Outstanding Books on Popular Culture (November/December 2004 | Volume: 55, Issue: 6)

Outstanding Books on Popular Culture

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Authors: David Nasaw

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

November/December 2004 | Volume 55, Issue 6

Text Complexity Grade Level

9
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“Popular culture” is not the opposite of or the alternative to something called “high culture.” It is not degraded, debased, simple, or undisciplined. Nor is it defined primarily by its mass appeal or commercial values. It is not the size of the audience that is important, but its diversity. In its productions and performances, popular culture brings together into the public space a variety of social groupings: women and men; adolescents and the aged; ethnics and “natives,” white, black, brown, and yellow; rich, poor, and middling; urban and suburban; the over-educated and the newly literate; the established and the recently arrived.

At its best, popular culture is exuberant, sometimes ecstatic; it overflows its formal boundaries; bends, breaks, and reconfigures genres; is often naughty, seldom “nice,” and usually vulgar (but in the largest sense of those words). It can be fun and frightening, engaging and enlightening, acerbic and celebratory. But it is, above all else, a shared or public culture, with its own particular politics.

Shakespeare and Italian opera in the 19th century, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, the world’s fair midways and Coney Island amusement parks, Elvis and Sinatra, the Simpsons and the Sopranos, Tupac and Destiny’s Child—all represent popular culture in its appeal to audiences defined by their heterogeneity.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America by Lawrence W. Levine (1988; Harvard). The centerpiece of Levine’s book is his discussion of how performances of Shakespeare were, in the course of the 19th century, integrated into American popular culture in such a way as to become indistinguishable from it. Only later in the century was Shakespeare transformed, for social reasons, into a “sacred author who had to be protected from ignorant audiences.” Performances of Shakespeare, Levine shows us, were not the only cultural products that were “sacralized” and removed from the broader public as urban elites established new cultural hierarchies in the late 19th century. Italian opera, symphonic music, painting, and sculpture were similarly walled off from the larger public as the exclusive property of upperclass audiences.

Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century by John F. Kasson (1978; Farrar, Straus and Giroux). There is no popular-culture subject more thoroughly fascinating and richly documented than the amusement park. John Kasson’s Amusing the Million remains a classic of social history. It conveys the excitement the visitor must have experienced on entering this magic peninsula, just off the Brooklyn mainland, and the anxiety engendered in cultural critics who refused to understand what Coney Island was all about. The photographs are as evocative and revealing as the text.

The Kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements by Woody Register (2001; Oxford). Register follows the career of Fred Thompson, an unrecognized giant among early-20th-century showmen as he moved from the Columbian Exposition in Chicago to the midway of the Pan-American International Exposition at Buffalo, then