Pop culture: Youth as consumers and producers

by Kathleen Knight Abowitz

Often we think of "culture" as something that we find at a museum. Cultural studies scholars are among those academic researchers who see culture as the everyday world around us. "Popular" culture is found everywhere: in a grocery store, on the side of a burned out city building, in a magazine, on TV, or in the Gap. In this essay, the meanings of popular culture are discussed, and the role of youth as both consumers and producers of culture is described. References, further readings and assignments follow the essay.

'Popular' is usually synonymous with 'good' in ordinary conversation, but this is an inversion of its earlier pejorative connotations. In its original form, popular was used to distinguish the mass of people (not 'people in general') from the titled, wealthy or educated classes. Not surprisingly, since most writers on the subject were either members or clients of the latter three classes, its synonyms were gross, base, vile, riff-raff, common, low, vulgar, plebeian, cheap (OED). (O'Sullivan et. al., 1994, p. 231)

Cultural studies theorists began studying popular culture when they began to distinguish between high culture, the cultural texts and practices of the elite and powerful, and those cultural texts, practices, and artifacts belonging to, or emerging from, the lower classes of an industrialized society. In contemporary debates about the academic canon, for example, these issues are crystallized into arguments over, "what is worth teaching in a liberal arts curriculum?" Cultural studies theorists are likely to argue that texts such as Madonna's music and live performances, or cultural practices like tattooing or graffiti, are just as important to study and understand as are the plays of Shakespeare, or the history of American Westward expansion. (Image credit: Cultural Studies Central, http://home.earthlink.net/~rmarkowitz/).

Yet even cultural studies theorists have had disagreements over what we mean by popular culture. For some, popular culture describes culture "made by various formations of subordinated or disempowered people out of the resources, both discursive and material, that are provided by the social system that disempowers them" (Fiske, 1989, p. 1-2). In this definition, popular culture is made by and in the interests of those who are subordinated in a society. By this description, the original street raps of hip hop in the 1970s, or the raw music and style of British punk of the same era, represents popular culture, since these cultural forms represent cultural practices, texts, and artifacts that emerged from the lived experience of working class people and racial or other minority groups. Popular culture, in this definition, is not produced by Hollywood or Ted Turner, but by the expressions and practices of subordinated people in a society.

But for others in cultural studies scholarship, popular culture means anything that is popular by average Americans. Seinfeld, under this definition, represents popular culture, even though it is not the creation of the disempowered in our society but the product of the huge, powerful American entertainment industry. This second definition of popular culture does not make distinctions about whether popular culture is imposed upon subordinated people (by Hollywood, by corporations, etc.) or is derived from their own experiences and expressions (as was original hip hop, practiced in clubs and on the streets rather than in major recording studios like Sony or Warner). In other words, is the viewer of Seinfeld a "passive receiver of predigested meanings,"(Kellner, 1995, p. 33) or an active, autonomous participant in meaning-making of this cultural text? Is the viewer of Seinfeld a passive recipient of the values of the Seinfeld writers, actors, and advertisers, or is the viewer of Seinfeld engaged in a (semi) autonomous creation of meaning? "What 'counts' as popular culture depends to some extent on whether you're interested in what meanings are produced by and for 'the people,' and whether you take these meanings as evidence of 'what the public wants' or of 'what the public gets'" (O'Sullivan et. al., 1994, p. 232).

