A few requirements first:
- Applications need to be at least 750 words in length.
- The writing standards detailed in the course syllabus need to be met. If you need help with this, the Writing and Reading Center on campus is there to help.
- You will need to do research from reputable and reliable sources to help support your application. There is a page in the course information module to direct you to research assistance should you need it.
Steps to take:
- Carefully review Chapter 4 in your text. This chapter details in additional analytical tools and approaches we have to reach better, deeper, and more nuanced understanding of popular culture.
- Trace the transmedial adaptation (p. 91) of a particular media property as described in your text. Explain how this text has been adapted for different media platforms and what kinds of changes were made to accommodate the new medium.
- You will need to do research on both the history and the adaptations of the media property you select. You will also need to make concrete references to the various forms and formats for the pop culture property you choose. Be sure that you provide in-text citations and a references page for this research that follows APA or MLA guidelines.
- Submit a Word or PDF document with your referenced discussion of the required prompts, including research on this assignment. Please submit them in a single document. It is okay to submit a numbered list rather than a formal essay if you prefer.
CHAPTER 4 POPULAR CULTURE PIVOT POINTS Putting Your Finger on It The preceding two chapters have outlined different approaches to popular culture. While semiotics will be our starting point—thinking about popular culture as encoding messages to be decoded by consumers of popular culture—Marxist theory, feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and so on, can then be used as lenses bringing into focus particular messages embedded in popular culture. This chapter will be a bit different. My goal here is to introduce five pop culture “pivot points”: authenticity, convergence culture, intertextuality, structure of feeling, and subculture. These five ideas are important concepts in popular culture studies that can further help us refine our approaches as we develop an increasingly large, shared vocabulary. Page 85. Authenticity To start thinking about the importance of authenticity to contemporary popular culture, let me ask you a few questions (you’ll notice this is becoming a trend): • What would you think if you learned that Bruce Springsteen didn’t actually write his own songs? • What would you think if you learned that rappers Ice Cube and Lil Wayne actually came from privileged backgrounds? • What would you think if you learned that your favorite independent coffee shop was actually owned by a large chain? It’s possible—likely, even—that you would feel let down or betrayed in each case, but why? Springsteen, Ice Cube, and Lil Wayne’s songs would still be as good and the coffee would taste the same, right? You’d be let down because contemporary Western culture privileges authenticity, which we can consider as a kind of semiotic code translating to honesty or sincerity of expression when it comes to identity, artistry, and even, bizarrely, to marketing. Page 86. CHAPTER 4 | POPULAR CULTURE Pivot POINTS Where personal expression is concerned; how many times have you been told that what’s most important is to “be yourself” or to “be true to yourself” or to “follow your dream” or something along those lines? This presumably means to act in accordance with your personal beliefs, passions, and preferences—to express your “core” identity, often including gender and sexuality, without regard for what other people expect or will think. This imperative to “be yourself” is very much a part of our twenty-first-century Western zeitgeist—the spirit of the moment in which the imperative to “be yourself” is paramount. This kind of oxymoronic “individualistic culture” prioritizing self-expression and personal goals over the moderation of expression, adherence to social codes and authority, and collective action is one particular cultural formation. resulting from and reinforced by various social forces—notably capitalism, which creates competition among individuals for material and social advancement. Other cultures in different times and places have empha-sized cooperative action and conformity to authority and expectation more fully—even the US has moved back and forth between periods of loosening and tightening of individualistic emphasis, although the overall trend has arguably been toward increased individualism. Although it doesn’t prevail universally, even within Western culture (e.g., certain orthodox religious sects), in the twenty-first century, indi-vidualism is arguably the dominant ethos—an important part of the contemporary structure of feeling—and authenticity is its privileged framework. To be an authentic person, to be “true to yourself” rather than fake, is to act in conformity with one’s personal beliefs and desires, even if, as memorably put by American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in his famous essay “Self-Reliance,” the world will