Lesson 3. Feature of a Popular Culture PDF

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CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR CULTURE Main Learning Outcome: After going through this chapter, you are expected to: a)

Explain and differentiate fundamental terms

b)

Assess idea regarding what popular culture is.

Lesson 3 . Feature of a Popular Culture II.

Learning Compass/Specific Objectives: After going through this lesson, you are expected to:

III.

a)

Identify the features of a Popular Culture.

b)

Explain the difference of each Popular Culture Features.

Let’s begin Activity 1. Think and Share! In today’s generation and in the rise of technology, think of a situation wherein you can say that the situation become popular or trending. Elaborate your answer by stating the process how and why the situation you think became popular. Share you output during the online class discussion. 1. ________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________

IV.

Let’s Discuss

Features of Popular Culture As the ‘culture of the people’, popular culture is determined by the interactions between people in their everyday activities: styles of dress, the use of slang, greeting rituals and the foods that people eat are all examples of popular culture . In its origins, pop culture was all about entertainment on the stage through a pastiche of music, dancing, and laughter. Indeed, the main feature that makes pop culture distinctive, vis-àvis cultures of all other kinds, is a collage of elements that somehow cohere into a

thematic whole that we grasp intuitively as integrated and cohesive. The following features can be discerned as basic or, at least, as recurring: spectacle, pastiche, nostalgia, occultism, make-believe, celebrities, and laughter.

Spectacle Spectacles are everywhere in popular culture—musicals, blockbuster movies, the Super Bowl, rock concerts, and the like. Many historians actually trace pop culture’s origins to a specific kind of theatrical spectacle that featured a wide variety of acts, called vaudeville. Vaudeville was popular from the 1880s to the early 1930s and produced many of the celebrities who gained success in other entertainment media, such as motion pictures and radio. Some vaudeville theaters featured more than twenty acts in a single bill, including juggling, animal acts, comedy skits, comedic recitations, songs, magic shows, and burlesque performances. Vaudeville was an offshoot of circus culture, where the term spectacle had a specific meaning. It referred to the segment that opened and closed performances and included performers, animals, and floats. As the band played and the ringmaster sang, costumed performers walked around the circus tent or arena. The spectacle usually ended with a trick called a long mount, in which the elephants stood in a line with their front legs resting on each other’s backs. Vaudeville/bodabil in the Philippines, more commonly referred to as bodabil, was a popular genre of entertainment in the Philippines from the 1910s until the mid-1960s. In 1920, a Filipino entertainer named Luis Borromeo returned from North America, renamed himself “Borromeo Lou”, and organized what became the first Filipino bodabil company. The main showcase of Borromeo Lou’s company was an orchestral band, which played what he called “Classical-Jazz Music”, and variety acts in between. Borromeo’s band is credited as having popularized jazz in the Philippines. It was also Borromeo who dubbed the emerging form as “vod-a-vil”, which soon became popularly known by its Filipinized name, bodabil. In 1923, there were three theaters in Manila that were exclusively devoted to bodabil. By 1941, there were 40 theaters in Manila featuring bodabil shows. The popularity of bodabil was not confined to Manila stages. Bodabil routines were also staged in town fiestas and carnivals. The typical bodabil shows would feature a mixture of performances of American ballads, torch songs and blues numbers; dance numbers featuring tap dancers and chorus girls and jitterbug showcases; and even the occasional kundiman. Two of the most notable performers and musicians were Katy de la Cruz and Alex R. Castro. Katy was hailed as “The Queen of Filipino Jazz” and as “The Queen of Bodabil” her signature tune was her rendition of St. Louis Blues. Article by Alex R. Castro that covers her background and her nomination for the 1924 Manila Carnivals. Held from 1908-1939, the 2-week fair was organized as a goodwill event to celebrate harmonious U.S.-Philippine relations and to showcase our commercial, industrial and agricultural progress. Through the efforts of wealthy producers and theater owners, who could foresee huge profits from spectacle performances, vaudeville became a highly organized nationwide big business with its own theater chains. In its heyday, it was the most popular form of live entertainment. Eventually it came to be known more generally as a variety show, indicating that the vaudeville spectacle had become sanitized and thus more family friendly.

