Critical Theories of Popular Culture

90s fashion is back and Gen Z is doing it better (sorry Millennials). Wide legged jeans, bright neon colors, and kitschy patterns are cool again, but it’s not just limited to the West. Korean fashion, specifically, the K-pop industry has been swept by a storm called “highteen.” Highteen is a portmanteau, made up of the words “high school” and “teenager.” The aesthetic is supposed to evoke feelings of youth, freedom, and nostalgia. Notably, highteen fashion draws its inspiration from 90s American high school culture. Or at least, popular portrayals of American high school culture. That’s right, it’s not about low-waisted jeans and blue eyeshadow: it’s about the Regina Georges and Cher Horowitzs of the 90s and early 2000s. The preppy blazer and skirt, largely inspired by Chanel at that time, has become ubiquitous in K-pop in recent years.               Arguably, Jennie from Blackpink popularized this style. She, and the rest of Blackpink, sport thick hea...

Takashi Murakami has become a household name. He’s one of today’s biggest contemporary artists and has found success in high art by incorporating what has long been considered low culture, maintaining a balance of intellectual complexity in his works with visuals pulling from otaku culture, a culture of passion for anime and manga. He succeeds most in popular culture in providing accessibility to these low forms of culture and to his own work among mass markets. One of his most successful pieces in these realms is the album cover he created for Kanye West’s Graduation, which explores themes of student life and life after fame. The content of the album cover itself plays off the dreaminess and idealization within these themes. The vivid colors and animated composition inspired by anime and manga draw us in by evoking our youthful optimism and shared experience of transitional period chaos. Murakami began his art career as a traditionalist, working in Nihonga, a painting style following ...

When I think of modern music videos today, my mind automatically goes to Olivia Rodrigo. At just 18 years old, Olivia gives us a glimpse into a new era of music video aesthetics, one that exhibits newer features of popular Gen z culture simultaneously paired with references to past objects of popular culture. The two music videos I have chosen to discuss are my personal favorites: “good for u” and “brutal”. Let’s start with a dissection of “good for u”. The music video opens with a montage of close ups of Olivia’s face as she applies makeup with several loud and interruptive camera shots of fire woven in, a kind of foreshadowing of something one will understand only at the video’s close. As the music begins, Olivia sits prim and proper, dressed in white and wearing a collared shirt. She maintains a calm appearance highly contrasting the lyrics of the song she is singing. As the video progresses and we begin to enjoy Olivia’s plan of revenge unfold, Olivia’s calm nature begins to slowly...

If you’ve been paying attention, then you’d know marijuana has gone mainstream. As the industry for cannabis continues to expand, so do the methods for consuming it. When there’s weed, there’s a way. You can smoke it, vaporize it, eat it, and even rub it on your skin. With these seemingly endless possibilities, the benefits range just as far. Other than the obvious prospect of getting high, marijuana presents various health advantages that have proven to be effective in medical treatment. But when did humans start using weed? The truth is, cultural integration of cannabis has persisted far and wide for many centuries. It was only fairly recently, however, that medical and or recreational usage were legalized in certain states, gaining visibility in the popular media. For someone just finding out about the drug, it may come as a surprise that it stands as a symbol for racial oppression in the United States. Even the term ‘marijuana’ originates from anti-immigrant sentiments by tying the...

With over 836,000 subscribers and over 105 million views across her channel, Jenny Nicholson has gained a reputation as a top video essayist on YouTube. Nicholson has been creating content on YouTube for over five years, mainly focusing on sci-fi and fantasy franchises such as Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and similar “nerdy” media. She also occasionally posts film reviews, script doctor videos, and content about 90s media. Praised for their charisma and charming humor, Nicholson’s videos often take beloved pieces of media and critically analyze them. What I believe to be her flagship video is “The Last Bronycon: a fandom autopsy,” a 71-minute video detailing the history of the Brony fandom and the events leading up to the last Bronycon, a convention for My Little Pony fans. For additional context, the word “Brony” is a contraction of the words “bro” and “pony,” a tongue-in-cheek name for the adult male fans of the show. I would also like to add a small disclaimer that I am ...

Lining the red walls of Target’s exterior at the crack of dawn, waiting for a designer collaboration launch, is quite the shift from strutting the red carpets of major high culture events in that designer’s pieces at dusk. Christopher John Rogers’ haute couture follows the long-standing high culture tradition of the avant-garde in fashion and the fine arts. But that exclusive, elite culture of couture has been translated into the popular culture realm through collaboration with one of the most recognizable brands embedded in American capitalism: Target. Through mediation by the culture industry, these once high culture artifacts of class and wealth have become commodified and reproduced for the masses, fashion for all rather than the few. The everyday fashion lover, the woman who shops at her local mall to clutter her closet with the latest styles of the fast fashion industry, can now gain access to the likes of fashion’s most coveted garments, to the voluminous silhouettes, wild p...

