How useful is a term if it delimits nothing? “Pop culture” is this way. Just about everything we feel or touch or eat or hear has been designated pop culture, according to the various sociologists and media experts I glanced at recently. One postmodernist social thinker even calls “high culture” a form of pop culture–Beethoven with Big Macs. Apparently real culture has been Big Gulped!
Of course, advertising is considered pop culture. It’s pop culture about pop culture. The experts in Filmworks’s November film Art & Copy tell you as much. Advertising is also a kind of trickster’s art. George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, and a dozen other (mostly retired) ad executives tell us what fun they had back in the 1960s selling stuff with minimal slogans: “Think small,” “Where’s the beef?” and “Just do it.” The whole film is like this, the birth of the cool in advertising artwork and copy.
Some experts you might read posit a thing called “folk culture.” These are grass-roots phenoms, sprouting up from the people–Paul Bunyan tales, chain-gang refrains, nursery rhymes, even Woody Guthrie. They are supposed to be “authentic,” pre-media and pre-industrialization. Most have been stamped out or appropriated, like pirate lore or those pre pop-culture tales of the 1940s and 50s such as Bambi and Aladdin. Then the movie studios exploit these classic tales. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End was produced by Disney for $300,000 and made that back in one week of distribution.
Related to pop culture but distinct from it, I am told, is mass culture. Mass culture is deliberately manufactured. Advertisers create mass culture. One of the ad execs interviewed in Art & Copy came up with the deliriously energized iPod dancer, in silhouette, her hair flying like she’d stuck her finger in a hot socket. The ad offers only this art and copy: the apple logo and the “word” iPod. The ad gets to you; you become pop cultured, going around with an ear bud pressed into your skull.
Critics of mass and pop culture see them as capitalist brain-washing. Bernard Rosenberg feels pop culture has crowded out important journalism and opinion writing, which, presumably, is real culture, not pop culture. He writes, “The popular press decreased the amount of news or information and replaced it with entertainment or titillation that reinforces … fears, prejudice, scapegoating processes, paranoia, and aggression.” All you have to do to confirm this is to look at the contemporary, dumbed-down Los Angeles Times. Most of the time, the front page is about movies, sports, and rap stars, and little else. What happened to the L.A. Times which pulled down so many Pulitizers under Otis Chandler? Zonked by pop culture.
I was frankly amazed at all the pop culture web sites you can Google. If you go to popculturemadness.com you can learn that Sharona Fleming is guest staring in the last two episodes of USA’s Monk and that the fling between “Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel May Not Be Over…” (Popculturemadness solemnly announces its “mission” as “to help Americans consume responsibly to protect the environment, enhance quality of life, and promote social justice.”
Meanwhile Elizabeth Millar of pop.greenwood.com steers pop culture junkies in the direction of the latest zombie film: “I can’t tell you how excited I am for a new zombie flick, and it’s right in time for Halloween! Zombieland is being described as an American post-apocalyptic, zombie comedy—bring it on!”
Most of us are EZ on pop culture or don’t think about it much. Or we are like fish in water that don’t know anything at all about water–we are forever submerged in it. After Jane Austin gets PBSed, a “novelization” of the PBS drama comes out, followed by a comic strip or Elizabeth Bennet’s Underarm Spray. We’re scarcely aware we are consuming junk-food Jane, and we are totally underwater. Glub, glub.