what is pop culture?

Pop culture is the foundation for the next Gap ad campaign.

Mass culture is the average level of acceptance of any given social dogma.

Music fits in wherever you want it to.

Music can liberate yr head, or sell you doughnuts...that's what really scary about it.

popkulcher = BEST THING EVAH!!

flexible powah of music = what's GOOD about it ie john oswald on cover of wire = part of entire whole wacky world of music even tho he is a worthless peabrained parasite (heh)

Well that's it!!! You people on this board are SOOOOO cruel! I'm never lurking here again.

Well that's it!!! Well that's it!!! what's GOOD BEST THING EVAH!! BEST THING EVAH!! BEST THING EVAH!! You people on this board are SOOOOO cruel! I'm never

oh look his hair is dyed blond = he is punk after all wow

I was just looking at BBC radio's site, and there's a section in Radio 3's page called 'Ideas and Culture' (which includes a RealAudio file of Peter Blegvad reading a story called 'The Spoon', by the way). It struck me as slightly odd that Radio 3 had put this here, a tiny subsection of a minority station, when in fact the whole content of all BBC Radio channels is also 'ideas and culture'. It's a bit like having a show called 'Woman's Hour', when there are women all over the networks at all hours.

But I suppose demarcating things in this way serves a purpose.

It distances and alienates the thing, making us think of it as something worth studying in its own right, something culturally-determined and ideological, rather than merely 'the air we breathe'. In other words, it removes the thing's immunity, removes its invisibility, and removes its claims to be, simply, reality. From our new distance, we see it as just one mode of representing reality, competing with others.

Using the term 'pop culture', I think, allows us to imagine alternatives:

- The world where culture is unpopular and what's popular is not culture. (The elitist world of Modernism or Classicism, for example.)

- The world where there is unpopular popular culture (the world I believe we now live in, a world of culture which uses the basic language of mass media, but speaks to minorities rather than 'the masses').

- The world where 'popular culture' is made, paradoxically, not by 'the people' but by a highly professional, technically-advanced elite.

- If the term 'pop culture' makes visible a world in which pop music (its energy, its model of the artist, its marketing strategies) has become the template for all the arts, we're free to imagine alternative worlds in which pop culture has been modelled on different things: worlds where all culture had to reflect religious themes, for example, or worlds where culture is based on the latest discoveries in science -- God culture, sci-culture.

And we can ask ourselves, are these other worlds better or worse than the world we know, the world of pop culture?

Of course, 'pop culture' is an inherently confusing term.

Popular = of the people, but also 'successful'. Culture = everything people make, but also 'art'. Pop = popular but also 'a genre of music' (which may or may not be popular, and may or may not be made by 'the people'). The people = the masses, but also anybody.

And so on...

I don't know that I necessarily agree with the following gnomic bit of wisdom, but it has always stuck in my head:

Culture makes a statement; art matches the couch.

I think a good term for what I'm describing above is 'metatag'. 'Pop culture' is a metatag indicating 'intellectual discussions about the non-intellectual', just as 'Woman's Hour' or 'Ideas and Culture' are metatags signalling 'women on women' or 'ideas about ideas'.

Of course, pop culture is already highly self-conscious. Every pop record is already a metatag, already a comment on other pop records, made by experts. Just ask Daft Punk or the Basement Jaxx!

WUOM, the University of Michigan's public radio station, repeats this slogan at the end of each report on local Arts happenings (Sympony, Ballet, Art Museum)

"The Arts and Culture: Adding Balance to Our Lives."

So Pop Culture must be the the kind that leaves our lives unbalanced.

I did a degree in this. I really ought to know.

metatags are the things you put in webpages to talk to search engines, momus. And occasionally to tell browsers not to cache.

