Critical Theories of Popular Culture

As usual, Yuka Kinoshita sits behind a small table and joyfully greets her audience, welcoming them back to see her enjoy her daily meal. In this recent video, she has three large size Domino pizzas and milkshakes and is about to consume up to 6700 Cal. Known as oogui bijyo, “gluttonous beauty,” Kinoshita is one of the most well-received Youtubers in the Mukbang community, which features hosts eating enormous amounts of food in a short period of time. The theme of Kinoshita’s channel is centered around her eating vlogs. From the familiar setting of her living room, to the same uplifting background music, to saying “gochisosamadeshita” with her hands clasped every time she finishes the last bit of her food, these elements have become part of the signature components of Kinoshita’s videos and attracted more than 5 million followers to her channel. In all her videos, Kinoshita opens by presenting the food she eats, some sponsored by companies and others sent by her fans, telling her v...

From Aretha Franklin to Rhianna, the industry has been thriving on bops provided by talented black artists. Black music has its roots in “Spirituals” sung by African slaves laboring in plantation fields and were often about suffering. This theme is a continuity in many of the songs created by black artists today because suffering is a present reality for many of their non-white listeners. Today, we see a contradictory story emerge of black suffering in which there is a narrative of hope for a better future and another of hopelessness for the world. This is America by Childish Gambino (2018) expresses hopelessness for the future while APES**T by the Carters (2018) (otherwise known as Beyonce and Jay Z) celebrates hope for black success. Despite the common theme of black suffering and solidarity, these music videos project different messages. Black music artists often feature a nod to their roots and culture through fashion. Childish Gambino and Jay Z both wear gold chains (Glover, 2...

Kim Kardashian West, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Kendall Jenner, and Fergie have all worn them, but cornrows are not just a pop culture fad available to the masses. Hair- braiding tutorials on websites like Cosmopolitan and cornrows’ increased presence on white models and celebrities frame the hairstyle as the “new trend,” while ignoring the historical context and ancestral significance that tie cornrows to the black community. Cornrows started out as a marginalized cultural artifact belonging to black people but have since been brought into the mainstream by wealthy white celebrities, serving as a potent example of cultural appropriation. Cornrows have been worn by black women and men since as early as 3000 B.C., with their roots tracing back to Africa as an indication of one’s tribal affiliation and the region in which they lived. As a result of the Black Power Movement, cornrows became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, as blacks rejected eurocentric beauty standards an...

Tattoos have become increasingly popular among people of all ages in the last few decades. In September 2017, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a study regarding the presence of tattoos in people aged 18 to 29. It said that 38 percent of people in this age group have at least one tattoo. (Newman, 2017) People get tattoos for a host of reasons: self-expression, spiritual motivation, tribute to a loved one, even drunken decisions. As the tattoo industry has progressed, so has a person’s ability to design a personal tattoo that can go anywhere on their body—literally, anywhere. However, it is all too easy to dismiss the class and gender politics from which the practice of tattooing gained popularity, and its former existence as a type of counterculture for those who resisted the status quo. Although tattoos are commonplace today, only after significant political and societal struggles have they been brought from the niche “other” into the mainstream. In America during the ea...

The Netflix documentary, FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, allows the audience to dive into the madness and messiness of the terribly unsuccessful music festival in the Bahamas. What was once argued to be “the biggest event of the decade”, became an utter joke and a massive viral disgrace (Smith, 2019). In this blog post, I will discuss the most important takeaways from this documentary. More specifically, I will highlight the prominent role of influencers, the dangers to instant communication, and the overarching idea of hype. The epic fail of the Fyre Festival can not solely be blamed on Billy McFarland, for this documentary interviews all the key players involved in this fraudulent festival. In the beginning, Fyre became widely known by their incredibly orchestrated promo video. Within the documentary by Smith (2019), one argued that the promo video was more of a party for “the titans of the modeling industry”. The celebrities hired to promote this “private” isla...