whip you with its displeasure for your nonconformity. his cultural imperative to “be yourself”—to express your authentic personality—is not without its complications and ironies. On the one hand, the insistence that we be ourselves comes at the precise moment that essentialisms of all forms are being questioned. We can reasonably ask: do we have one core self or many? Is our weekend self our “true self” and our work-a-day self-fake? Or are these equally valid and true, Page 87, forms of our self? On the other hand, capitalism has been remarkably adept at coopting the imperative to self-expression by selling us our non-conformity (as a kind of compromise equilibrium). You can customize everything from your truck to your burger to your laptop skin, but you are still buying them from corporations. And then there’s the overarching oxymoron of individualistic culture: if everyone is a non-conformist, is anyone nonconforming? YOUR TURN: What makes a person authentic in your eyes? To what extent and why do you value this? An emphasis on authenticity has been particularly important to evaluating contemporary popular music—the perception of the “real-ness” of a music artist or band is inevitably central to their appeal to audiences, although what that realness consists of varies depending on genre. As P. David Marshall discusses in Celebrity and Power, ideas of authenticity in relation to musical performance and performers have shifted across time—notably in the twentieth century in response to new technologies—but have focused on the performer with an increasing emphasis on the sincere expression of emotion (155). Like gender codes discussed in the previous chapter, authenticity can be considered as a kind of semiotic code: a “language” spoken by artists and bands and understood by audiences. Authenticity in post-1960s rock and roll has arguably pivoted around two tightly coupled elements: sincerity of expression on the one hand, and rule-breaking on the other. To avoid being inauthentic—or “fake”—and to be regarded as “serious” artists, rock and roll artists and bands in the twenty-first century need to write their own songs, play their own instruments, and “follow their vision”—that is, to create music without regard for the anticipated response from critics and audiences (which leads to an artist or band being construed as a “sell-out”). The assumption is that the music, created by the artist or band, is a reflection of their genius and that the song lyrics offer a sincere snapshot of the artist or band’s history and/or “feelings”—the lyrics “make a statement” about “who, the artist is” or what they stand for. Marshall speaks of this in terms of “Commitment,” can mean either emotional sincerity or a form of solidarity with an audience, or both (164). This is why fans feel duped if it turns out that the music or lyrics weren’t written by the band or if the performer’s beliefs or background are at odds with lyrical content. And, while it is often crucial that rock and roll artists or bands write their own songs and lyrics, and play their own instruments, sincerity of expression is more important than technical precision or virtuosity. What punk rock of the 1970s proved is that three chords and an attitude, rather than a trained voice and years of practice on an instrument, are all that’s required for rock and roll stardom. Indeed, lack of polish is itself a marker—part of the code—of authenticity in rock and roll. Anything too polished or overproduced has the potential to come across as fake. Closely connected to sincerity of expression in the code of rock and roll authenticity is rule-breaking—which I consider related to what Marshall refers to as “difference” (163–64). Ironically, we expect rock and roll celebrities to flout conventional rules of decorum: the whole. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll” mantra. This can be in terms of outrageous personal behavior and onstage antics. We not only license but expect rock and roll bands and performers to violate the social rules and expectations that typically govern the rest of us—this is part of the reason rock and roll stardom is particularly appealing, even within an ostensibly individualistic culture. Rule breaking, however, also applies to musical composition. Authentic bands and artists differentiate themselves from other similar bands and artists (and here we can think about the paradigm rock and roll bands) through innovative approaches to their genre. (Interestingly, there is a kind of formula at play here in which a band’s first two albums develop a particular sound or approach, the third album is then a departure, and the fourth a return to form.) Convergence Culture Coined by central media studies scholar Henry Jenkins, convergence culture refers to the way twenty-first-century technologies combine tasks and activities that previously were distributed among discrete systems, as well as to the ways consumers of media content interact with that content and each other. In his 2006 book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Jenkins defines “convergence” as “the flow of content across multiple platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (2). “Every