and it was safe to wear Givenchy and pay 40 bucks for an entree again, comes this stunning dispatch from the pop-culture front lines: There are poor people among us! What’s more, downward mobility can be diverting! America, which usually prefers the champagne fizz of success, is sampling the malt-liquor authenticity and reverse-snob appeal of TV shows, rap tunes, fashion spreads and other cultural tributes to the burger-flipping classes.

In less time than it takes to say “Au revoir, 401(k)!,” we’ve gone from groveling at the feet of Bill Gates to aping Lil’ Abner.

But does this new infatuation with the lifestyles of the penniless and desperate reflect shifting social values -- a break with the go-go, gaga ‘90s and a touch of empathy for the 32 million Americans now living in poverty? Or is it a fashionably jaded form of exploitation?

Consider the conflicting evidence:

Nappy Roots, a hip-hop sextet from rural Kentucky, has gone gold with its CD “Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz,” a witty, straight-up exploration of the mixed blessings of being a have-not. No city-slicker rhymes for these guys about posses, stretch limos and gangsta profilin’. That stuff, explains group member Skinny DeVille in the rapper’s down-home patois, is as passe as Y2K.

“When Clinton was in office, man, everything was good,” DeVille says. “The economy was excellent. There was a lot of jobs out there, folks was working. Right now it ain’t at all like that no more. People aren’t spending on certain things that was frivolous. Time to take care of your own right now.”

DeVille’s colleague Big V remembers growing up so poor that he had to wear his sports uniforms to school in lieu of new clothes. “We used to think money was white. You know, like: ‘Put that down, boy! We ain’t white!’ But we always had each other, and that’s what I like to rap about, was my family being there, and my auntie chipping in, and my uncle doing what he could afford.”

Nappy Roots’ blue-collar identity is real, but pop culture doesn’t always treat poverty so charitably. Often, its response is more ambiguous. In the halls of CBS, plans are underway to remake the ‘60s sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies” as a “reality TV” show. According to a story in the Washington Post, program developers are scouring Appalachia’s hills and hollers looking for a Clampett-like clan to relocate to a Westside mansion for at least a year, where they’ll grapple with the plot-propelling mysteries of hiring maids, driving fancy cars and, no doubt, that ol’ cee-ment pond.

CBS insists that its remake -- using real, live hillbillies -- will aspire to “social commentary” and be more about skewering pretensions of the rich than making hay out of hapless rubes.

‘Dust-bowl glamour’

But what are we to make of the New Yorker’s recent fashion layout, in which photographer Herb Ritts poses hollow-cheeked models in clothes and backdrops that make them look like Okie refuges from the Great Depression? “Fashion has been looking over its shoulder again,” says the upscale magazine’s breathless text. “Designers have drawn on both the glitter and the squalor of the [1930s] -- satin shoes and dusty dungarees, gimlets and dry rot -- and the result is something like dust-bowl glamour.”

One model, a weather-beaten Pa Joad impersonator, sports an artfully soiled Dolce & Gabbana undershirt beneath his bib overalls. Another photo of a woman’s legs in tattered stockings tapering to a pair of Manolo Blahnik crocodile-and-leopard-print pony skin pumps, coyly alludes to a similar photograph by Dorothea Lange, who pricked America’s conscience with her haunting images of real poor people, the Steinbeckian migrants who flocked to California’s fruited plains in search of hope and a living wage.

Whether Ritts’ concept is tasteless and insensitive, or a clever jab at America’s historic habit of following fat times with sharp economic reversals, is a question of interpretation. But Judy Keller, who curated a current exhibition of Lange’s photographs at the Getty Museum in Brentwood, including the iconic “Migrant Mother,” doesn’t think Ritts should be able to have his postmodern-ironist’s cornbread and eat it too.

“ ‘Outrageous’ is the first word that comes to mind,” says Keller, an associate curator in the Getty’s department of photographs. “He is using the idea of poverty and a Depression context to show current couture fashions. I would say it’s totally out of whack.”

Americans have always been schizoid about the morality of material success, or its lack. We venerate Lincoln’s humble, character-building roots, but given the choice most of us would probably prefer to be strolling the gardens at Monticello or water-skiing at Hyannisport than reading by log-cabin candlelight. Unless our parents picked cotton in Texas or scooped strawberries in Salinas we may easily forget that we’re only a generation or two away from plucking chickens or mining coal for a living.

That’s one of the points raised in “Nickel and Dimed,” the stage adaptation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s bestselling, first-person odyssey of trying to survive in minimum-wage America. (The show just finished its run at the Mark Taper Forum.)

But for all its scathing observations about the grinding nature of the modern service economy, “Nickel and Dimed” doesn’t let the author claim the hero’s mantle. The Ehrenreich character (played by Sharon Lockwood) is constantly questioning her right to judge the difficult decisions confronting the working poor and her ethical duties as a journalist-observer.

As she should. Even as trenchant a social critic as George Orwell, author of “1984,” was criticized for his stunningly matter-of-fact observations about working-class hygiene in “The Road to Wigan Pier.” (“The lower classes smell,” he wrote. “That’s what we were taught.”)

But Orwell cited his own prejudices to show how stereotypes of the working poor get instilled. What distinguishes his essays and the photos of Lange -- a federal government employee who was trying to bring attention to a burning social problem -- from that of their blushing imitators is motivation. Without social consciousness and a commitment at some level to improve the lot of the working poor, cultural depictions of poverty, whether in a sitcom or a fine-art exhibition, can become just a proletarian pose -- a kind of Populist drag show.

“I think the line is, how good is it as art, in terms of its powers of communication?” Keller says. “If it moves you, if it is good enough for you to understand it and therefore have an emotional response to it, that is a sympathetic response to it, I think that it is not exploitation.”

The culture of poverty has its price, all right. But who pays? A print of “Migrant Mother” was scheduled for sale last week at Christie’s auction house. It was expected to fetch up to $200,000.

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Reed Johnson can be reached at [email protected].