History and popular culture

Popular Culture

Folk culture refers to the collection of "songs, tales, proverbs, jokes" that reflect a specific segment of society -- and can often refer to the expressions of marginalized groups like African-Americans. Popular culture is more mainstream, and is fabricated and consumed by the dominant culture. It would include newspapers, magazines, and books propagated throughout a country, as opposed to folk culture, which would be localized (either geographically or, if the group is geographically spread out, culturally). According to Levine, popular culture is "seen as the antithesis of folk culture."[footnoteRef:1] There is also an impression that popular culture lacks the authenticity of folk culture in capturing the spirit of the people. As Levine puts it, popular culture does not emanate from the community but is created artificially for consumption by the community and usually with financial motives. For historians and other researchers, popular culture, "if it has to be invoked at all, should be used primarily to represent the consciousness of its producers, not its consumers."[footnoteRef:2] Popular culture is criticized for being both crass in its quality and hegemonic in its intent and impact.[footnoteRef:3] [1: Levine 1370] [2: Levine 1370] [3: Levine]

Popular culture certainly is not perceived of as art. Thus, it often takes a strong justification to invoke popular culture in scholarship. Yet Levine claims that there are earnest academic uses of popular culture. While popular culture is qualitatively distinct from folk culture, it "functions in ways similar to folk culture and acts as a form of folklore for people living in urban industrial societies."[footnoteRef:4] The debate over the value of popular culture in scholarship is in many ways reflective of a concurrent debate about the differential value of pop art and high or fine art.[footnoteRef:5] [4: Levine 1372] [5: University of Calgary, Red Deer]

Consumers are not necessarily passive or "hopeless" and that they do modify, modulate, interpret, and personalize the objects that are mass produced for them in the mode of mass culture.[footnoteRef:6] Moreover, Levine claims that the definition of popular culture need not be judgmental at all. Popular culture is simply that which is popular and accessible to large numbers of people. Not all "mass culture" is popular, according to Levine, which is why popular culture must be distinguished from the barrage of mass-produced items. [6: Levine 1373]

Popular culture is also less formulaic, less predictable, and less escapist in its function than many critics would like to believe, claims Levine. In terms of its relationship to art and aesthetics, moreover, Levine notes that art does not necessarily need to stand apart from the masses, or be unpopular or elite. Popular culture can yield a wealth of fruitful analysis, too, regardless of its aesthetic. It can be as worthwhile an endeavor to analyze Anne Rice as Ayn Rand.

Thus, popular culture does function in many if not most of the same ways as folk culture even when the two categories are considered anthropologically distinct. If mass production is considered to be the province of popular culture, but not folk culture, then folk culture can easily capitalize on the mode of mass production for its historical preservation and for the effect it has on community identity maintenance. The example Levine uses is the mass production recordings of blues artists, which, rather than dilute the original folk music, had the ancillary effect of enabling African-Americans in their diaspora and migrations through the nation to retain a common identity, shared values, and mutual aesthetic.

Breaking through the "rigid compartmentalization" between popular and folk culture enables a more productive and honest scholarship, notes Levine.[footnoteRef:7] Popular culture is like the folk culture of the modern (if not necessarily postmodern) urban, industrialized society. Key to the understanding of popular culture as folk culture is an examination of the audience reaction to and use of popular culture. Often in the case of popular culture, the audience is the creator, and this phenomenon is perhaps most evident in African-American art and culture such as Hip Hop (Bennett). Furthermore, there is the aggregate viewer response to popular culture that can have a transformative effect on the art as well as on the viewer. For example, Levine refers to the "contagion" of other people's reactions during live performances.[footnoteRef:8] [7: Levine 1378] [8: Levine1395]

The potential problem with contagion is that it mitigates what would be a natural personal encounter with the art, and encourages instead the conformity to shared values and experiences. Kelley refers to this as the penetration of the collective consciousness, which is a shared function of popular and folk cultures. As Haque puts it, popular culture is now a curious dialogue between the consumer and producer: "popular culture is what happens as mass culture gets pulled back into folk culture." As the relationships between popular, mass, and folk culture become more complex, they also become more inviting for scholars. Recent scholarship reveals an affection if not outright appreciation for the effects of popular culture, as it can be studied for its anthropological, sociological, psychological, aesthetic, historical, and contextual relevance. Hartley also points out the confluence of popular culture and journalism, which in the era of phenomenon like iReporting, reveals the curious connections between consumer/audience and producer/artist.

Levine's astute analysis has therefore a strong bearing on how scholars perceive popular culture, and reveals why popular culture can and should be integrated into the pedagogies that once shunned it. Using examples from early 20th century artistic expressions, Levine is able to show the genesis of popular culture -- which is related directly to technology and other means of mass production. Mass, popular, and folk culture can collectively inform historical debates.