Catchy and entertaining music was an intrinsic feature of vaudeville. The vaudevillian stage thus introduced new musical trends to large audiences. One of these was jazz. One cannot overstate the role of jazz in the spread of pop culture . Jazz originated around 1900. Its roots lay in the musical traditions of African Americans. Most early jazz was played by small marching bands or solo pianists. In 1917, a group of white New Orleans musicians called The Original Dixieland Jass Band produced the first jazz records, garnering nationwide attention for jazz. Two groups followed: in 1922, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and, in 1923, the Creole Jazz Band, led by cornetist King Oliver. The most influential musician at the time was King Oliver’s second trumpeter, Louis Armstrong, who showed jazz to be not only entertaining but also emotionally moving. Armstrong was perhaps the first true pop music icon, despite his African American ethnicity—a fact that indicates how the pop culture stage can often set aside cultural prejudices toward race and gender. By then, jazz developed into swing, which became very popular, leading to its association with ballroom dancing as a spreading popular trend. Based on Richie Quirino's book, Pinoy Jazz Traditions, which won the 2004 National Book Award in the music category (Philippines), PINOY JAZZ is a 58-minute video documentary that provides the first-ever documentation of the development of jazz in the Philippines, from its infancy in 1898, when Filipinos were first exposed to Black music performed by African-American soldiers, to its present-day maturity in which musicians are turning to indigenous sources for inspiration. Incorporating historical still photography, turn-of-the century film footage, maps, old recordings, present-day performances and interviews with veteran and contemporary musicians, the video presents an eye-opening view into an almost-forgotten history of the art of jazz as it developed in the Philippines over the last century. The movie Chicago brought out the importance of jazz in the origins and spread of pop culture, encapsulated in its opening musical piece titled “All that Jazz,” alluding not only to the music itself, but also metaphorically to the role of open sexual attitudes in pop culture. The main character, Roxie Hart, becomes an overnight sensation after murdering an unfaithful lover. People react against her at first because she is a burlesque star associated with jazz and promiscuity—the two evils in society. For her courtroom appearances, Roxie and her lawyer devise an acceptable persona for her—a pregnant and loving mother figure— emphasizing society’s hypocrisy. But Roxie is a freethinking woman, unbridled by the yoke of tradition, which saw women only as wives and mothers. This free-thinking woman continued to reverberate in all areas of pop culture. In the videos “Like a Virgin” and “Material Girl,” Madonna showcased the power of that persona. The key era for the rise of pop culture was, as mentioned, the Roaring Twenties. The public consumption of alcohol, sexy clothing, jazz music, and socializing late at night became part of a new social mind-set. Before World War I, women had worn long hair tied into a bun, ankle-length dresses, and long cotton stockings. In the 1920s, they started wearing short, tight dresses and rolled their silk stockings down to their knees. As mentioned above, they came to be called flappers, cutting their hair in a boyish style called a bob and wearing flashy cosmetics. They danced cheek-to-cheek with men. Like Roxie, they acted sexually in public. The era of pop culture had arrived. Collage, Bricolage, and Pastiche Three French words, collage, bricolage, and pastiche, are often used to describe pop culture. Collage is a term taken from painting, describing a picture or design made by gluing pieces onto a canvas or another surface. By arranging them in a certain way, the