The second, broader definition of popular culture does not distinguish, therefore, between media culture, consumer culture, and the cultural expressions of subordinated groups in our society. This second definition, the one to be used throughout this essay, does not help us differentiate between the interests of the working classes, for example, and the interests of the entertainment industry served in a cultural practice such as World Wide Wrestling. Therefore, when we encounter examples or descriptions of popular culture, we must be aware of the ambiguity in operation with this term (see Kellner, 1995, p. 33-34). Further, we should examine both the sources and political/economic interests of the pop culture text or practice, the intended audience for the text or practice, and the meanings that are made of the cultural form. Let us take, as another example, the two examples of graffiti and of Barbie. Both are, under the broadest (second) definition, artifacts of popular culture. Under the first definition, however, these material artifacts of popular culture are very different. Graffiti is produced, typically in urban areas, by marginalized youth as a form of self-expression and resistance to state (police, governmental) authority. A variety of meanings might be made from graffiti: police see it as vandalism and evidence of delinquency, other youth might see it as a social critique, etc. Barbie is produced not as a form of self-expression or resistance, but as a cultural commodity sold to consumers at a profit. Barbie's meaning may be imposed on girls (meanings about gender roles, about women, about women's bodies), or it may be created by kids who play with Barbie (kids creating their own interpretations of Barbie in terms of gender roles, women, etc..). Or, meaning may be a construction of both received meanings (from producer to consumer) and created meanings (by the consumer/user). Culture is produced with various motivations (self-expression, profit, etc.), for very different audiences, and with various effects (imposing meaning, helping create new meanings). Part of our work, as readers of culture, is to examine the production of cultural artifacts and the meanings and effects that these artifacts produce in our society. (Xena photo credit: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Guild/8867/xena09.jpg)

When we examine popular culture in our society, we examine the world of production and consumption of commodities. By the production, consumption, and usage that we make of various and endless commodities, we create and re-create culture:

Commodities make an economic profit for their producers and distributors, but their cultural function is not adequately explained by their economic function, however dependent it may be on it. The cultural industries are often thought of as those that produce our films, music, television, publications, and so on, but all industries are cultural industries to a greater or lesser extent: a pair of jeans or a piece of furniture is as much as a cultural text as a pop record. All commodities are consumed as much for their meanings, identities, and pleasures as they are for their material function. (Fiske, 1989, p. 4)

Commodities take on meaning both as goods sold for a profit by a company and as goods purchased, used, and interpreted by consumers. Commodities have meanings, identities and pleasures for consumers. Take, for example, the commodity of hair coloring. Advertising for hair coloring emphasizes the pleasures of beauty gained from changing your hair color. Changing your hair color means changing your life for the better, or so the advertising logic goes. This advertising creates certain meanings in our culture that various audiences interpret and act upon. What meaning does hair color have for a man who is worried about getting old and dyes his hair to cover the emerging grey? What identity does hair color confer on a 19-year old woman that is part of a punk subculture and dyes her hair green? What pleasures (desirability, satisfactions) does hair color have for each of these individuals? How do these pleasures and identities align with advertising logic, or in other cases resist that advertising logic entirely?

When we study popular culture, therefore, we are looking at a wide range of productions, practices and texts. We are engaged in the world of commodities to analyze the meanings these commodities have for those who produce them, and those who consume them. Now, let's turn to youth as consumers and producers of culture and commodities.

Youth as consumers

Americans have a starkly negative view of popular culture, and blame television more than any other single factor for teen-age sex and violence. By a large margin, they favor measures like ratings that would give parents more information about what their children are watching and listening to. But by almost as large a margin, they say they believe that such measures would not actually succeed in preventing children from viewing or hearing material that is inappropriate. (Kolbert, 1995, p. 21)

American youth are tremendous consumers of popular culture, and this fact alarms many adults in our society. Of special concern among many parents these days are the cultural commodities of the entertainment industry: movies, television, videos, video games, and music recordings. The producers of other types of "lifestyle" commodities may be guilty of directly targeting youth in their advertising, as in the case of cigarettes. Miller writes that Dave Goerlitz, a former cigarette model, testified in Congress in 1988 that:

RJR Nabisco's marketing types routinely cruised the shopping malls in search of teens, showing them photos of himself and other 'Winston men' and asking kids to pick the coolest shots. 'The other models and I were depicted as young and daring buddies, [Goerlitz stated,] and that's what young people relate to at 14 or 15 years old. When the tobacco industry tells you that it doesn't want your children to smoke, that's a big lie.' (Miller, 1994, p. 22)

As Miller points out, the commodity is not simply the tobacco product itself, but is the smoker's toughness, posture of defiance, and masculinity that may hold meaning and pleasure for young would-be smokers. Producers of the product want to sell their commodity, but they know that to do so (at a large margin of profit) they must also sell an image or an identity that has meaning for the potential consumer.

