Skip to main content

What Is Pop Culture

 I read a description of a Jules Pfeiffer cartoon in a book recently. I have tried to find the actual cartoon, but in vain. The description was a series of drawings of a boy growing into a young man and then aging into an old man. The caption for the boy read something along the lines of loving the popular songs on the radio, and going to see sci-fi and horror movies in the theater. Then the young man had a caption about loving jazz and seeing art films. The adult man's caption talked about listening to the old standards and watching serious drama. The old man's caption mentioned listening to oldies on the radio and watching "junk" movies in revival houses and being allowed to love pop culture again. And that line is what prompted this post. Because I thought to myself, "Wait, aren't all of those things pop culture?" So I thought it might be worth taking a look at what comprises pop culture.

To begin, let's take the words pop culture. I have always taken it as a contraction of popular culture. I know some have taken the pop to mean is is fizzy and satisfies a sweet tooth without having any real nutritional value. I reject that, because sci-fi movies (which I have never seen anyone argue not being pop culture) can have quite a bit of "nutritional value". Star Trek may not have been the most intellectual show of it's day, but it often had some moral or philosophical point to make. I also think that the context of era matters. Mozart might not be "pop" now, but he most certainly was during his lifetime. And recognizing this also shows the lie in the assertion that pop culture is disposable. 

In my mind, pop culture is any artistic or commercial venture (or combination of the two) that impacts the public psyche in a way where it can be referenced and almost everyone will know what the reference means. When someone makes shrill screeching sounds while making up and down stabbing gestures with their hand, almost everyone recognizes that this is a reference to the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho without having to be told. And for more obscure things, not everyone will be familiar with the classic (and great) sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet, but most people with be familiar with the genre tropes of that era that originated with it. Not everyone has seen a giallo movie, but they understand the tropes that are associated with it. Not everyone listens to heavy metal music, but they grok the stereotypes of a typical Judas Priest audience. Grok, by the way, is one of those words that used to be pop culture, gaining mass acceptance from the novel that originated it, Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land. It has since slipped from the public consciousness. Which raises the question, is it still pop culture?

I think it is. To me anything made for mass consumption is pop culture. And no matter what the John Cages and the Lou Reeds of the world may say, ultimately they are hoping that the biggest amount of people possible see/hear/appreciate/take in their work. Does this mean that basically anything made for the enjoyment of other people is pop culture? In my mind, yes. And even further. I think magazine ads and t.v. commercials are also pop culture. They are something the majority of people see and hear, and they sometimes leave a large enough impression that they become a cultural reference point. Toys are definitely pop culture, especially the mass produced ones. The implication of this is that Garbage Pail Kids The Movie is pop culture, as is The Godfather, as is Citizen Kane and The Seven Samurai. Of course that's not to say the first movie is the equal in quality of the other three, or that it had the same cultural impact. But even junk culture can have a huge impact. See how much Star Wars and Marvel Comics have changed the cultural landscape over the past few decades. By the way, I love both Star Wars and Marvel Comics, but I hardly think one can argue in good faith that they are on the same intellectual level as a novel by Leo Tolstoy, or even J.R.R. Tolkien for that matter. The same as The Ramones, whom I also love, are not on the same musical level as John Coltrane. However, in the modern musical landscape the argument could be made that the Ramones have had a more immediate and tangible influence on current music that Coltrane. 

If all this seems like a lot of words to say not much of anything at all, that's what pop culture does best. It navel gazes, like Steven Spielberg writing a movie about a kid growing up who wants to be a film maker. It bloviates, like the staff writers at Rolling Stone churning out 250 words on the cultural significance of Miley Cyrus wearing a tank top to some awards show. It completely misses the point of itself, the way audiences at the time didn't care for Heathers, only for it to become one of the most influential movies of the 80's. Social media is filled with people (like me) who spend an inordinate amount of time discussing, arguing, reminiscing, and questioning the movies, music, television shows, theatrical productions, advertising campaigns, and books (comic and prose) that make up most of our leisure time enjoyment. And the great thing about that time spent dong those things is, it's all subjective. There's someone who will take umbrage at something I said here, or maybe even everything I said here. And that's okay. Their opinion is just as valid as mine. Pop culture is a buffet of entertainment. We can all take what we like, or what we need, and leave the rest. Pop culture is also prone to self grandiose phrases that don't mean as much as they might seem to on the surface, like that one.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

When Toys Were For Playing With

 I am about to share an opinion that I believe may be highly unpopular. I feel that the 80's are highly over-mythologized, romanticized, even fetishized. Let's face it, music was better in the 70's, movies were better in the 90's, and television was better in the 2010's. One area where the 80's did excel however, was toys. My family didn't have much money, so I didn't have an overabundance of toys, but they still managed to factor into a few memories. The first toys I remember really being crazy about were these sets with a cardboard background that would be printed to look like New York or Metropolis, and they had these vinyl cutout figures that you could stick on it. I would spend hours just creating little scenes. I would make an entire story around the one action scene I had created. I loved toys that allowed you to be creative. I remember I wanted a Lite Brite so badly for years. For Christmas when I was 9 I finally got one. I made so many pictures

Movies With My Dad

I have already talked about my first movie experience  with my dad  so I won't repeat it here. Like many memories of my dad it is a mixed bag of good and bad. But that wasn't the only memory of him I have involving movies. He didn't talk about movies a whole lot except to say he loved westerns and wished they would make more of them. But one non-western that came up was Rebel Without a Cause. He found out it was coming on t.v. and raved about it. He told me how much he loved it, and what a great movie it was. He insisted that I had to watch it when it came on. I watched it and let him know. He asked me what I thought of it and I told him I liked it. And that was it. There was no further discussion of the movie and it was never brought up again. But I still think of him whenever I see the movie or anything referencing it. I know it must have been an important movie to him for him to react the way he did, seeing as he rarely talked about movies at all. When I was a little bit

My Life Under The Stars

  The following post was submitted by Kellie Curtains, Your Queen of Halloween. You can find her on Facebook here .    Some of my earliest and fondest memories took place at our local drive-in theatre. It was the perfect place for my parents to get out for the evening with six kids to juggle. Mom and dad would pack a cooler and we’d be off for a night of fun and flicks under the stars. I can still smell the Pic mosquito coil and hot buttered popcorn and hear the tinny echoes of seventies music playing from every speaker before the show. Mom loved it when the latest Burt Reynolds movie played, he was the big Hollywood hunk at the time. My father preferred horror films and we never missed a horror double feature. That’s when I fell in love with horror and when at the age of five, I fell in love with Vincent Price. I first saw him in The Abominable Dr. Phibes and it left quite an impression on me. Especially when he crushed that Doctor's head in the frog mask. I guess you could say