Popular Culture in a New Age by Marshall Fishwick

Author:Marshall Fishwick [Fishwick, Marshall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Media Studies, Sports & Recreation, General
ISBN: 9781317956730
Google: 7onJAwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 4219427
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2001-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Style

Style, not substance, will be the wave of the future.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson was right: style was the wave of his future and of ours. Why is this so? What is style?

Style: a characteristic model manner, or method of expression; skill or grace in performance, manner, or appearance. One of the keys that unlocks popular culture is style; but trying to define it need not be stylish. People who have style tend not to write or talk about it; and people who write and talk about it usually don’t have much.

Yet the term style gets attached to everything, age after age: actors, writers, cultures, nations, periods, crafts, and dynasties. Despite all this, the word style eludes us. What brings a dead object to life is hidden within a living viewer or reader, not the object. But what sets the process in motion? What makes certain epochs, cultures, and people “stylish”?1

Certainly prominence and power help. When the Egyptians were developing a unique style which still delights us, their Pharaohs were power brokers throughout their known world. The Athenians under Pericles were a mighty factor, so that the ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were carried far and wide. One of Aristotle’s pupils—Alexander the Great—was a world conqueror, and is said to have cried when, as a young warrior, there were no more lands to conquer. Alexander had style.

The Greeks were in turn conquered by the Romans, whose empire flourished for a thousand years and who left theaters, forums, and aqueducts everywhere they went. They even made much of thermal baths, such as the one Claudius constructed in Britain. Today, England’s Bath is a major structure and tourist attraction, and spas are stylish everywhere.

The ecclesiastical Gothic style long favored by the Vatican left magnificent Gothic cathedrals; one was recently completed as a national shrine in Washington, DC. At the same time, one of the popular youth cults in the 1990s called itself the “Goths.”

That other powerful nations in their prime shaped style on a worldwide scale is obvious—China, Spain, France, and Great Britain. Under Queen Victoria, the British controlled almost a quarter of the world, so that “The sun never set on the British Empire.” It set in a hurry after World War II, when the British lost their empire and American power and prestige took in the West. Did that result (or has that resulted) in an American style that will do the same? In popular culture, style seems bound up with fads, formulas, and model building. Style isn’t something that activates the process but is instead the result of that process. Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French traveler who toured America in the 1820s, pointed this out. He thought the new nation’s motley multitude would create a new style. We have been trying to verify this ever since. In a nation that long thought of itself as a melting pot but now favors the term multicultural is a new style emerging in the new millennium? Can we describe it?

Back we go to crucial definitions.

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