The Netflix documentary “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” illustrates the journey of the promised luxury music festival experience, Fyre Festival, which was in reality one big lie. Billy McFarland and his team came up with the idea to throw an over-the-top luxury music festival in the Bahamas that guaranteed a once in a lifetime experience to those who attended, but not just anyone could take part. Ticket prices started at $2,000 and there were VIP package deals that went for more than $12,000, so only those who could afford to shovel over several thousands of dollars could go to what they thought would be the best weekend of their entire lives. The main reason the Fyre Festival got any attention in the first place is because of social media influencers. The team planning the festival decided to hire extremely well-known influencers like Kendall Jenner, Hailey Baldwin, Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski to post the famous orange square with the Fyre Festival logo on their...

The original Hulu documentary, entitled Fyre Fraud (2018), was a clever and insightful movie that tells the backstory of Billy McFarland, a millennial, self-proclaimed tech entrepreneur, who was jailed for fraud after fabricating the “Fyre” music festival that scammed thousands of attendees and wasted millions of investment dollars in 2017. The film begins with the enterprising coming of age story of McFarland, who clearly seemed to grasp from the intricacies of mediatization, explained by Alice Marwick (2015) as social media’s increase in relevance in the framework of society. He built not just one, but two start-up companies using this principle, and basically self-willed their success through feigned internet popularity and media presence. McFarland rose to his theoretical “power” at the start of his professional career by launching a credit card company called Magnises, which had one reckless angel investor, and eventually gained customers because of hype, a concept defined by Dr. ...

Among the many niches of YouTube, the lifestyle and fashion communities saw a rise of content creators that began to curate a new style of aesthetics revolving around the Cooper Black font , colorful or earth toned palettes, and their seemingly imperfect and quirky qualities. Ashley, better known as bestdressed, is one popular Youtuber that flourished in this community. After graduating college in 2.5 years this June, she is now a full-time Youtuber with 2.35 million subscribers as of November 2019. Her channel description reads, “fashion, thrifting, and other misadventures of a 20-something college graduate clinging to her glory days when she won the best dressed senior superlative. all served with a spicy side of dry humor.” The videos on her channel are organized into different categories: thrifting, chatty (more personal videos usually in a Q&A format), thrift flip (altering clothes she thrifted), outfit 101 (provides outfit ideas), vlogs (shows her daily life), room tours and ...

Starting out as an independent comedy Youtube channel, 유정호tv (Yoo Jungho tv) has now become one of a handful of Korean Youtubers to reach one million subscribers. All of its videos are produced, filmed, and edited by a single creator named Jungho Yoo, and as a subscriber myself, I witnessed with my own eyes the channel’s rapid growth in popularity as well as some of the difficulties it went through. Whereas some Youtube channels target a specific subpopulation for viewership and tailor the contents to their interest, this channel has been targeting Korean youths in general as its main audience. Seeing Yoo rise to fame with prank videos and short comedy skits, I initially thought he was one of those typical prank Youtubers that attracted potential subscribers with provocative (and sometimes misleading) titles. Then I came across one of his videos that made me completely change my perception towards him and his channel’s identity. It was a short video titled “Subscribers’ cancer ...

During middle school, my sudden accessibility to hundreds of shows and movies through my new best friend, Netflix, led to a slight obsession with 90s coming of age movies. Through my short period of incessantly watching these movies, I found a pop culture classic featuring Alicia Silverstone that won my heart—Clueless. Up to this day, I can watch the movie and recite bits of the dialogue along with my favorite characters, and even recite the main character’s monologue connecting her father’s 50th birthday party to Haitian refugees in the United States. It wasn’t until a couple of times after I first watched the movie that I found out that there was a connection between the pop culture classic and the classic novel Emma by Jane Austen. Due to my love of the movie, I decided to pick up a copy of the book and noted the similarities with fascination.  The similarities between the key plot of both the movie and the book are astonishing. To summarize, Cher Horowitz is a rich Beve...

