Exploring Media Culture

A Guide

Michael Real

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9781506339726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This unique textbook provides a fresh interpretation of media analysis and cultural studies. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of American popular culture - including Hollywood cinema, presidential elections and the Super Bowl - to demystify complex concepts such as ritual, postmodernism and political economy. This use of popular culture texts, narratives and interpretations will enable readers to understand more about this important yet esoteric debate.

Exploring Media Culture synthesizes a wealth of information and research and presents this in an engaging and accessible format.

1

Culture, Media, and Identity: My Music

A lonely flute rasps quietly on the soundtrack. The rainy street dimly reflects streetlights in the darkness of the alleys. A lone figure shuffles along with collar turned up and hands jammed in pockets. A shot rings out. Feet scurry off. A body lies motionless awaiting the dawn and the coroner. The camera pulls back and up in a slow crane shot. Eerie music fills in the dark scene.

“Media culture” is replete with scenes like the preceding. Metaphorically one can imagine the current state of media culture as a mystery story which opens on an unsolved crime much like the film noir murder described. Who has created this mystery? What is the mystery? Who can solve it?

In this opening chapter we explore the nature of our present predicament by defining central concepts, particularly “culture” and “media.” These fundamental concepts are illustrated by examples drawn from contemporary music, noting how these play a role in our sense of personal identity. The emphasis is on how media and culture interact in reciprocal causality, a “system” perspective rather than the disputed “causal” perspective often applied to media’s relation to culture. System reciprocity provides a context for exploring the development of personal and social identity. Exactly what is it we are exploring when we explore “media culture”?

Experiencing “CULTURE”: Music as Expression and Social Bond

Three teenagers ride in a car with the music blaring. The contemporary rock station plays an oldie. The song is Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy.” As Eddie Vedder’s agonized vocals fill the interior of the car, each teen is flooded with a series of associations from years earlier . . . the person I had a crush on at the time, my friend who talked of suicide, the too-familiar classroom of the music video of “Jeremy,” the political eccentricities of Pearl Jam, associated memories of Kurt Cobain’s self-destructiveness at that time. . . . Each occupant’s mind and emotions are absorbed into different but parallel worlds of association. They talk about some of them. They ride on, radio blaring.

When we listen to our favorite music, whatever our tastes may be, we are engaging in a cultural experience of great resonance. The joy of music may be the simplest and most immediate of pleasures but the experience is also complex and many-layered. For example, accessing music today connects us with the creators of music through a series of very sophisticated, if transparent, technologies of recording, storage, and playback. Our choice of music is influenced by our past musical choices and what our friends like. The music is structured and shaped in historically and socially established cultural forms of melodies, lyrics, and instrumentation, and is delivered through an industrial system that manages, distributes, promotes, and sells. The lyrics may concern love or heartbreak, joy or sadness, the world outside or our feelings inside. The musicians may be superstars known to all or an obscure local group or singer; they have managers, contracts, and technology to work with. We do not think about these elements as we listen, no matter how dependent we are on them. All we know is the way the music seems to reach inside and express what we feel and care about. We are experiencing “the meaning of culture.”

In describing the carload of teens listening to music we have created a crude “ethnography,” a grounded description of actual people experiencing and expressing culture in a particular case. In the spirit of the anthropology of Clifford Geertz and others, we are looking over the shoulders of natives to discover the meaning the text of their culture has for them. As we discover the meanings particular experiences have for the subjects—the carload, a popular concert, a rock party, individual listening, background music, and so on—we begin to discover the outlines of the larger culture that these experiences are drawn from and recreate.

When we explore the cultural experiences of others—and of ourselves—we sense that “culture” may be defined simply, but it is not a simple concept. Culture is the shorthand label for everything that sets us apart as humans. Culture is the way we mentally structure our interactions with other people and our environment. At once so close we can hardly see it and so encompassing that we can scarcely imagine it, culture is the way we collectively express ourselves as human beings. Culture is meaning constantly being created. Like sound, culture is observed as it is emerging and disappearing from existence.

The basic anthropological definition runs something like culture is “the systematic way of construing reality that a people acquires as a consequence of living in a group.” But culture is not vague or abstract; it is our lived experience shared with others. Culture is the peak emotion when music hits us just right and carries us along with power and strength and awareness. Such cultural experiences we have access to “as a consequence of living in a group,” and they relate to our “systematic way of construing reality.”

Cultures Large and Small. The cultural group can be any size, from those teens riding in a car to the entire population of the planet. On a global scale, we can talk of a consumer culture of capitalism and the multinational music industry that markets pop stars and hit songs. On a national scale, there are “God Save the Queen,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and other national anthems, together with less official rock anthems, reggae classics, or sitar solos. On a regional scale, we have the culture of Yorkshire puddings and heath and folk songs or the Beach Boys celebrating California coastal culture. On a local scale, one can point to the club scene of Pearl Jam’s Seattle or the Beatles’ Liverpool replete with favored bands, musical styles, clothing, hair length, and attitude.

