Profiles of Popular Culture: A Reader (Ray & Pat Browne Book) (A Ray and Pat Browne Book) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0879728698 ISBN 13: 9780879728694

Publisher: The Popular Press, 2005

Synopsis

From Hank Williams to hip hop, Aunt Jemima to the Energizer Bunny, scrap-booking to NASCAR racing, Profiles of Popular Culture cuts a generous swath across what is perhaps the fastest growing discipline of the past several decades.  Edited by a pioneer in the field, this volume invites readers to reflect on a diverse sampling of modern myths, icons, archetypes, rituals, and pastimes.  Adopting an inclusive approach, editor Ray B. Browne has mined both scholarly and mainstream media to bring together penetrating essays on fads and fashions, sports fandom, the shaping of body image, aesthetic surgery, the marketing of food, vacationing and sightseeing, toys and games, genre fiction, post-9/11 entertainment, and much more.  Like Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause's Popular Culture: An Introductory Text, this book opens critical doors into the study of popular culture-and does so within a fresh context that includes points of reference both established and new.

About this title

About the Author

Ray B. Browne is professor emeritus of popular culture studies at Bowling Green State University. Through some sixty books and a variety of initiatives - including the founding of the Journal of Popular Culture, the Popular Culture Association, and the Popular Press itself - he has played a key role in making popular culture a topic of serious inquiry.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Profiles of Popular Culture

A Reader

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Copyright © 2005 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87972-869-4

Contents

Preview.....................................................xiMYTHS.......................................................13HEROES AND HEROINES.........................................35ICONS.......................................................54PREOCCUPATION WITH CHILDHOOD................................89STEREOTYPES.................................................102FORMULA.....................................................115RITES AND RITUALS...........................................127HOME AND ENVIRONMENT........................................142YOUTH, AGE, AND CHILDREN....................................149NOSTALGIA...................................................164WHAT TO DO WITH THE OLD PEOPLE?.............................168FADS........................................................172FASHION.....................................................187FOODS.......................................................192PERSONAL APPEARANCE.........................................210CULTURAL EXCHANGE...........................................224AIR TRAVEL..................................................232SIGHTSEEING AND VACATIONING.................................238MUSEUMS.....................................................249POPULAR ART.................................................256CELEBRATIONS................................................273POPULAR LITERATURE..........................................290MUSIC.......................................................340TELEVISION, RADIO, AND NEWSPAPERS...........................357WORLD OF MOVIES.............................................371SURVEY OF YEAR'S POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT......................375ADVERTISING: THE SOFT AND THE HARD SELL.....................389

Chapter One

The Generalities of Cultures

RAY B. BROWNE AND PAT BROWNE

Though daily existence is made up of specific events and localities, all are tied together somehow in the flow of generalities. Events of one day are part of what happened yesterday and will continue to occur tomorrow in the same or a different location. But in order to make some kind of sense out of these recurrences we need to have generalities that connect them and tell us what they all mean. We constantly search for the keys of connections which fit us into the life cycle and answer the questions common to us all: Why are we here? Where are we headed? What does it all mean? To be sure we all begin on a common footing we need to be sure we understand what popular culture is.

Popular culture is the system of attitudes, behavior patterns, beliefs, customs, and tastes that define the people of any society. It is the entertainment, diversions, icons, rituals, and actions that shape a society's everyday world. It is what we do while we are awake, what we think about and how we approach the thought, and what we dream about while we are asleep. It is the way of life we inherit, practice, change, and then pass on to our descendants.

Popular culture is the current mature extension of folk culture, the culture of the people. With improved means of communication and electronic media in American culture, folk culture expanded into popular culture-the daily way of life as shaped by the popular majority of society. Especially in a democracy like the United States, popular culture has become both the voice of the people and the force that shapes that voice. In 1782, the French commentator J. Hector St. Jean de Crvecoeur asked in his Letters from an American Farmer, "What is an American?" He answered that such a person is the creation of America and is in turn the creator of the country's culture. Indeed, notions of the American Dream have been long grounded in the dream of democracy-that is, government by the people, or the popular rule. Thus, popular culture is tied fundamentally to America and the dreams of its people.