If you are a black makeup fanatic and have no idea who Aunty Jackie is.... what are you doing? The beauty guru community on YouTube and the makeup industry has been forever impacted by the presence of black beauty influencer Jackie Aina. She’s down to earth, insanely hilarious, drop dead gorgeous, has flawless makeup application, and has no fear when it comes to calling out the exclusivity and injustice the beauty industry imposes on women of color--especially dark skin women. Her platform centered around representation of women of color (WOC) in all things beauty, holding brands and influencers accountable for their racial/cultural insensitivity, calling out colorism in the industry, and disclosing her favorite products and makeup tips for viewers of darker skin complexion has brought her channel millions of views (approximately 180k+) and a whopping 3.2+ million subscribers --most of whom are young brown and black beauty enthusiasts. Aina has indeed championed the use of inti...

The idea of a popular culture artifacts is one that encompasses a large and broad number of items and concepts. Some examples of these artifacts include movies, shows, advertisements, photographs, consumer goods, and much more. Often times, many of these cultural artifacts that make it to “mainstream culture” tend to come from subcultures and marginalized groups, turning what was once seen as the “other” into the norm. An exemplar artifact that tends to clearly reflect this process is the establishment of cornrows in US culture. Cornrows demonstrate a recurring pattern in society, seeing that many aspects that show up in popular culture tend to come from marginalized subcultures. Cornrows in themselves are not a new development. Evidence of cornrow use within societies has been found as far back as 3,000 B.C in Africa. In her ethnographic book that compiles the experiences of black women and their hair, Ingrid Banks defines cornrows as a hairstyle where, "one’s hair is braided ...

“We gon’ be alright!” The crowd’s unrelenting chants fill the streets around Cleveland State University. Minutes ago, they were attending a Black Lives Matter conference. Now, they were being pepper sprayed by a transit officer as they attempted to block a squad car carrying a 14-year-old Black child from making its way to jail. The July 2015 incident, captured on video , is a striking act of resistance in response to the racially-charged abuses of power committed by U.S. police, its power only accentuated by the rallying cry of the protesters. Just four months earlier, Kendrick Lamar releases his politically-charged magnus opus To Pimp a Butterfly. The album’s themes of Black empowerment and resilience garner widespread attention and acclaim, swiftly entering and cementing its place within pop culture discourse. Among its singles include “King Kunta” and “Alright” , both of which receive music videos in the subsequent months; as of November 2019, each video has over 100 million vie...

The first signs of house music came to light in 1977 when a club called The Warehouse opened in Chicago. There, a primarily black audience could enjoy DJ Frankie Knuckles, a pioneer of the genre, meshing pieces of different records together to form singular mixes, which manifested as an extension of disco. Disco and house are intertwined with church tradition and display quasi-religious elements as the genres originally took form through gospel music; the gospel through which house evolved exemplified a Christian rhetoric of the “Black experience” (Maloney 2018). Disco within itself was created for the marginalized, including those in the black, latinx, and gay communities in an effort to combat the segregation that plagued Chicago throughout the 1980s. Black and white communities were kept separate on an ideological basis; the black community then placed its focus on building its creative identity through the Church. Black homosexuals faced more severe prohibition from expressing thei...

In the late 90s, the US was experiencing both immense technological advancements, with the recent advent of the Internet, and also growing social tension regarding race, gender, and sexuality. The American LGBQT community had just experienced the tragedy of the AIDS crisis in the 80s, which severely altered societal perception of queerness. At the same time, women were in the midst of third-wave feminism, which aimed to pushback on ideals of second-wave feminism through embracing sexuality, femininity, individuality, and attempting intersexuality. However, the Clinton presidency at this time was enacting a series of policies that catalyzed mass-incarceration. The examination of popular culture from this era illuminates how the public internalized or projected these rapidly changing power dynamics. Therefore, I analyzed TLC’s “No Scrubs” (1999) music video in conversation with Britney Spears’ “Oops...I Did It Again” (2000) to explore presentations of sexuality, gender, and race. I found...