As we explore musical culture, we often discover ourselves occupying local expressions of larger trends. The levels of culture interact in complex patterns. Our local pop music may be, for the most part, just one small market within international hype, but at the same time, global cultural trends are often the outgrowth of local cultures. Memphis blues and New Orleans Dixieland jazz were first local, then regional, and finally international musical styles. Pearl Jam came from Seattle and the Beatles from Liverpool, but both groups produced, and themselves became, international cultural products. “Subcultures” may refer to a rural bluegrass style in West Virginia or a punk style among unemployed youth in Glasgow or widely scattered individuals who share a set of values and tastes associated with heavy metal or hip-hop or salsa. Most of us occupy at least one, and usually several, subcultures of music and values. Our musical choices are part of our subculture’s systematic way of construing and expressing our reality. Because of media access to once distant expressions, geography no longer restricts cultural groupings to specific places. Teens listening to music in a car are one rich specific point in a huge array of disparate but somehow inter-connnected cultural expressions.

Each individual today is a unique blend of cultural forces. Culture exists in our head like a Walkman implant, and our heads are filled from many sources, both individually and as groups. The external expression can be seen in cultural artifacts of T-shirts or neckties, paintings or posters, a room in a tenement or suburbia, in art, architecture, clothing, dance, or any other expression of style. Beneath these external expressions, the internal knowledge, values, myths, fears, and ideals define and express the internal consciousness and identity of members of that culture or subculture. Each of us finds and creates meaning in our life in and through culture. The way we understand and feel about our relationship with our family, our friends, our work, our play, our politics, our music, and all the rest occurs in and through the culture we share. The better we understand our culture and culture in general, the better we understand ourselves—and others.

In our preceding example of culture, when Eddie Vedder sings that Jeremy spoke in school today, anyone who knows the music video of that song recalls the horrible image of a preteen carrying his father’s gun to school and killing himself in front of his classmates. The silent, unloved boy “spoke.” Based on a true incident, the song is the sixth cut, 5 minutes and 19 seconds long, on Pearl Jam’s 1991 CD Ten. The song is most powerful and unsettling, close to home for many because the boy, the school, the classmates seem so familiar. What does it say of a culture when such a problematic expression becomes widely dispersed and popular? A media system that allows such a challenging expression, in an MTV forum widely followed by teens and preteens, can be admired for its openness and honesty at the same time as the alienation and cultural disintegration thus portrayed can be deplored. The music video is clear about what is happening but never quite shows it explicitly on screen, restrained perhaps by both a fear of censorship and a concern for role modeling and copycat viewers. Exploring our media culture brings us face-to-face with loaded cultural expressions and tough choices.

Cultural Stability Versus Change. A music video like Jeremy, just as our culture in general, can be both order-maintaining and order-transforming. Those who would exclude such troublesome videos favor order-maintenance; the creators of Jeremy would seem to favor order-transformation. Cultural expressions are a source of both stability and change. The degree to which culture maintains either one is a source of great controversy.

What is the relationship between culture, individuals, and change? S. N. Eisenstadt (1992) describes three distinct ways of characterizing the relationship. One approach, popular in American sociology, is the “structural-functionalist” approach. This approach emphasizes the place of established norms and values as givens to which we conform. This emphasis says in effect: We fit into our culture. Another approach, the “structuralist,” was developed largely in France and among linguists. The structuralist approach reads culture in reference to the programmatic codes and deep structure of human behavior and language: We decipher and apply the binary codes of our culture. A third and somewhat similar approach, that of “symbolic anthropologists,” sees culture as a set of expressive symbols that create a worldview through human action and interaction: We interactively express and create culture. In this last view there is increased room for change because it envisions individuals selecting from a range of options and fabricating new options. Culture is no longer a given map for behavior that the individual or group must accept passively. In general, all three agree on the centrality of culture as a determining human system. If children grow up in a culture where the alienation of the character Jeremy is normative, the culture is in trouble. On the other hand, if children grow up in a culture so restrictive that the music video Jeremy cannot be made or seen, the culture is also in trouble. Whatever its character, individuals exist in and through their culture.

When the cultural order is transformed, the guardians of the established order are frustrated because they cannot prevent cultural change. For example, when Little Richard and Elvis and others first threatened traditional pop music standards with the initial rock and roll invasion, there was a widespread outcry from both classicists who heard it as junk and traditionalists who found it threatening. Punk rock in Britain in the early 1980s negotiated a fascinating mixture of accommodation with the big business distribution system and radically outrageous rejection of establishment values, as David Rowe chronicles in Popular Cultures: Rock Music, Sport, and the Politics of Pleasure (1995). In Rowe’s sophisticated historical and theoretical analysis, small independent music labels and major music distribution companies cooperate and feed off each other as much as they represent opposite alternatives. When we select our personal and group musical preferences, we take an implicit stand on competing interests of taste, control, and power. Of course, we can also listen to “Jeremy” or any music and remain oblivious to any meanings or cultural associations connected to it. But such lack of individual self-consciousness does not mean that the individual’s cultural choices are not in themselves significant and consequential, only that that individual is unfortunately lacking in awareness.

