Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

x Prefaceerences, presence, and perspectives of people of color” have increasinglyaltered long-standing assumptions about the American identity. Popularculture has facilitated new ways of defining what an American is. Phraseslike “as American as Ray Charles” or “. . . Oprah Winfrey” do not shockmainstream sensibilities within which the norm was once emphaticallywhite. 5From this perspective, popular culture has been America’s most democraticart form. Granted, much racism, discrimination, and injustice havemarked it. But the perception that the United States is an open society arguablyhas no more forceful basis than in the evolving messages and imagesof popular culture.The world of entertainment has bridged not only racial lines but alsothose of class and gender. Examples have been legion. They include the immigrantfounders of Hollywood’s studio system, the white “cracker” kidElvis Presley, and female performers such as Mae West and Carol Burnett.But, even as popular culture has helped shape a more open, diversifiedsociety, its commercial matrix has functioned like a sponge, absorbing contrary,dissenting views so efficiently that even radical ideas become mereconsumer items. In mid-1969, for example, Paul Goodman’s highly criticalexamination of American society, Like a Conquered Province, appeared ina New York Times Magazine advertisement. The book was a vigorous critiqueof the United States as an “empty society” in which, among otherthings, middle-class citizens wandered aimlessly across the barren terrainof a consumer culture. In the ad, however, the book’s message was completelyabsent. The ad was not even about the book. Instead, it endorsed aparticular brand of women’s beach wear. Goodman’s book was only a propin the hands of a leggy model displaying a new-style swimsuit. Around thesame time, the box for a board game “for kids from 8 to 80”—ClassStruggle—featured pictures of Karl Marx, whose nineteenth-century writingscalled for a proletarian revolution, and Nelson Rockefeller, a scion ofone of the nation’s wealthiest families and a powerful Republican politician.The box portrayed the two men engaged in an arm-wrestling contest.In such ways, popular culture could strip protest of political meaning. Itscapacity to do so has frustrated people fighting for change as well as traditionalistswho celebrate the market economy even as its pursuit of noveltyand profit demolish the “good ol’ days.”This study draws mainly from the gathering flood of scholarly publicationson popular culture over the past several decades. I am deeply indebtedto the many people who have done pioneering work in a field thatscholars not long ago dismissed as frivolous. The subject is, in fact, full ofintellectual surprises, revealing, in the words of one of its leading students,“terrains of conflict and struggle in the most unexpected places and alliesin the most improbable individuals.” 6