Introduction
Culture is a powerful and dynamic force, constantly changing in response to internal and external forces. By definition, ‘pop is a well-liked genre’ (Rojek 2). Typically pop music uses the same mechanism as other branches of music to influence mass opinion.
The origin of pop culture is linked to the late Michael Jackson and has great potential to make listeners radical. Michael Jackson’s highly publicized personal life, coupled with his successful career made him part of pop culture for several generations.
Shortly after his death, several people revisited his popular videos to celebrate and pay tribute to his work. Along with his musical style and way of life, Michael Jackson has gone into history as an important icon in pop culture. Subsequent he has been referred to by many as the King of Pop.
As explained by Inglis, ‘pop culture is the culture of our everyday lives’ (25). It is a mirror of societal dynamics and has the power to shape and reflect cultural ideals, generate resistance and activism, and represent changing social realities.
The artifacts of pop culture reveal a great deal about black society and how it has changed over the years. Pop culture is also very instrumental in revealing external influences on the daily lives of the black population in the United States.
According to Fedorak, the study of pop culture presents interesting challenges and demands that anthropologists look inward as well as outward, especially when examining a given society (2).
Performance theory allows anthropologists to consider a wide range of pop culture including music, food, sports, and graffiti.
Although kinship, social organization, and religious rituals find their way into every ethnographic study, there has been little recognition of the pop side of these activities.
Indeed, until recently, there has been a scarcity of ethnographic information on tangible elements of culture that make life enjoyable such as folk art, games, pop music, hairstyles, and theatrics.
The situation seems to be the same in the present day society because ethnographic articles on pop culture are quite rare in anthropological journals.
Characteristics of Pop Culture
In most cases, pop culture is associated with pop music and aims to generate a general cultural response to issues faced by members of a given society. Rather than being tied to communal or sub-cultural experiences, pop culture seeks to appeal to every single individual.
Historically, pop music and culture grew out of light entertainment. Unlike other forms of music, which often include expressions of resistance and opposition, pop music is conservative.
This imposes tight restrictions upon narrative content, musical composition, and the packaging of performers. Typically, the best pop songs carry powerful emotions.
Besides the desire to generate revenue, ‘pop music and culture have been very helpful in consolidating the efforts of the black population’ (Neverland 38). The music is regarded as a business rather than an art form.
As such, it places ultimate value on professional songwriters, slick production values, and overwhelming star images. To a great extent, pop culture endeavors to shape public opinion about various issues in society.
It does not constitute the free articulation of people and is characterized by an imposed form of well-liked music, mainly created by business-oriented individuals as a means of earning a living.
Furthermore, pop culture is greatly influenced by the industrial nature of pop music created to appeal to the masses.
However, the medium of expression is typically organized around achieving instant empathy with personalities rather than the public. To connect with the target audience, pop culture mainly utilizes stereotypes.
Importance of Pop Culture
Pop culture has been widely recognized as an effective way of creating togetherness among the blacks in nations that are dominated by Whites. By and large, pop culture enabled the black community to be differentiated from the white community in several ways.
The culture presented the black society with unique characteristics not visible among the White population.
It brought together a group of people sharing common predicaments and in need of supporting each other through daily challenges.
In a way, any consideration of the black community and their sub-cultures in the United States has to be seen in the broader context of Afro-American in the present day America.
Pop culture motivates the black population to fight against poverty and racial discrimination among other forms of unacceptable behaviors.
The growth of pop culture generally reflects the level of dissatisfaction that the black people showed the white community in the United States as well as other places.
The coolness of pop music is reflected in the style of certain types of hustlers, who withdrew from the intense struggle of the ghetto life where unemployment is a collective experience.
Moreover, pop culture offers support for the unemployed man by creating an opportunity for him to interact with others faced with the same problem.
Commonly, young blacks face the same structural problems as their parents modified or amplified by the immediate economic conditions they are compelled to live in.
However, they survive in different youth culture to that of the adults, shaped to their specific difficulties, and their response is thus different. Black pop culture, music, dance, and style articulate this specifically for the youth and create an environment that enables them to develop resistance.
As such, pop culture is a practice that enables young black people to make sense of particular conditions of existence. According to Brake, the popularity of the pop culture grew from the activities of Michael Jackson and his ‘moon-walk,’ a dance performed by gliding backward (183).
Generally, characteristics such as breaking, rapping, hip hop, wearing distinct clothing, painting murals, and spraying graffiti on subway cars, are all visible symbols of resistance which defined the life of the black people in the United States.
These characteristics are things that made the Black culture visible and could not be done by young Whites. They also generate a reaction, usually hostile or fearful, among the White adult authority.
Considering that circumstances and reactions are quite complex, pop culture tends to change and to adapt to new circumstances. For today’s youth, the fighting spirit ebbs and flows but the danger in the streets is much higher, as is a crime.
Other features remain, such as the ghetto culture that teaches children from an early age to avoid the questions of landlords, police, social workers, and debt collectors. These are all regarded by the back community as symbols of the white authority.
Graffiti art finds its way into coffee table books or exhibitions, and black cultural resistance may be accommodated into the lives of radical individuals. Usually, the pop cultural response is to rebel, taking full advantage where possible, of any financial advantage encountered.
Racism, educational disadvantage, often coupled with educational ambition, the rejection of dirty work, and the rising rate of unemployment have formed a context for sub-cultural solutions open to the youthful black population.
Unlike their white counterparts, black youths were found to be less likely to have jobs fixed up for them when they left school, spent more time finding a job, made more applications, and were less satisfied with the jobs they found. Discrimination was a major factor to be considered about this development.