Historically, culture analysts have tried to fine-tune culture into two categories: "elite"-the elements of culture (fine art, literature, classical music, gourmet food and wine, etc.) that supposedly define the best of society-and "popular"-the elements of culture (comic strips, best sellers, pop music, fast foods, etc.) that appeal to society's lowest common denominator. The "educated" person approved of elite culture and scoffed at popular culture. This schism first began to develop in western Europe in the fifteenth century when the privileged classes tried to discover and develop differences in societies based on class, money, privilege, and lifestyles. Like many aspects of European culture, the debate between elite and popular cultures came to the United States. The upper class in America, for example, supported museums and galleries that would exhibit the finer things in life that would "elevate" people. As the twenty-first century emerges, however, the distinctions between popular culture and elitist culture have blurred almost into invisibility. The blues songs (once denigrated as "race music") of Robert Johnson are now revered by musicologists; architectural students study buildings in Las Vegas, Nevada, as examples of what Robert Venturi called the "kitsch of high capitalism"; sportswriter Gay Talese and heavyweight boxing champ Floyd Patterson were co-panelists at a symposium on literature and sport at the State University of New York-New Paltz in 1992. Examples go on and on but the one commonality that emerges is the role of popular culture as a model for the American Dream, the dream to pursue happiness and a better, more interesting life.

Popular culture is one of the most changeable aspects of our way of life. Literally here today and gone tomorrow, popular culture is never static but always dynamic. Its origins and movements are everywhere. Because popular culture has had various meanings over the years, a clear and precise definition is necessary.

The nature of popular culture makes it particularly difficult to define. As used today, the term is relatively new though its subject matter is as old as human society. In addition, popular culture must overcome two barriers: prejudice and the various definitions associated with it. Together they can be summarized in the statement, "I know what it is and I don't like it."

Yet every academic field has had to cope with popular culture to one degree or another, especially lately. Such fields as anthropology, sociology, religion, communications, theater, and, to an increasing degree, history, literature, and psychology have had to work to some extent in the broad fields of the everyday culture of people. Each has developed its own definition. Generally the definition has been associated with entertainment and leisure time activities, and usually with a negative connotation.

With the explosion of democracy in education since World War II has come a firm insistence on the inclusion without prejudice of democratic aspects of life. This changing attitude has brought a new attitude toward this inclusion and new fields and new seriousness and dignity toward those fields.

At first the new attitude and the resulting new subjects were treated with derision and fear-fear that the old canon and its shibboleths would be destroyed and replaced, and derision as a weapon to fight for retention of the old. Linguistically, in the fight to keep popular culture out of academia, the terms of derision were pop culture, mass culture, and cheap trash. Some academics and the general public-speaking through the media-seized on the term pop culture because it was short, quotable, and convenient and because it set apart and cheapened the culture it named. This downputting continued for at least a decade.

But familiarity, though it breeds contempt, can also foster respect. So it was with the recognition of the place popular culture-read everyday cultures in the plural-has played in the emergence of the United States as one of the leading nations for democracy. Academia and the public at large-except for a conservative group who think in terms of yesteryear's clichs-have dignified the field by calling it popular culture and recognizing that in a democracy the proper studies are of democratic institutions. Democracy demands an understanding of its strengths and weaknesses if it is to survive. A case can be made that democratic life poses greater possible triumphs and more potential threats. Thrones and empires topple when ruled by people who forget or ignore the culture of their power bases. A case could be made that Rome fell because the emperors forgot the popular cultures which created and supported it for a thousand years. Crime novelist John Maddox Roberts, in Saturnalia (1999), writing of the Rome of Caesar, reveals a mountainous knowledge of details of daily life in Rome at that time but criticizes the aristocrats in power for having forgotten their folk roots. Perhaps their greater flaw was in despising and never trying to benefit from the cultures of their conquered people.

Other nations have likewise stumbled. Hitler's Third Reich, which was prophesied to last a thousand years, died early partially because its popular culture power base crumbled. And Communism's Berlin Wall toppled because the leaders did not appreciate the will and power of the masses they claimed to serve. Popular culture levels up and, as a hurricane gains strength from the warm waters at its base, generates irresistible power. Not to recognize this potential and to keep it struggling as an undesired, outside alien invites destruction. The fighting chant "power to the people" really means "power to the people's cultures." That power is becoming stronger and stronger-and needs to have its base and dynamics understood.

Along with the public's-and media's-recognition of the power and importance of everyday culture has come the realization in academia of the importance of everyday cultures of the present and the past in understanding the world around us. There has not yet been an enthusiastic open-armed embrace by all academics, but demands are marching around the walls of the ivory tower as though they enclosed the biblical Jericho. If the walls haven't yet come tumbling down, cracks are evident, and many people are coming out of the city to see what the action is, and even to join in the call for a more open academic awareness and approach to education and the things that are important in education and life.

