Critical Positions on Popular Culture

When looking into Popular Culture you first need to understand Culture itself. It's a particular way of life, a set of ideas. Karl Marx came up with the concept of the Base and Superstructure, he divided society into two, the Base being economic reality, the employer relations that make up society. The Superstructure is the direct result of the Base which would be laws, politics, culture, the way we think of the world is direct result of the Base. All in all, the Base produces the Superstructure however the Superstructure maintains the Base.

Culture is a product of the Base so Popular Culture could be classed as inferior to culture as it is made from the masses for the masses - popularism. Before, it was all shared 'culture' it was and always had been produced by the rich. They would determine and define what culture would be  and this could easily be turned to high and low culture - culture doesn't have politics, anything with an agenda isn't culture - Matthew Arnold 1867. The Frankfurt School however argued that popular culture actually maintained social order and perpetuates it, strengthens. There is an endless stream of popular culture so much so that it promotes a false consciousness, it's very limited. When looking at the  contemporary culture industry there are many things that actively disguises the real world and exploits people below them, such as The X Factor. It teaches us nothing so in the end real world problems never get solved and the radical ideas get dissolved.

The problem with popular culture is that today it is getting mass-produced without a care in the world to try and make it different in any shape or form. The movie industry, mass movies yet only slight alterations between them. The plot becomes predictable and we as viewers have seen it all before - movies recently have been moving towards making adaptations from books which shows in a way that the movie industry are running out of good ideas for plots. The music industry is almost the same, selling exactly the same thing but slightly different. The thing is, it's easy to produce and easy to consume, and endless chain of consumption.