artist can create strange or witty effects that are not possible to achieve with traditional painting techniques. Many pop culture spectacles, from early vaudeville to some sitcoms, are created by an analogous collage technique. Vaudeville consisted of a combination of acts, ranging from skitsto acrobatic acts; The Simpsons sitcom cuts and pastes diverse elements from different levels of culture into the same episode, as mentioned earlier, to create a satirical collage. The term bricolage emphasizes a unifying structure to the seemingly disparate components of a spectacle or text, not just an admixture. It was first used in anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962) to designate the style of many tribal rituals that mix various symbols and myths holistically in order to evoke magical feelings and a sense of communal harmony. The disparate elements become unified in the act of mixture itself. Bricolage has been used to describe the power of subcultures among youth (Hebdige 1979). Finally, in painting pastiche refers to an admixture of elements intended to imitate or satirize another work or style. Many aspects of pop culture, not just comedic ones, display a pastiche pattern. A daily television newscast is a perfect example, since it amalgamates news about crime and tragic events with those involving achievements of pop stars, creating a veritable pastiche of emotions and meanings. The defining feature of all pop culture spectacles and texts may well be pastiche. Nostalgia Nostalgia is the sentimental attachment to trends from one’s past. Whether it is Elvis movies, Disney cartoons, Beatles albums, disco dancing, Barbie dolls, punk clothing, adventure comics, or other cultural item, people react nostalgically to the trends and popular artifacts of their youth. The business of memorabilia is a profitable one indeed, as sales of items from the past, including Hula-Hoops, Coca-Cola classic bottles, and the like continue to make conspicuously obvious. People seem to maintain and cherish the trends of their youth well into their later years. But this does not mean that pop culture is incapable of producing meritorious and lasting forms of art (music, novels, and so on) that transcend simple nostalgic value. Indeed, some of the modern world’s most significant artistic products have come out of pop culture (as previously mentioned). The comic book art of Charles Schulz (1922–2000) is a case in point. His comic strip Peanuts, which debuted in 1950 as Li’l Folks, appealed —and continues to appeal—to all kinds of audiences, because of its intrinsic philosophical and poignant portrayals of the human condition. Through the strip, Schulz dealt in a unique and aesthetically powerful way with some of the most profound questions of life, such as the nature of good and evil. The characters in the strip are children and animals, and they are among the most recognizable figures in modern pop culture: Charlie Brown, his beagle Snoopy, Lucy, Schroeder, Linus, Peppermint Patty, Sally, and a bird named Woodstock. Each character has a distinct personality. Charlie Brown is a born loser. Lucy is crabby and rather devious. Linus is an intellectual attached to his blanket. Snoopy acts and thinks like a human being. Schroeder loves to play the music of Ludwig van Beethoven on a toy piano. They have become characters to which most people relate today and can be used as metaphors of human nature. Occultism In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a serial killer known as the Zodiac used astrological signs in his messages to the media, becoming a dark and mysterious celebrity. Two movies have since dealt with the allure that the Zodiac held for people

from that era. The first one was Dirty Harry (1971) in which a killer aptly named Scorpio is exterminated by Dirty Harry Callahan, a hardnosed cop played by Clint Eastwood, thus allowing for a pseudo-cathartic effect to occur. The second movie is David Fincher’s 2007 Zodiac, which taps into our intrinsic fear of the unknowable that the Zodiac evoked in his heyday. These movies illustrate the grip that the figure of the serial killer has on pop culture. They also bring out the fact that pop culture delves into occultism—a fact borne out not only by movies, but also by the popularity of horoscopes and doomsday documentaries on television. Occult practices from palm reading to magic shows have always been a part of carnival sideshows and early vaudeville. And the most popular of all pop culture genres— the mystery or thriller narrative—is really a form of occult storytelling, where mystery and fear of the dark are evoked. Television shows such as Supernatural and Lost, Gothic adventure heroes such as Batman, and many other spectacles cater explicitly to the occultism instinct as a form of cathartic entertainment. Make-Believe Spectacles, texts, and locales within the pop culture landscape allow people to indulge in make-believe. Disney’s Fantasyland and Magic Kingdom are examples. As copies of previous fictional worlds, they are part of a communal make-believe. They are copies of copies, and people appear to experience them as more real than real, indicating that simulated worlds are more desirable to the human imagination than the real world. Constructing a make-believe identity in this simulated world allows people to perceive themselves on their own terms and relate to others accordingly. Disney-worlds, malls, sports events, and certainly the virtual worlds on the internet are more meaningful than real worlds, which are perceived as banal and boring. Eventually, as people engage constantly in make-believe, everything from politics to art becomes governed by simulation. Only in such a world is it possible for advertising—the maximum manufacturer of simulation—to become so powerful. This is why people are easily duped by charlatans and hucksters in real life, from marketers to politicians. Celebrities Another salient feature of pop culture is the fact that it produces most of our celebrities. It is sufficient to point out that it is an intrinsic component of pop culture. Like the heroes of ancient myths, the celebrities of pop culture are both exalted and condemned. Some become icons, especially after their deaths, venerated (at least for a time) like religious icons. Two well- known examples of this are Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Icons can come from all areas of pop culture— from sports (Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, and so on) to science (Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and so on). Differentiating between celebrities and icons is part of the aim of pop culture studies. Laughter In any episode of the animated TV series South Park, one is bound to find a moral subtext—something in society, for example, political correctness, that is raised to general awareness through comedy. Similarly, in any episode of The Big Bang Theory, we are presented with comedic portrayals of changing relationships and the role of common young men—known as geeks—in contemporary society. As Arthur Asa Berger (2005, 38– 39) observes, “People crave humor and laughter, which explains why there are so many situation comedies