Many scholars argue that adolescent consumers are especially vulnerable as "targets" of corporate advertising for a variety of commodities. Young people, trying to find a niche in the world within a fuzzy, liminal state between childhood and adulthood, are vulnerable to the manipulation of marketing lures. "It is this desire to not be out of place in such an ambiguous world that leaves the young vulnerable to emotional and economic exploitation by schools, peers, and, in particular, capitalist enterprises" (Côté & Allahar, 1996, p. 82). As cartoonists Borgman and Scott (1999) identify in the strip below, conferring status as "consumer" seems to confer an important cultural identity in this society.

As we know, and as Borgman and Scott are indicating here, being "chosen" for a credit card is simply being chosen as a consumer who now has the privilege of going into debt at the profit of the credit card company. It confers only a temporary and, in the end, a very dubious kind of social status for the teen. This statement holds true for a wide variety of commodities targeted for the youth market, including the cigarette example previously discussed here. As one critic writes, this state of affairs is in the interests of a few (the producers) and at the expense of the many (consumers), and is a pervasive situation in our society. "Consumer culture contains the search for human well-being within the simulational world of consumption. The promotion of product solutions to social and economic problems has become not only the easy way out, but the only way out" (Andersen, 1995, p. 116).

Other scholars offer another way of looking at what consumption means for teens. In a capitalist society, "buying and ownership not only offer a sense of control, but form the main, if not the only, means of achieving this" (Fiske, 1989, p. 25). An example offered here is the purchase of a VCR. Many households, regardless of income, began purchasing VCRs when they become commercially available in the 1980s. Fiske argues that VCRs gave families control over the scheduling and programming of their own entertainment, since with a VCR they were no longer hostage to what was playing at the local theater or what was on television.

Douglas (1994), writing about growing up as a female adolescent baby boomer in the 1950s, remembers what it was like to be "targeted" as a teen market. Although many of the images and messages sent to girls during that time were damaging in terms of stereotypes and patriarchal ideologies, there was also an element of power being conferred to young girls during this era, as she explains:

We were the first generation of preteen and teenage girls to be so relentlessly isolated as a distinct market segment. Advertisers and their clients wanted to convey a sense of entitlement, and a sense of generational power, because those attitudes on our part meant profits for them. So at the same time that the makers of Pixie Bands, Maybelline eyeliner, Breck shampoo, and Beach Blanket Bingo reinforced our roles as cute, airheaded girls, the mass media produced a teen girl popular culture of songs, movies, TV shows, and magazines that cultivated in us a highly self-conscious sense of importance, difference, and even rebellion. Because young women became critically important economically, as a market, the suspicion began to percolate among them, over time, that they might be important culturally, and then politically, as a generation. Instead of co-opting rebellion, the media actually helped promote it. (Douglas, 1994, p. 14)

Douglas suggests here that a consumer society has both liberating and oppressive elements. For girls of her era (and in our own), there were many liberating images for women being portrayed in popular culture, and these images produced a discourse of feminism and freedom that would last through the rest of the century. On the other hand, in targeting girls, companies used then and now a wide variety of stereotypical, hyper-feminized images of women that simply sought to sell them more diet pills, hair-spray, and beauty cream (not exactly items of liberation for any woman). In doing so, these companies used feminine stereotypes that would enlarge their profits and reinforce the political ideology of women as pretty, delicate, soft, unintellectual, frivolous, and weak. (Image credit: Greenfield, 1997, p. 37).

Youth, as consumers of culture, are consuming both commodities and ideologies. Goods and services are not sold as neutral objects; they are marketed to produce certain meanings and identities for those who buy. These meanings may have particular significance for teens, in a time of their lives in which their identities are in a special state of flux and uncertainty. Consumption may therefore have the contradictory effect of both manipulating teens to purchase unneeded or harmful products and the effect of empowering the teen to construct meanings of agency, control, and self-esteem.

