Introduction
Popular culture also called pop culture refers to the cultural norms and patterns and the symbolic activity of human activity with shared norms and practices and social cognitive behavior that create human activities that are accepted and liked by a larger percentage of people. Some writers argue that pop culture has been alternatively called as ‘moral decay of the youth who use it as an excuse to indulge in anti-social habits while some argue that pop culture has done away with many social stigmas and dogmas and repression of minority groups such as blacks, women, and people with different gender orientation. The paper examines the statement that ‘Popular culture is trash and that it can tell us nothing about the past’. The statement is discussed in relation to teenage culture in the ’60s, the 70’s culture crisis, and the ’80s.
Culture before the 1950s
A brief assessment is done about the culture before the 1950s and this will help in framing the arguments in the later sections. McRobbie (1994) points out that the 1900s had proved to be very chaotic for many nations in the world. There was the First World War that cost millions of lives and rendered many children orphans, caused widespread upheavals in personal relations as there were millions of widows and young children who had to be cared for. Then came the great depression of 1928 that wiped out the collective wealth of millions of people and broke the back of many economies. Just as the world was recovering from the great depression, came the second world war, and this created immense upheavals as young people went overseas to fight and die. Women who had been repressed in the previous centuries now could vote and since men had gone to the wars, they had to work in factories and establishments, doing the work of men. There was a huge role reversal in the way women behaved and thought and there was also a sense of rebellion among the people as they turned away the old cultural norms that had brought them nothing up despair, death, and gloom. Women had become liberated and could now compete with men on an even footing. The economy was looking up, people were well-traveled, adventurous and looked for a culture that broke away from the staid old societal norms.
Drivers for Popular Culture
There were a number of drivers or causal factors to led to the emergence of pop culture from the 1950s onwards. These include music and bands, films and film personalities, political landscape and Vietnam, and many other movements and these are discussed below. Each driver would be analyzed to understand its contribution and if the driver was ‘trash’ or had something valuable.
Music of the Pop Culture
David (2007) points out that music has been associated with the emergence of pop culture from the 1950s onwards. Prior to the 1950s, music was supposed to be something that one sat down to enjoy and the likes of Frank Sinatra and Perry Como who basically crooned was popular as was chamber music. With the emergence of rock and roll, the music world underwent a great storm, and musicians such as Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and others, teenagers found that they could ‘shake it, baby shake’ and music transformed the world. Chuck Berry was an African American or a ‘Nigger’ as this minority group was called and it was unthinkable for white teenagers to actually applaud a Black person’s performance. However, songs by this and other artists include Armstrong who played Sax for his Jazz band changed the earlier culture for the better. Thus music had served to break the racial divide that the Great American Civil war had attempted to do in 1860. So, the statement that popular culture is trash is disproved. There emerged artists such as Elvis Presley, the King, Jerry Lewis, and many others and these artists created their own brand of music that is still enjoyed today. Simply put, the concept of popular culture had changed.
Grace (1996) points out that there were many bands that bridged continents and united people from different countries and languages and as the years passed, music became a symbol of popular culture. Beatles is one very good example, this was a British band of just four people, they managed to make the whole world rock, and society became more open and ready to accept change and integrate them better. There have been many examples of transnational bands such as Deep Purple from England, AC/DC from Australia along with bands from America, Germany, and other countries. The lyrics of the songs appealed to the common teenager and there was nothing highbrow or high language in the songs and this became a part of the popular culture. The songs and bands attempted to change the manner in which the strict and overbearing government persisted with its policies of repression and the US attempts to colonize the world and music united people to revolt and resist these policies. The Vietnam war was a focal point for new music to emerge and there were millions of teenagers who did not want to be drafted to fight in Vietnam and protests against the deadly war grew. The 1960s gave the world immortal artists such as Bob Dylan, The Who, and many others. These bands brought in the songs that spoke of cultural change and Dylan gave hits such as ‘Times, they are changing, ‘Blowin in the wind’, and many others. The songs served their purpose well and helped to transform the culture into a much better place. The music also helped the Black power movement and the feminist movement and these groups obtained immense support from the music and bands and were united in their cause and they had a specific direction in which to go.
The contributions of music to the development of harmony in the culture and to promote integration and rights for minority groups have been discussed. It is ethically wrong to call such contributions as trash.
TV and Films
Television and Films underwent a cataclysmic change and films could be seen in color. David (2007) points out that the theme of the movies changed from the Humphrey Bogart representations to the dashing antics of Errol Flynn and James Dean. The establishment and police were boldly depicted as cruel and corrupt and the hero wanted to save the world and fight social injustice. This was a change in the popular culture of the earlier era. Television emerged as the most important means to define popular culture and TV producers, advertisement executives realized the immense potential of the idiot box as it was called. Many ‘soap operas’ came about and some of them were The Andy Griffith Show, Star Trek, The Beverly Hillbillies, the Twilight Zone, and many more. Popular culture now included the evenings sitting in front of the TV and enjoying the sitcoms and TV celebrities became as popular as film personalities and a parallel industry worth billions had come up that employed thousands of staff. TV attempted to show the ideal family, the ideal children, and so on, and the themes related to everyday occurrences in millions of homes, and people could relate to these themes. So the popular culture contributed immensely to the TV and film arena and these contributions cannot be called trash.
Books and Literature
Robert (2006) points out the world of literature underwent huge changes in line with the newfound cultural change. Feminist authors such as Margaret Atwood started writing about feminist-related themes, something that Kate Chopin had started about a century back. But while Kate was hunted down and humiliated, people sapped up these books. Other notable workers such as To Kill a Mockingbird that won a Pulitzer prize for Harper Lee’ brought the issues of race and bigotry of racist Southern America into the open. These and many other books such as ‘Cry, The Beloved Country’, Catch-22 by Heller Joseph brought in a new dimension to culture and directed the thoughts of right-thinking people. These books helped to drive away bigotry, racism and showed the dominant races that ‘Niggers’ and ‘women’ were also people that god made in equal measures. It would be ethically wrong to call these cultural contributions as trash.
Conclusion
The paper has discussed the statement ‘Popular culture is trash and that it can tell us nothing about the past’ and disproved it by citing many positive changes in the social cognitive thinking process of people from the 1950s. The paper has examined how drivers such as music, films, and TV, and literature helped to change the previous culture into a positive one and helped to change the world to be a better place.
References
- Grace Palladine. 1996. A hard day’s night: Beatles, boomers and the bomb: in Teenagers: an American history. New York: Basic Books.
- David P. Szatmary. 2007. Motown: the sound of integration: in his ‘Rockin’ in time: a social history of rock and roll. New Jersey: Pearson Publications.
- McRobbie, Angela. 1994. Postmodernism and Popular Culture: Cultural anthropologist and feminist discourse on cultural studies. Routledge.
- Robert Arnett. 2006. Eighties noir: the dissenting voice in Reagan’s America. Journal of popular film and television, 34(3).