Popular Culture

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Popular Culture

Black popular culture is the individual and collective expression of identity that reflects the social, historical, and cultural politics surrounding the black presence in the Americas. The black body is a site for modern consumer culture industries such as fashion, music, film, and advertising. Within a media-driven contemporary society, blacks use the body, self-adornment, movement, language, and music to construct and locate themselves socially and culturally in society (Gray, 1995). Black cultural production occurs in a myriad of institutions and spaces including churches, urban and rural neighborhoods, colleges and universities, and social and civic organizations. One of the spaces in which black cultural production is exercised is aggrieved communities that exist on the margins of society because of racist social, economic, and legislative policies that are the result of dominant and pervasive ideologies articulated by the ruling class. Colonial and imperialist encounters such as the transatlantic slave trade, Jim Crow, apartheid, and racist and sexist policies imposed by government institutions created deplorable socioeconomic conditions for people of African descent worldwide. Within these highly contested spaces emerges the cultural production of blackness through cultural signifiers, practices, and consciousness.

By recognizing the convergence of history, culture, and power, blacks divert power away from mainstream culture toward a culture in touch with their present conditions tied to common traditions in an effort to build an uncommon and distinctive future. Blacks have used organic and technological means to present their experiences and aspirations to the larger world (Lipsitz, 1990). They merge the oldest African-American oral and folk traditions with new technology in order to create a visual and aural presence in society. The struggle that ensues over power and meaning establishes a space for black cultural expression. An example of this occurrence is black youth style.

The representation of black youth styles, expressed through the body, language, hair, music, and fashion, occurs in relation to African-American cultural traditions. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy (1994) discusses blackness as a socially situated production that is constantly invented and reinvented from tradition. Black cultural expressive forms are not fixed, essential, or unchanging. Traditions are structured differently, appropriated, modified, and transformed within specific historical, social, and cultural conditions. This is the condition of the "changing same," a condition that must be constantly situated and theorized and not assumed in the manner of either essentialism or radical social construction (Gray, 1995). As is the case with black youth culture, the construction and reorganization of black youth style is imbued with struggles over power and access.

When located within institutionally structured settings like visual media, black popular culture is largely represented as fear and menace by dominant media institutions invested in the circulation of pop cultural iconography and images that are palatable to the ruling class. A broader representation of black cultural production can be found in alternative and independent media spaces and reflect social and historical movements. For example, in the 1970s, the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers (1974–1978) contributed a variety of films that offered critical perspectives on black life and a myriad of representations of black figures and characters. Founders of this movement included Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Ben Caldwell, and Jamaa Fanaka. The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers consisted of African-American and African students studying at the University of California at Los Angeles whose films were the direct result of the cultural expression of the civil rights, Black Power, and black arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In the many media representations of success and achievement, blacks appeared as objects rather than as the subjects of their own construction. Black cultural producers like the members of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers created alternative images that reaffirmed black cultural expression and challenged dominant constructions of blackness found in black popular culture, like those found in blaxploitation films which were at their peak during this time. Black youth cultural production is also a space where blacks create identities and cultural expressions.

Symbols of black youth culture travel to the commercial mainstream through advertising, film, and television. They labor discursively in several directions at the same time. As consumers and producers of media images, black youth, in the manner of organic intellectuals, seem to understand implicitly and negotiate effectively the dual nature of representations. W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness resonates with contemporary blacks because of the need to exist in two worlds that are largely separate and unequal for survival. Black youth culture and style collide with American and European commercial culture (magazines, music videos, television, advertising), transporting them into a "media hyperspace where they are magnified into a spectacle of hyperblackness" (Gray, 1995). Marketing professionals actively shape the meanings of the category of "the black consumer" for the public at large; promote powerful normative models of collective identity that equate social membership with conspicuous consumption; and believe that African Americans use consumption to defy racism and share collective identities most valued in American society. Black cultural production can typify and resist this assumption simultaneously. A contemporary example of this can be found in hip-hop culture.

Hip-hop culture arose out of the malaise of a postwar society destroyed largely by the effects of racist and sexist socioeconomic policies. An example of this is the systematic use of highways and freeways to literally destroy once thriving communities, resulting in the loss of a solid financial base because of white flight. The demarcation of deteriorating tenements as "affordable" housing, colloquially known as the "slums" or "projects," and the introduction and infiltration of crack cocaine into black and brown communities created the socioeconomic conditions out of which hip-hop culture was born in large urban centers. Hip-hop culture was a blend of African-American, West Indian, African, and Latino cultural expressions.

It emerged not only to offer a different sense of blackness but also to alter many of the ways that society understands the function of blackness, especially as it exists in contemporary popular culture (Boyd, 1997, p. xxi). Hiphop culture did not come about in a vacuum. It is reflective of the cultural production of blackness that has occurred continuously in a postwar society and falls squarely into a long history of black popular cultural production.

There are many traditional and contemporary examples of black popular culture, including blues, jazz, reggae, Gandy dancers, rap, turntablism, break dancing, art, fashion, advertising, stepping, sports, cheers, double-dutch, poetry, and literature. However, the unifying principle of black pop cultural production is the coalescence of African peoples in the global struggle for equality and freedom through expression.