Youth producing culture

When we look at youth subcultures, those marginalized adolescents who resist dominant culture to construct their own resistant cultural spaces and meanings, we see a very interesting phenomenon relating to production and consumption at work. When these youth consume or use certain products, they are using them in such a way as to transform the cultural meanings of the cultural commodities. In Hebdige's classic study of 1970s punk subculture in Great Britain, he comments on this phenomenon:

Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in the punks' ensembles: lavatory [toilet] chains were draped in graceful arcs across chests encased in plastic bin-liners [trash can bags]. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic 'utility' context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip. 'Cheap' trashy fabrics (PVC, plastic, lurex, etc.) in vulgar designs (e.g., mock leopard skin) and 'nasty' colours, long discarded by the quality end of the fashion industry as obsolete kitsch, were salvaged by the punks and turned into garments (fly boy drainpipes, 'common' miniskirts) which offered self-conscious commentaries on the notions of modernity and taste. Conventional ideas of prettiness were jettisoned (Hebdige,1979, p. 107)

Punks transformed every-day objects - safety pins, trash can liners, plastic - into cultural productions that made radical statements about the punk subculture and those who participated in it. The transformation gained by appropriating commodities in such a way as to "erase or subvert their original straight meanings" is called bricolage (Ibid, p. 104). A good example of this, again from Britain's punk subculture, was the act of using fragments of old school uniforms in their outfits. Most British school youth (public or private schools) wear uniforms to school, attire that is conservative and considered "proper." Working-class punks, in a spirit of rebellion and resistance, "symbolically defiled" (Ibid., p. 107) the uniforms by covering the shirts in graffiti, fake blood, or leaving the ties undone; uniform pieces were also juxtaposed against leather, chains, or shocking colors to combine seemingly incompatible realities into a stylistic statement about class and generational rebellion. (Image credit: The Bromley Contingent, from http://www.comnet.ca/~rina/fashion.html)

Many subcultural styles are constructed through activities of symbolic creativity such as bricolage (see "Youth Subcultures"). Using commodities and fragments of dominant culture, subcultural youth often transform the meanings of these commodities for their own cultural meanings. Often these meanings are resistant to mainstream culture, as Manning (1996) points out in his description of how "house music" functions within the rave subculture. "There's a fundamental subversiveness at the very heart of dance music" played in the rave subculture, he argues. Rave, following on the heels of dub reggae and hip hop subcultures, has "reconceived the very notion of 'music.'"

No longer is pop music something produced and - crucially, owned by musicians recording 'original' tracks based on melodic and harmonic principles. Ambient and techno can be made on computers in bedrooms, and are more concerned with texture than melody. House music can be created purely by mixing together other people's records, using sampling technology, (Manning, 1996, p.41-42)

Making new uses of technology, groups such as the Chemical Brothers mix house music using not instruments but computers. Popular cultural practices of rave music and dance, in this case, are often created by and for youth. Rave follows the rich tradition of hip hop in this regard. Working class, urban-dwelling African Americans began this subculture by DJ-ing parties in new ways, making innovative uses of sampling and scratching. The cultural practice of "scratching" a record to make a certain sound was, in effect, a breaking of the rules of how to use record players, but out of this broken rule came a cultural practice that would remain part of the ritualistic domain of the hip hop DJ. "Scratching" is now spreading, as a music-making practice, to other alternative and popular forms of music for youth. The meaning of the scratching sound was transformed, and with it, the meaning of what music can be.

Often, youth subcultures use their cultural productions to resist the meanings and ideologies of the larger, more dominant culture. Consider the example of riot grrrls, a movement that originated in the underground punk and hardcore scenes in Olympia, Washington. Bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, preached "their own brand of feminist revolution," through "envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things," according to one manifesto. (Gottleib and Wald, 1994, p. 262). A member of Riot Grrrl New York City explains that "we support and encourage Grrrls to publish zines, create and show their artwork, start bands in a supportive and non-judgmental atmosphere, and do anything they want to do."(Ibid, p. 263). Riot Grrrls are encouraged to become producers of the musical culture of punk and hardcore music by starting bands of their own, rather than watching from the sidelines as fans of male groups.