Mass cult is non-judgemental. Pop-cult positive.

metatags also useful for FITING ROBOTS (or leading them to safe harbor grrr...) (real example: <meta name="robots" content="index,follow">)

Go on to Google and search for 'postmodernism essay generator'. It will tell you everything you ever need to know about popular culture and Marxist cultural theory and post-neo-deconstructivism and many many other fine things.

It got me a 2;1.

Well, obviously HTML was the reference. Metatag as metaphor. A metatag is a tag which talks about the HTML code itself, rather than doing anything. The term 'Pop culture' (as opposed to the phenomenon itself, or, rather, the term as a way of bringing the phenomenon itself to a certain kind of respectable visibility) is culture about culture.

But in a world where culture = culture about culture -- in other words, in post- modernity, or the world of Daft Punk et al -- it's debatable whether we need metatags. I mean, if 'Discovery' is itself a hyper-intelligent comment on 'popular culture', what more can some media studies lecturer add? Which brings me back to my first point, about 'Woman's Hour'. What's the point of 'Woman's Hour', except in a (vanished) world where women are elsewhere repressed and invisible? And what's the point of discussions of 'popular culture' in a world where all media products are comments on all other media products?

The only point might be to alienate the conversation usefully, hence my second point about the 'metatag' helping us to imagine alternative worlds.

i know lots of things not on that generator nick: hence i do not need to look at it to check heh!! (unless radiop free narnia is on it ulp...?¿!?¡)

sterl your defn of metatag and momus's are surely now identical?

today is a day when i agree with everything momus says (google told me to)

What is Pop culture? Its whatever PepsiCo tells us it is.

sinkah: no. he uses metatag as a metaphor. I use it to mean an HTML tag.

So Sterl, do you jump up in public meetings when someone says we should do 'bridge-building' with Iran to point out that no bridge could be that long?

Pop is like a prostitute, whatever we want it to be... as long as pay.

Momus: not rilly, but that would be sorta fun, now that I think about it. Who sez anything about "bridge building" with Iran anyway these days?

Besides, I disagree. Discovery exists in a self aware world but it is an album to make you DANCE and sometimes to make you CRY and sometimes to make you LAUGH.

Discovery exists in a self-aware world: but do you mean discovery the activity (cf amundsen) or discovery the metaphor (cf new age) or Discovery the album?

I say they are all identical of course.

I mean Discovery the HTML tag.

Who sez anything about "bridge building" with Iran anyway these days?

There was talk of it on ILE yesterday with ref. to a BBC piece about Iranian birth control classes. Most people were saying how sensible Iran seemed in the light of this policy, and how foolish Bush looked with his 'Empire of Evil' malarky. I guess that's more of a 'trojan horse' policy than a 'bridge building' one though!

(And it's a non sequitur in a thread about pop culture.)

Momus: so, often, are you.

Yeah, I meant me!

Culture is a vulture but there's also vulture culture and cultured vultures and cultured yogurt (cherry, peach, pear, pineapple, grape, vanilla, plain, cherry vanilla, pineapple orange, cranberry orange, mandarin orange, coffee, apricot, raspberry, blueberry, boysenberry, prune). And speaking of vulture culture there's counter-culture and under-the-counter culture too. But whether you call it kulture with a k or kulchur with a k and a ch and without the e it's still the same thing and you can't disguise it with pretty frills and a gallon of dogsweat. It has two syllables and TWO-SYLLABLE WORDS SUCK so you can just forget it, man. It's no fun at all and even fun wouldn't be fun if it was called funjure or funion or funching. But somehow fucking is still loads of fun even though there's that extra 3-letter cluster of vowels and consonants. Proof positive that there are exceptions everywhere you look. But don't look too hard, you might get eyestrain!

-Richard Meltzer

They say 'it's all about fucking, man' = they are monkeys = can we eat them?

Only if they like Hitler.

There is culture and there is kulture and there is vulture and there is kustom kulture and ther is Kalifornia Kar Kulture, and there is Vulture Kulture which encloses all of the above.

www.vulturekulture.com