To what extent does pop culture reflect our society’s values?

Popular culture is a term that once characterized mass-produced or lowbrow culture: pop music, potboilers and page-turners, movies, comics, advertising, radio, and television. Its audience was the masses. Opposite popular culture were highbrow forms of entertainment: opera, fine art, classical music, traditional theater, and literature. These were the realm of the wealthy and educated classes.

Today, the line between high and pop culture has blurred. Pop culture is often at the leading edge of what will become established culture. For example, the 1980s graffitist Jean-Michel Basquiat is considered a leading figure in contemporary art.

Popular culture moves through our world at warp speed. Rap music and mash-ups sample and remix current and past albums. Celebrity gossip in the morning is the talk-show host’s monologue at night. Homemade videos are posted on the Internet, become cultural phenomena overnight, and are just as quickly forgotten. Albums and movies are exchanged on peer-to-peer networks months before they are officially released. What does this onslaught of entertainment and information mean?

These days, most people realize that pop culture asks many of the same questions that high culture does: Does it say something new? Does it tell us about ourselves? Popular culture also spawns new questions: What is pop? Should pop culture respect its roots? What is the relationship among pop culture, politics, and commerce? Do commercial interests control what is offered to the public, or does old-fashioned word of mouth still tell us what’s hot and what’s not?

The selections in this chapter are about media that you can access. Listen to the music, watch the films and TV shows, and look at the art. The connections made in this chapter prompt a conversation between the past and the present; enter the conversation, consider both, and imagine the future.