As noted by Rojek, ‘pop music is a means by which group identity is located and represented’ (22). In terms of embodiment, group beliefs, and lifestyle values, there is a similarity between pop music and social practice. Pop music exploits and develops the possibilities of resistance and opposition.
Two sub-positions in literature can be identified based on this reasoning. The first conceptualize resistance primarily in political terms. Pop music chips away at the system of organized inequality and manipulation and create a space of opposition.
The second sub-position focuses on the aesthetic role of pop music. This may involve aspects of political critique, but paramount is the mobilization of an aesthetic style that matches aesthetic relations that are in dominance and joined to a particular regime of authoritative power.
More recently, the digital revolution has combined technology and subculture with the politics of resistance. Pop music also articulates regulation. It reproduces organized inequality and dominant power relations by advancing compliance.
On this account, pop is a type of social control. At the society-wide level, this role has been explored about class inequality and oppression. However, pop music has also been examined as reproducing the largely informal micro-orders of everyday life and structured settings of work and consumption.
What distinguishes pop music from classical music is that the former is a loud, high-spirited popular form. It is the study of people’s music. Generally, the form of this music is not constant since different genres articulate historically specific conditions and concerns.
The musical refrains and lyrical ornamentations through which pop operates privilege spontaneity, flexibility, heartfelt emotion, and plain communication. The old distinction between composers and performers as active, and audiences as passive has over time decomposed.
Popular culture, differentiation, and technology have weakened the division between producers and consumers. Through scratching, mixing, and sampling techniques, the audience looks through recorded popular music and transforms recorded texts from different times and places.
Increasingly, understanding the audience has ceased to be a matter of sub-cultural or generational characteristics and has become a more complex matter of the relationships between production, texts, and contexts.
Iconic pop stars are bearers and articulators of ‘social imaginary,’ a term coined to refer to popular intimations, contributions, and dreams of a more just, robust, and inclusive society.
In societies in which organized religion is in steady decline, and where politics is often automatically associated with doublethink and dirty dealings, pop stars have an unusually powerful connection with the social imaginary, particularly with the telling of unpopular truths.
This explains why pop superstars have over time emerged as celebrity diplomats, acting without a plebiscite to articulate common concerns relating to hunger, poverty, natural disasters, and environmental degradation.
To an extent, pop songs are activations of precedents found in real life. It is not satisfactory to describe the composition of pop as the simple record of conditions encountered in real life. Nevertheless, it is acceptable to propose that this is the basis of the composition.
As noted by Rojek, older traditions of popular music conveyed sentiments of typical personalities, common predicaments, shared aspirations, the responsibility of common struggle and philosophy of ‘we are in it together’ (30). Contemporary pop is, however, quite different.
Largely, the last century perfected electronic forms of exchange and distribution. The consumption of pop is now weightless and easily accessible at the flick of a switch. Despite these developments, contemporary pop still produces social solidarity.
Even though the ends may be different, it may be that contemporary pop still can rouse collective emotions and build solidarity.
The success of global pop mega events tends to suggest that this is the case. Smaller political and cultural events like rallies, marches, and group protests also frequently utilize live or recorded pop to enhance a sense of togetherness.
Although the process of modernization and globalization has created many more opportunities for cultural flow, they have also raised the presence of pop culture. It may also be regarded as a means of communicating to the entire world the view and circumstances of the black community.
Essentially, it presents the unfolding way of life among the blacks including their cherished memories, how they live, and their hopes and dreams for the future.
Fedorak claims that ‘pop culture is always part of power relations’ (21). In many ways, therefore, it symbolizes a struggle to maintain a distinctive social or cultural identity in the face of homogenization processes.
Throughout the ages, pop culture has been quick to expose incidents of social injustice and discrimination in society. As noted by Cawelti, ‘pop culture has been very instrumental in addressing concerns raised by the black community’ (31).
Seemingly, pop music provides a very strong platform for reaching out to the discriminated lot. The many problems faced by blacks also contribute to the unification of those affected to create a strong force that cannot be easily ignored by those in power.
Although pop culture has been criticized for stereotyping some groups or sub-cultures, particularly through the media, in many ways, it is also a means of maintaining the traditional customs and artifacts of the black community and empowering them to sustain their culture.
Conclusion
Without doubt, the theme of pop music as an accessory of consumer culture producing a fake sensation of doing something rather than a spur to raising the collective consciousness and achieving togetherness is a subject that is widely talked about.
Some authors have famously categorized the entire pop genre as bolstering conformity, social compliance, and pseudo-individualism.
Pop elicits sub-conscious conditioning that provides damaged individuals with the illusion of time off and escapes through music amid a system that requires everyone to finally accept obedience to the rule of capitalism as fate.
Pop culture is also often criticized for its commercial nature. While its products appeal to the masses, they leave very little room for individualism.
However, as has been demonstrated in this paper, pop culture is capable of creating, sustaining, and shaping a community. Also, it reflects, embodies, and even resists the socio-cultural patterns of human groups.
Works Cited
Brake, Mike. Comparative Youth Culture: The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures in America, Britain and Canada, New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Cawelti, John. Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture: Essays, Madison, Wisconsin: Popular Press, 2004. Print.
Fedorak, Shirley. Pop Culture: The Culture of Everyday Life, Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Print.
Inglis, Ian. Performance and Popular Music: History Place and Time, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Print.
Neverland, Princess. Michael Jackson: Alive or Dead, Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010. Print.
Rojek, Chris. Pop Music, Pop Culture, Malden, MA: Polity, 2011. Print.