Popular Culture Studies - Contemporary Popular Culture Studies

Contemporary Popular Culture Studies

Aside from precursors such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes, popular culture studies as we know them today were developed in the late seventies and the eighties. The first influential works were generally politically left-wing and rejected the "aristocratic" view. However, they also criticized the pessimism of the Frankfurt School: contemporary studies on mass culture accept that, apparently, popular culture forms do respond to widespread needs of the public. They also emphasized the capacity of the consumers to resist indoctrination and passive reception. Finally, they avoided any monolithic concept of mass culture. Instead they tried to describe culture as a whole as a complex formation of discourses which correspond to particular interests, and which can be dominated by specific groups, but which also always are dialectically related to their producers and consumers.

An example of this tendency is Andrew Ross's No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). His chapter on the history of jazz, blues and rock does not present a linear narrative opposing the authentic popular music to the commercial record industry, but shows how popular music in the U.S., from the twenties until today, evolved out of complex interactions between popular, avant-garde and commercial circuits, between lower- and middle-class youth, between blacks and whites.