Music is “central to the cultural practices of all societies,” as Garth Jowett notes (Jones, 1992, p. ix), and has both order-maintaining and order-transforming dimensions. Music’s power extends beyond physical pitches and words; it creates an entire aural environment. For example, many young people may not have a clear-cut physical space of their own, but they can at least have a clear-cut aural space in the form of a, usually loud, sound system (Eisenberg, 1987, p. 251). A boombox or home entertainment center can superimpose its own space on the space people live in. Music can overcome the limits of time and space and give “what youth discovers and desires in popular music—freedom and oneself” (Jones, 1992, p. 183). Teens on the road listening to a car stereo are a classic illustration of mid- to late-twentieth century ideals of independence. Yet music’s freedom has enemies. Steve Jones notes that the development of recording technology is “biased toward control” whereas popular music relies on spontaneity, inspiration, and creativity. The conflict is eased however, by multitrack recording which allows musicians, in his words, “to work on their spontaneity” (Jones, 1992, p. 185). To quite different degrees, each of us is open to music that is familiar to us—order-maintaining —and music that is different for us—order-transforming.

Similarly, the commercial structure of the transnational music industry favors stability and uniformity but cannot afford to eliminate variety and change. Large-scale international research indicates how new local versions of punk or rap or reggae or other trends are stimulated by the spread of large musical markets and not merely overwhelmed and eliminated by them (Robinson, Buck, & Cuthbert, 1991).

Exploring musical culture means examining both how we receive culture as a given, by accepting meanings shared by a group, and how we create culture, by expressing anew those meanings. Each new performance by Whitney Houston expresses culture, each replaying of her CD reexpresses culture, and each mangling of it by us in the shower expresses culture as well. We learn the language that is our culture and we speak it. The proportion between what is imposed and what is chosen, however, remains hotly contested, especially by cultural studies, as we see in the following sections. Are the car’s occupants who hear “Jeremy” freely expressing their unique individuality or are they passive pawns in a global media chess game for corporate profit? And how do the vehicles through which we access culture, the media of communication, operate as we enter the third millennium?

Experiencing “MEDIA”: How Music Reaches Us

One of the teens from the car, a young Toronto sporting goods clerk named Hester Prine, hears a new U2 song on the radio. Two days later she catches the same song on MTV. She checks out the Bono and U2 home pages on the World Wide Web, likes what she finds, and decides she wants the CD with this song on it. The next morning Hester sees in the newspaper that the CD is on sale at a local music store. She calls the store for their hours and stops by after work to buy the CD. The store has sold out, but the salesperson checks the computer and refers Hester to their sister store close to Hester’s home. Hester buys the CD and immediately goes home to listen to it and tape it so she can also play it in her car and lend it to her girlfriend.

Eight media were employed by the young woman from Toronto in the preceding process, five mass media—television, radio, a newspaper, a compact disc, and a cassette tape—and three interpersonal media—a telephone, the Internet, and a computer network. And she has most likely not thought twice about any of it. Media, both mass and interpersonal, are deeply embedded in our daily lives today, and they interact with each other abundantly, The net effect for Hester is that she can cruise along in her car totally lost in her favorite music, an intensely personal experience and, yet by traditional definitions, a supposedly nonsocial experience because she is sharing it with no one else, only the electronic ghost of U2.

“Media” are any extensions of the human sensory apparatus, any technologies that enable communication. They mediate interpersonal or mass communication as the go-between. Each of Hester’s means for connecting with U2 is a medium of communication.

Media as Transmission. The nature of “mediating” recalls Harry Lime in The Third Man, a mediator between the hidden underworld and the proper society of his friend Rollo Martins. In Michael Curtiz’s film noir classic, The Third Man (1949), and in Graham Greene’s novelized version of his own screenplay of it (1971), the setting is rubble-strewn, post-World War II Vienna. One famous scene takes place in a large, closed cabin high up inside a giant Ferris wheel. Played charmingly by Orson Welles, Harry Lime is a black marketeer responsible for killing and deforming countless children by selling diluted penicillin. He has been hiding out and getting around through the sewer system underneath Vienna. Speaking for his underground world, Harry attempts to draw his old school chum, Rollo, into his scheme.

“Victims?” he asked. “Don’t be melodramatic, Rollo. Look down there,” he went on, pointing through the window at the people moving like black flies at the base of the Wheel. “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving—for ever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money without he...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Guidebook for Media Study
• 1. Culture, Media, and Identity: My Music
• 2. Ritual Participation: Toward an Ethnography of Fans, Hackers, and Jumpers
• 3. Reception Theory: Sex, Violence, and (Ms.)Interpreting Madonna
• 4. Textual Analysis: Light Against Darkness in Disney and Film Noir
• 5. Production/Hegemony: “And the Winner Is . . . Hollywood!”
• 6. Gender Analysis: Patriarchy, Film Women, and The Piano
• 7. Historical/Ethical Interpretation: Reconstructing the Quiz Show Scandal
• 8. Postmodern Aesthetics: MTV, David Lynch, and the Olympics
• 9. Conclusions: Navajos and “Co-Authoring” Media Culture
• References
• Index
• About the Author