Popular culture

Popular culture has been defined in a large number of different ways, but the core essential seem to include an opposition to or polarity with high culture - either popular culture ends up being the culture of the mass, the Marxist proletariat, the dismissed culture of glitz and razzle-dazzle. Popular culture is also thought of as a commercialised folk culture that has been created as a result of urbanization, the increase in leisure time after World War Two and mass media. Another important aspect of popular culture is the fact that it evolves alongside subcultures. For instance, in the commercialisation of black culture - specifically jazz, blues, hip-hop, soul, dance and club culture - and also of punk music and fashion.

Popular culture is often traced to a number of sources - the form of the operetta or light opera, and early musical theatre like Gilbert and Sullivan, which led on to the development of early film, including the animated shorts and features of Walt Disney. Similarly, twenieth century popular music combined a mixture of the black influence of blues and jazz with that of gospel music from both black and white ecclesiastical traditions. The invention of the Player-Piano and then radio and television helped shift the culture over to one of mediated experience from live performance to mediated experience.

Many have been critical of popular culture, including the late Neil Postman who criticised television in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which argued that the format of television reduces the intellectual involvement and attention span of the viewer compared to the reader of a book - and that ideas in politics, science and religion are trivialised by the medium.