What then is a proper and workable definition of popular culture? We have said that it is far more than entertainment and leisure time activities. It is the bone and flesh of a society from which the spirit emanates and soars-or falls.

Popular culture is the way in which and by which most people in any society live. In a democracy like the United States, it is the voice of the people-their practices, likes, and dislikes-the lifeblood of their daily existence, a way of life. The popular culture is the voice of democracy, speaking and acting, the seedbed in which democracy grows. Popular culture in all societies-from the most authoritarian to the most democratic-democratizes them and makes democracy truly democratic. It is the everyday world around us: the mass media, entertainments, diversions; it is our heroes, icons, rituals, everyday actions, psychology, and religion-our total life pictures. It is the way of life we inherit, practice, modify as we please, and then pass on to our descendants. It is what we do while we are awake; it is the dreams we dream while asleep, as well as where and how we sleep and how long.

Obviously then, since many manifestations of people's behavior are dictated by race, history, custom, gender, age, locality, and group size, popular culture actually consists of many overlapping and interworking cultures, like scales on a fish. The only way to talk of a singular popular culture is to realize that it is a mixture of many small and large cultures which are controlled by elements smaller than and different from the large national picture, the living fish.

The many ethnicities of people and their histories and cultures from around the world who have poured into the United States over the past two centuries have brought their many elements of cultures and added them to the dominant Protestant western European base. So the culture of the United States today is a broader stirring, both vertically and laterally, of all the people who make up our society. It would have been completely different if this continent had been discovered, colonized, and developed west to east instead of east to west, by Asians instead of Europeans, or south to north instead of north to south, by Catholics instead of predominantly Protestants. The same basic human needs would have been present, but their traditional and current development would have been entirely different in expression and degree. Culture developments are driven by and develop within the needs and constraints of a people. They extend in directions and to degrees allowed by the physical, mental, and emotional attitudes.

Popular culture has nothing to do with popularity in the sense of number of people engaged in it. That kind of popularity has to do only with how widely something is used. It also has nothing to do with quality, though at times we might wish it did. Popular culture is the lifestyle and lifeblood of groups-large or small-of people.

In 2004-popularly (if not mathematically) considered the beginning of a new millennium-an estimated 327 languages and dialects are spoken in the United States. The smallest ethnic and nationalist, cultish, religious, or political group using one of those languages or dialects lives in and by their everyday culture. That culture identifies the people and makes them cohere as a part of the larger culture of the United States. The dominant popular culture is like a patchwork quilt that covers the many smaller groups. In such societies, citizens must speak several cultural languages, those of their own-and similar-group, and that of the dominant culture. As the peoples of the earth necessarily become more and more mixed, any and all cultures will become more complex.

Popular culture has nothing to do with so-called quality, with the "good and beautiful" in life as distinguished from elements which are considered neither good nor beautiful. Some aspects of culture are positive, some negative, some beneficial, some detrimental. Popular culture, especially in a country like the United States, is the total of all ways and means of life, for better or worse, desired or undesired.

Popular culture in many instances is distributed by the mass media, but other, more old-fashioned, media-like habits, such as the "grapevine," gossip, imitation, observation, and indifference, are much more powerful controls. We control popular culture at the ballot box and, of course, on Wall Street and other sites of unrestrained democratic capitalism.

The complexity of popular culture can be illustrated in the following diagram. It is in this context of easy fluid movement and mixing of cultures, then, that we talk of the popular culture-singular-of the United States. The degree of comprehensiveness and complexity of this culture is demonstrated by the contents of this volume, which is about the popular culture of the United States.

In a capitalistic democracy, taxpayers and voters pay the piper and consequently call the tune. In the sea of culture, in President John F. Kennedy's words, the rising tide eventually floats all boats at the same level, though the rise may seem slow. In the present outbursts of democratic culture, you can hardly identify the cultural status of a boat owner by where he or she docks the craft. The demands of ethnopietistic, nationalistic, cultist, religious, political, economic, and gender groups display varied flags on their crafts and create many eddies of water movement. But all float on a common body of the United States-mixed with those from around the globe-popular culture.

The cultural historian Jacques Barzun once said that to know America one must understand baseball. That may have been correct when he called the play and might even be useful today, but it is not sufficient. There are thousands of aspects of American life that all of us must comprehend in order to understand the United States and ourselves.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: The Popular Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0879728698
• ISBN 13: 9780879728694
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480
• Editor: Browne Ray