on television and why film comedies have such widespread appeal.” Humor is a basic feature of many YouTube sites, which highlight very funny occurrences from the spectacle of everyday life. In some ways, the phenomenon of pop culture is an exercise in laughter and its psychological benefits. Although many aspects of this culture engage us in serious emotional ways, many others allow us to laugh and express ourselves cathartically. The ancient theatrical dichotomy between tragedy and comedy manifests itself in various new forms in pop culture, suggesting that they are complementary aspects of the human psyche.

Take Note! According to origins, pop culture was all about entertainment on the stage through a pastiche of music, dancing, and laughter. The following features can be discerned as basic or, at least, as recurring: spectacle, pastiche, nostalgia, occultism, make-believe, celebrities, and laughter. Spectacle Spectacles are everywhere in popular culture—musicals, blockbuster movies, the Super Bowl, rock concerts, and the like. Vaudeville specific kind of theatrical spectacle that featured a wide variety of acts. Some vaudeville theaters featured more than twenty acts in a single bill, including juggling, animal acts, comedy skits, comedic recitations, songs, magic shows, and burlesque performances. Vaudeville was an offshoot of circus culture, where the term spectacle had a specific meaning. It referred to the segment that opened and closed performances and included performers, animals, and floats. Vaudeville/bodabil in the Philippines, more commonly referred to as bodabil, was a popular genre of entertainment in the Philippines from the 1910s until the mid-1960s. In 1920, a Filipino entertainer named Luis Borromeo returned from North America, renamed himself “Borromeo Lou”, and organized what became the first Filipino bodabil company. Two of the most notable performers and musicians were Katy de la Cruz and Alex R. Castro. Katy was hailed as “The Queen of Filipino Jazz” and as “The Queen of Bodabil” her signature tune was her rendition of St. Louis Blues. Article by Alex R. Castro that covers her background and her nomination for the 1924 Manila Carnivals. Held from 1908-1939, the 2-week fair was organized as a goodwill event to celebrate harmonious U.S.-Philippine relations and to showcase our commercial, industrial and agricultural progress. Catchy and entertaining music was an intrinsic feature of vaudeville. The vaudevillian stage thus introduced new musical trends to large audiences. One of these was jazz. One cannot overstate the role of jazz in the spread of pop culture . Collage, Bricolage, and Pastiche Collage is a term taken from painting, describing a picture or design made by gluing pieces onto a canvas or another surface. By arranging them in a certain way, the artist can create strange or witty effects that are not possible to achieve with traditional painting techniques. While The term bricolage emphasizes a unifying structure to the seemingly disparate components of a spectacle or text, not just an admixture. Finally, in painting pastiche refers to an admixture of elements intended to imitate or satirize another work or style. Nostalgia Nostalgia is the sentimental attachment to trends from one’s past. Whether it is Elvis movies, Disney cartoons, Beatles albums, disco dancing, Barbie dolls, punk clothing, adventure comics, or other cultural item, people react nostalgically to the trends and popular artifacts of their youth. Occultism Occult practices from palm reading to magic shows have always been a part of carnival sideshows and early vaudeville. And the most popular of all pop culture genres—

the mystery or ...