Foundations for Youth Ministry by Dean Borgman

Author:Dean Borgman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Youth Ministry, Church work with youth, REL109030, REL067000
ISBN: 9781441241504
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

What Is Popular Culture?

If culture generally has been described as “the air we breathe” and “the water we swim in,” we might consider pop culture as the part of overall culture mass produced for us, the way in which we buy and sell, are entertained, and normally communicate with one another. Pop culture has been contrasted to “high culture,” although high culture can, at times, become popularly acclaimed (as with the operatic tenors). Neither pop culture nor high culture is easily or conclusively defined. Pop culture can also be contrasted to the folk art of traditional cultures or contemporary subcultures.

John Storey in his Cultural Theory and Popular Culture has this to say about the difficulty of defining pop culture:

There are various ways to define popular culture. This book is of course in part about that very process, about the different ways in which various critical approaches have attempted to fix the meaning of popular culture. Therefore, all I intend to do for the remainder of this chapter is to sketch out six definitions of popular culture, which in their different, general ways, inform the study of popular culture.329

Punk and grunge rock were first of all a kind of folk art of a subculture, as was the first hip-hop music of young, New York African Americans. But soon the music of these groups went mainstream, becoming mass produced for a mass market; it was no longer folk art but pop art. Dominic Strinati, if I can extract just a bit of his quotation, says, “Popular culture is produced by mass production industrial techniques and is marketed for a profit to a mass market of consumers. It is commercial culture, mass produced for a mass market.”330

The symbiotic relationship between youth cultures and pop culture should be clear by now. The more extreme and sensational aspects of youth cultures, which are often associated with excess or rebellion, have special influence. For example, the questioning of authority, widespread use of drugs, and open mores on sexual activities have generally affected adult and pop culture. Iain Chambers takes note of some of these changes.

Spectacular subcultures, commercial popular culture, America, the triumph of record and television, by the time of the 1960s these were all uniting to announce the death of an aesthetics based on the stable referents of the “authentic,” the “unique,” the “irreplaceable.” . . . With the rise of Pop Art in the 1950s, the distinctions between advertising, design and painting become increasingly blurred. . . . Pop Art employed the despised, more frequently simply ignored, commercial iconography of popular experience.331

What then is popular culture? Resisting conclusive definition, popular culture is often seen in contrast to such classifications as high culture and folk culture. Popular culture needs a mass culture produced by mass communication feeding an industrialized consumer society. Wikipedia gives this definition: “Popular culture (or, pop culture) is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred through an informal consensus within the mainstream of any given

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