important story gets told,” continues Jenkins, “every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms” (Convergence Culture 3). Convergence culture, on the one hand, can refer to transmedia. adaptation. Meaning “across different media,” transmedia adaptation describes the process of adapting content presented in one medium into others. For example, Dracula was originally introduced as a character in the novel of the same name by Bram Stoker in 1897. Stoker’s narrative, however, has subsequently been adapted for stage, film, radio, television, comics, video, video games, and so on, and the character Dracula has been marketed in an endless variety of consumer products ranging from mugs to masks to cereal. Harry Potter, similarly, began life in a series of books by J.K. Rowling and has subsequently been adapted across media into films, consumer products, and even a theme park. Jenkins connects this idea of transmedia to what he calls participatory culture. Instead of an older model of media consumption in which media producers and consumers occupied separate spheres, in participatory culture, the process is much more interactive with private individuals creating and publishing their own media content and then circulating it via various means, most notably social media platforms. As will be discussed in chapter 10 of this book, fandom is an important example of participatory culture and is something Jenkins associates with collective intelligence—the ways in which consumers of media,Page 91, interact with one another discussing the media they’ve consumed and collectively arriving at shared understandings. “Collective intelligence,” writes Jenkins, “refers to [the] ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members” (Convergence Culture 27) to shape understandings of a media property. Convergence culture, on the other hand, is also used by Jenkins to refer to technological shifts that have allowed different technological systems to share the same tasks. Phones used to be solely for the purpose of making telephone calls. Now, however, your phone can be used to text, play games, watch movies, surf the web, and so on. Amazon.com used to be a site for buying books; now, not only can you purchase just about anything, but you can also stream media content. Computers used to be for data processing; now, they can do everything your phone can. “Convergence,” explains Jenkins, “involves both a change in the way media is produced and a change in the way media is consumed” (Convergence Culture 16). Converging Platforms YOUR TURN: In what ways have you been a producer of media content? And in what ways have you experienced or benefited from the “collective intelligence” of participatory culture? Page 92. Intertextuality The animated television show Family Guy is notable for its “cutaway gags”—moments when the program shifts away from the story being told to a short, usually unrelated scene, and then back again. For example, in the fourth episode of the first season, main character Peter Griffin’s explanation to his wife about why he can’t help with housework involves a short cutaway to him having disappeared into the land of Narnia through the dryer (such as the episode shown below, from the fifteenth season, in which Stewie and Brian play Sherlock Holmes and Watson) Family Guy has literally hundreds of such sequences that briefly refer to celebrities, politicians, other television programs, movies, and so on, all of which are examples of intertextuality—moments when one text (in this case, Family Guy, see Fig 4.1) makes a connection with another. Fig. 4.1 Family Guy At its most basic, intertextuality refers to the ways in which the meaning of one text is shaped by its connections with another: “inter” as in “between” texts. Of course, as discussed in chapter 2, this is how meaning is produced in general. The meaning of a given sign depends on its paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships to other signs, as well as the connotations overlaid on the sign by individual users. Put differently, when we think of a sign as a kind of text, its meaning will be shaped by its differences from other similar signs that could be substituted, its position in relation to other signs, and the associations we bring to bear on the sign, some of which may be widely shared, others of which may be idiosyncratic. A Rottweiler is a black and tan dog breed that is not a Doberman or a dachshund. A Rottweiler will signify differently playing happily in a dog park or barking on the end of a chain guarding an impound lot. And a Rottweiler will certainly be regarded differently by someone who grew up with them as pets and by someone who was once bit by one while jogging! All meaning production, therefore, depends on an element of inter-textuality, as the meaning of one sign is shaped by its interrelations to others. However, the idea of intertextuality tends more commonly to focus on the ways more sophisticated assemblages of signs—art, music, literature, and media of all kinds—refer to others, as when Family Guy mentions the land of Narnia from C.S. Lewis’s fantasy series or the familiar Cat in the Hat cartoon character from the