14Popular Culture

Abstract

This review of three introductory textbooks in the field of popular culture published in 2018 and 2019 focuses on the different perspectives they provide on such culture, as a means for understanding its current state and future evolution. It is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Pop Culture, People, and Politics; 3. A Pastiche Approach to Cinema; 4. Pop Culture Theories; 5. Pop Culture and the Internet; 6. Conclusion. Pop culture is changing radically today, breaking away from the historical flow that gained momentum in then 1920s, because its delivery through the Internet may be fragmenting its organic textuality. As a distinct form of culture, pop culture crystallized primarily in the US in the first decades of the twentieth century, arguably as a way for young people to contest and openly violate the restrictive social traditions of colonial America through new music, fashions, and overall lifestyles. It spread rapidly and broadly throughout American cities and other areas of the urbanized world—a diffusion made possible by new technologies, such as radio and cinema. From the outset, trends in pop culture influenced aesthetic tastes, politics, and even major musical and literary movements that were once considered to be part of ‘high culture’, gradually obliterating binary distinctions such as high-versus-low in cultural matters. In a phrase, what started out as a lifestyle reaction against puritanical colonial culture became a major source of new aesthetics (new music, new writing, and so on), remaining so ever since. But pop culture may have run its course with the rise of meme culture on the Internet. The books under review here are thus quite significant, not only because they present complementary views of pop culture to a broad audience, but also because we can draw from them a picture of how pop culture is evolving in the digital age and what this might imply for the future of this century-old cultural experiment.