My name is Leslie Kawakami, I’m a senior at California State University Northridge working on my B.A. in English with Creative Writing and this blog is devoted to the study and examination of popular culture. It seems fitting that my general dialogue, opinions and musings about what pop culture means, both in theory and definition, should be published online for the worldwide community to ponder and discuss as well.
In today’s global, media-savvy and constantly-on[line] society, the idea of pop culture has moved beyond application to only the Western world, or even just America itself. I believe that the technological advances in the past decade have created culture on a world-wide scale. For example, because of the advent and subsequent rise of television in the 1950s, the United States found itself in the midst of an influx of British music in the 1960s and 70s, termed the “British Invasion”. Obviously, the arguably largest influence was from the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show (which resulted in the aptly-deemed “Beatlemania”) and yet many other bands were “discovered” by American teenagers during this time: The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks. Today, after the rise of the Internet, YouTube and social-media sites, musicians and bands that begin humbly in Britain have the potential to reach worldwide audiences, potentially including non-English-speaking countries. While British influence on American culture is not limited to just these time periods or one specific medium (music), I would argue that these are good, contemporary examples of how technology has shifted culture and created cross-culture, a blending between what is wholly “theirs” and what is “ours”.
In the Introduction of “The Politics of Culture”, Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan present a variety of definitions and explanations of what culture “means”. There is the idea of culture as the dominating force compelling the people to bend the will of the masses; the rallying cry of culture as a rebellious outlet for resistance and “alternate perspectives”; the concept of a larger culture as the result of counter-cultures; the mirroring aspect of culture as it reflects society’s likes (and dislikes); culture as restraints; culture as divisions of class, gender or position; culture as “high” and culture as “low”. The classifications of “high culture” and “low culture” (or culture from “above” or “below”) is the elitist way of trying to separate the things that people like into clear specifications, but this is not the way that it should be. “High culture” like classical music, lofty literature in stuffy libraries and the paintings and sculptures in museums should not be divided from rap music, comic books and street art, despite being deemed “low culture”. These distinctions only work to further divide the masses along class, race and gender lines – like Rivkin and Ryan address when they note that one approach to cultural studies sees culture as “owned by large corporations and largely run by men… [who] cannot help but assist the reproduction of the social system by allowing only certain kinds of imagery and ideas to gain access to mass audiences.” However, they also suggest that the opposite approach focuses more attention on “energies and attitudes fundamentally at odds with the attitudes and assumptions… of the capitalist social order.”
Thus, the reading leads me to believe that there is no widespread agreement about what culture is, even among those who study it. My original, brief and ridiculous definition seems as fragmented and disorganized as Rivkin and Ryan’s – “anything – regardless of medium – that the mass culture embraces as its own and reveals in; shows the people what other people enjoy; stuff that a lot of people think is awesome; crap that is trendy.” In fact, I honestly think that this rather silly definition of pop culture is often simply, exactly that: things that are popular.
But perhaps that is the beauty of culture (both pop or otherwise) – it is indefinable and thus can never wrestled and tied down to one particular theory or another. Having no concrete classification allows the idea of culture to change as the people do, providing us – that is, those of us who take the time to ask, examine and reflect on the question “what is culture” – a better understanding of our own times, issues and attitudes.
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Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan, eds. “Introduction: The Politics of Culture”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. Excerpt.
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