Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

A Pop Culture Society 4831990. Criticism of culture’s rougher elements “largely ignores the ghetto,where the black underclass has built its own furious culture on the slagheap.” Such criticism, according to Corliss, “discounts much of the youngwhite working class, in tattered towns and trailer parks, who feel left outof bland, sitcom America.” 109From this perspective, the “tabloid culture”—no less than the “streetknowledge” of N.W.A.—articulated the hopes and fears of people whostood on society’s margins because of their class, race, age, sexual preference,or educational limitations. The rapper Ice-T asked: “If there wasn’trap, where would the voice of the eighteen-year-old black male be? Hewould never be on TV, he ain’t writin’ no book. He is not in the movies.”Like rap music, talk shows thus arguably had a democratizing influence.“On talk shows, whatever their drawbacks,” contended the writer EllenWillis, “the proles get to talk.” As voices from society’s underside, talk showparticipants represented what the media scholar Elayne Rapping describedas “an emotional vanguard blowing the lid off the idea that America is anythinglike the place Ronald Reagan pretended to live in.” In that regard, tabloidtalk shows destabilized the views of powerful elites by implicitly positingmultiple truths and lifestyles. And, because the shows highlighted individualdifferences, they were, in fact, statements of tolerance. “Norms become subjectto challenge, interrogation, criticism, and therefore change,” accordingto another cultural observer. 110Measuring such change—let alone the proletariat’s influence—was,nevertheless, difficult. Although rap music expressed the voice of the streets,the black feminist writer bell hooks warned: “It gives people a false senseof agency. It gives them a sense that they have power over their lives whenthey don’t.” Similarly, the real winners of TV’s rowdy talk shows were mediatycoons such as Murdoch. 111Still, by the mid-1990s, the tabloid talk shows may have helped accountfor a curious phenomenon: despite a loud public outcry for tougherstands against crime generally, juries in notable instances were willing tofind extenuating circumstances for criminal acts. In the face of reports thatthe Menendez brothers in California were victims of child abuse, two hungjuries could not find them guilty of murdering their parents. Similarly, ajury acquitted Lorena Bobbitt of cutting off her husband’s penis on thegrounds that he had long abused her. “Lorena Bobbitt for Surgeon General”read some buttons outside the courtroom. The ABC analyst Jeff Greenfieldwondered whether, by focusing on personal situations, the confessionalformats of such shows as Sally Jessy Raphael’s and Oprah Winfrey’s encouragedthe growth of a culture of therapy and empathy. Oprahizationwas the term that the California attorney general, Dan Lungren, applied togrowing difficulties in securing convictions: “People have become so set onthe Oprah view, they bring that into the jury box with them.” 112