Through their own cultural productions, youth can develop a sense of agency; they understand themselves to be capable of having a powerful effect on the public world. Rather than seeing themselves as objects that passively receive a culture of another generation's making, the cultural productions of youth display the power of youth as subjects of their own world. In the process of re-conceiving their cultural world through subcultural expressions and practices, many American youth navigate the difficulties of adolescence in this society.

References

Andersen, R. (1995). Consumer culture and TV programming. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Borgman, J. & Scott, J. (1999, 28 June). Zits. The Cincinnati Enquirer, pp. C8.

Côté, J. E., & Allahar, A. L. (1996). Generation on hold: Coming of age in the late twentieth century. New York: New York University Press.

Douglas, S. J. (1994). Where the girls are: Growing up female with the mass media. New York: Random House.

Fiske, J. (1989). Reading the popular. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.

Gottlieb, J., & Wald, G. (1994). Smells like teen spirit: Riot grrrls, revolution and women in independent rock. In A. Ross & T. Rose (Eds.), Microphone fiends: Youth music and youth culture. New York: Routledge.

Greenfield, L. (1997). Fast Forward: Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of style. London: Methuen.

Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity, and politics between the modern and the postmodern. New York: Routledge.

Kolbert, E. (1995, 20 August). Americans despair of popular culture. New York Times, pp. 21, 23.

Manning, T. (1996, 23 February). Meet the E-culturati. New Statesman and society, 9, 41-43.

Miller, M. C. (1994, March/April). Selling "power" to the powerless. Extra!, 22-23.

O'Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M., & Fiske, J. (1994). Key concepts in communication and cultural studies. (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

For further reading

Doherty, T. (1988). Teenagers & Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.

Hall, S., & Jefferson, T. (1975). Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in Post-war Britain. London: Hutchinson.

Leadbeater, B. J. R., & Ways, N. (Eds.). (1996). Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities. New York: New York University Press.

Assignments

1. "Pop" versus "high" culture

Take two sites that are examples of this dichotomy from the lists below. In a written assignment, provide a short summary of 1) the distinctions made between these two in cultural studies literature, and 2) how you see these distinctions (or not) in the two sites you are comparing. Look for, and describe in your writing, how "culture" is constructed through icons, norms, language, norms and meanings within the two sites.

Pick one of the "high culture" sites:
Boston Museum of Fine Arts < http://www.mfa.org/home.htm>
Plato informational site < http://phd.evansville.edu/plato.htm>
J.S. Bach Home Page < http://www.jsbach.org/>
Web Museum of famous paintings < http://metalab.unc.edu/wm/paint/>

Pick, to compare, one of the "pop culture" sites:
World Wrestling Federation < http://www.wwf.com/splash/>
Barbie < http://www.barbie.com/>
Art Crimes (graffiti site) < http://www.graffiti.org/>
Urban Latino < http://www.urbanlatino.com/home/urbanlatino.html>
Grrowl! (riot grrrl e-zine) < http://www.nrrdgrrl.com/grrowl/index.html>

2. Reading punk

Collect an array of Punk imagery and sound from across the past three decades. (Search the "punk" links to find names of recordings, pictures, etc.) Record your most immediate reactions/ideas/readings on these sounds and images in private. Then, present this photo and sound gallery to several friends who are unacquainted with punk, and record their reactions. Use all this data to construct a reading on the punk imagery you have collected. Submit both the image gallery and the cultural reading paper.

3. Analyzing MTV

Pettigrew (1992) asserts that MTV and other video stations teach an "ethic of self gratification and consumption." Watch some MTV and visit some MTV sites (in our "links" section), and construct a defense of your own opinion on this assertion. Be sure to include concrete examples from your MTV viewing and web-surfing in your commentary.