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Loving USA Culture
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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You're ignoring a lot of the cool stuff that America has put out:
The best thing about America is the fusion of different cultures. It started as a refuse for the oppressed, and its culture reflects that. Unfortunately, it has itself become an oppressor in many ways, but that shouldn't detract from its unique, blended culture.
Absolutely. But as you get closer to the heart of American mass media and corporate commercialism, I tend to see a flattening and homogenizing of those cultures until it comes out as a bland inoffensive gruel. American music is a great example of this phenomenon. The really gripping and transformative musical movements start on the periphery, often in migrant or other minority communities, and are treated with a range of indifference to outright hostility by the current central figures in the industry and in society as a whole.
The stark unabashed hatred of rap music, during the 80s and 90s comes to mind. Or the Boomer cultural response to GenX/Millennial grunge and metal. In more modern music, you see a strong influence among gender queer and Middle Eastern / East Asian artists, which has provoked a string of vitriolic social and political responses (Don't Say Gay laws, mosque burnings, social media censorship of East Asian media, etc).
The fusion happens regardless, and eventually this stuff is normalized and digested by the central cultural institutions. Pop music transforms the more queer and colorful presentations of culture into something for rich white kids. Hong Kong and Bollywood hits get rewritten as mediocre midwestern knock-offs. Transgressive Rap and Heavy Metal and Punk music become anthems for the US military and patriotic pro-sports franchises and even ultra-orthodox political campaigns. Revolutionary ideas in comic books and pulp fiction get transmuted into mass marketed white nationalism and reactionary conservatism.
The media is diluted, thinned, and flattened until it is inoffensive and trite. That's the end result of mainstream American incorporation of peripheral arts. Its the Chicken McNugget of culture. Ground up, overly processed, and stripped of flavor so as to be safe to distribute to the widest possible audience.
That's true with everything. Do you think France always had highly regarded cuisine? No, they hired chefs from all around to come to France, and through that they developed a unique food culture. That's the same general process for pretty much every important piece of culture. Someone creates something great, then the masses adopt it and mix it with existing things and the fusion becomes a part of the culture.
Look at the cowboy hat. In the 1800s, people moved out west to make a life for themselves, and their clothing styles and whatnot were fused with existing people in the area (e.g. the 10 gallon hat largely came from similar hats in Mexico at the time). It was derived from prior art, but it turned into something uniquely American, and is now a symbol for a certain part of the US.
I disagree. The US has a very unique culture, and that culture is constantly evolving. The same happens in other regions as well. For example, Europeans aren't still fighting wars over which country has the best classical composers (well, at least not the majority), they've largely moved on to newer genres that have evolved from older genres (e.g. I think Eurobeat derivatives are still popular?).
The underpinnings of American culture are still present in the current iteration of things: individual freedoms and exceptionalism. Look at modern rap, country, and pop, the songs are largely about breaking free of constraints and asserting your identity. Sometimes that comes from the queer end of the spectrum, and sometimes it's about flashing money or cars in music videos, but it all has that distinctly American feel. If you look at K Pop videos, it's all about tight choreography and fashion, which reflect the values in Korea. In Indian music from what I can tell, it's all about the community, so large groups of dancers and traditional clothing, and that reflects value in India.
Culture evolves and is constantly adapted and changed, but the core identity is usually still apparent.
And yeah, pop culture tends to get diluted, which is why younger generations tend to push the envelope to "spice up" the bland. mass market media, which then get absorbed and becomes the current mass market media as that generation ages, and the cycle repeats.
A great example of the degradation of culture through Americanization. The modern bright-white cardboard stiff western hat is a facsimile of a facsimile mass produced so a bunch of oil tycoons could play-act as working class cattle rustlers with the oodles of money they harvested from the native population.
When you watch a crowd of old white businessmen in cowboy hats talk about how we need to round up all those illegal border dwellers and send them back where they came from, you're getting an American aesthetic on a very classically European attitude towards native people.
The pastiche changes, but the underlying white nationalist nature of the culture endures. What you're witnessing isn't evolution so much as digestion. Foreign bodies picked clean of the meaty bits, broken down into their baser elements, and reincorporated into something the body finds palatable.
The modern Pop Music scene - where it sources material, how it packages and distributes the media, and who ultimately benefits from the windfall of popularity - hasn't meaningfully changed in nearly a century. There's a movie - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom - that does an excellent job of illustrating this phenomenon. The harvesting of talent from disadvantaged communities, the flattening and homogenizing of the content, and the subsequent profiteering by corporate magnets that have only grown fatter and more burdensome on the industry to this day.
You get fed the same recirculated slop decade after decade via a narrow channel of hyper-sensationalized advertising. You're going to listen to Dolly Pardon at the Super Bowl until she's too old to walk, and by god you're going to like it. You're going to watch the Amy Winehouse biopic thirteen years after the industry chewed her up and spat her out and then you're going to buy tickets to the next Britney Spears world tour right after that.
The wheel can't spin forever. Eventually this thing America has built is going to break. But until it does, the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas special will be airing in the same CBS timeslot its occupied since 1964.
The meaning of the hat has shifted over time. They're not acting like cattle ranchers, they're wearing it as a fashion statement about Texas culture.
And yeah, the talk about immigration is pretty disgusting, but that doesn't change the fact that the US is a nation of immigrants, it just means they're pointing the finger at the wrong problem. I hope this type of cultural issue irons itself out, because we should be championing more immigration, not less, and we can have that while maintaining strong borders. I think a lot of the people in that region understand that (i.e. ranchers and farmers rely on immigrant labor to keep costs low), it just needs to filter its way up.
Pfft, that has been consistently rebuffed. Yes, parts of the culture are still stuck in the era that brought us "Birth of a Nation," but that's changing even in some of the most stubborn parts of the country. I currently live in Utah (grew up elsewhere), and my grandmother (who grew up here) was quite racist, but since I've moved here, I've seen a huge shift in culture here. Our demographics are becoming more diverse, and our governor is openly talking about trans causes (though still doing nothing about it), so positive change is absolutely in the works. Some parts of the country seem to be going backwards, but the overall direction of the culture seems to be toward tolerance. As old stubborn people die off, they'll be replaced with more tolerant generations. What we're seeing, IMO, is a last ditch charge to hold on to that past culture.
Aside from the profiteering, I think the rest is a good thing! We're bringing culture from disadvantaged groups to the masses, which increases our overall cultural diversity. We get new role models and more general awareness, and there is usually a mix of "authentic" and "pop" varieties of whatever that new culture is, and the end result is more variety.
Old stuff existing doesn't mean new stuff can't exist too. Old people will want to see performers they're familiar with, and the same goes with young people. It's especially interesting IMO when old and new get mixed, like an old performer performing a new song, or vice versa. That cross-pollination has value, and we're increasingly doing these mashups because they're interesting.
You're probably right. All empires fall and new empires take their place. The question is how long it'll last, and what it'll look like. It seems we're going the direction of other countries getting their share of the spotlight (e.g. K-Pop is getting quite big, Japanese anime is everywhere), and I'm excited to see it. I don't know if this is the beginning of the end, or if it'll spur on another wave of change that'll keep the US on top. Regardless, I think the US has an interesting culture, just like most countries and regions of the world.