When you think of India you might think of 18th century Rajasthani forts, red Mughlai sandstone pillars with flourishes of gold and marble palaces boasting of ancestral wealth. Consequently, your mind might take you to a far less glamorous movie screen. Here you might see poverty ridden slums lined against speckles and glints of seemingly sparklier urban networks. Bleak grey polluted skies hanging menacingly over beggars on the street, heavy clouds prepared to erase tobacco stains on bus walls. It’s interesting how you might form these two divergent images, or as Hall (1994) would say, regimes of representation of India in your head. The first would be influenced by the tourism industry’s cash cow- the Taj Mahal, and the second would be drawn from critically acclaimed movies like, ‘Slumdog Millionaire.’ These limiting images reflect a polarity in viewing India which “swallow[s] up all distinctions in [its] rather rigid two part structure” (Hall, 1994, p.235). You would imagine that Ind...

Shein. Zara. Fashion Nova. Pretty Little Thing. Most young people have bought from, or at least heard of, these fast fashion giants. At first glance, these brands seem great - who wouldn't want cheap clothes that are also fashionable and current? But when you take a closer look at these designs, you may find that they cause more harm than you think - trends and sometimes specific designs are frequently taken from low-income communities and/or small designers (mainly BIPOC). This is nothing new… Let’s take a step back and talk about fashion trends. When something is “trendy,” this means it is fashionable and current (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Ever thought about how things become trendy? Who decides what’s cool before it’s cool? As you can imagine, social media and influencers have something to do with this. But before there were Instagram influencers, there were coolhunters - people whose job it was to figure out what was going to be cool before it became cool, by talking to young p...

The Lion King is a beloved children’s film that narrates the story of Simba in his quest of becoming king. The first version was released in 1994 and the second version was released in 2019. The Lion King (1994) raised concerns when the movie was perceived by the nation as a “Black movie” with an all-White cast, suggesting that the roles were Whitewashed. However, with the release of the second version of The Lion King (2019), this issue was believed to be “fixed” because of their predominantly Black cast. Though The Lion King (2019) was seen as a corrective to The Lion King (1994), many aspects of the film and the politics surrounding it exhibit how The Lion King (2019) was only performative and plays into respectability politics. The original Lion King (1994) was an enormous success in the box office and one of Disney’s biggest hits, earning roughly 1.084 billion USD. However, when looking deeper into the film and its societal repercussions, we notice that it was originally intended ...

In 2016, Hamilton blew up as the Broadway smash hit that everyone needed to see. There was even a sense of prestige that went along with saying that you had experienced the original cast in person, which included the musical’s writer and creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. While the songs from the musical certainly circulated, you were simply not a true fan of Hamilton unless you had seen the musical in person. Yet, seeing this musical was not accessible to all: after Lin Manuel Miranda announced he would be leaving the cast, the price of the cheapest seats rose to a median of $1000 in order to see him perform (Bunt, 2016). In his discussion that distinguishes the difference between objects of high or popular culture, John Storey states that “being difficult ensures its exclusive status as high culture” (Storey, 2009, p. 7). In the case of Hamilton, seeing the musical live, in its original form, was extraordinarily “difficult” due to prices, and therefore exclusionary: a clear form of high cu...

My connection to a total of eight films (and counting) regarding a single superhero began as a Christmas gift in 2005. The Christmas of 2005 was when I received my first superhero action figure, Spider-Man. Since then, I have managed to watch all eight Spider-Man films. However, it is important to note that there are not eight Spider-Man films that revolve around the same cinematic universe. The Spider-Man films have been managed to be rebooted twice, each time with a different actor, a different set of villains, and different storylines. While there are different arguments as to why the original Spider-Man series was rebooted and as to why the Amazing Spider-Man series was also rebooted; the films this paper focuses on are the original Spider-Man with Tobey Maguire and the reboot, The Amazing Spider-man, with Andrew Garfield. Regarding the original Spider-man and The Amazing Spider-man, both films manage to have differences and similarities in their plot, but it is the acting, the plo...

Gua sha: yet another niche that has surged into the mainstream, infiltrating millennials’ and Gen Z’s social media feeds. What was merely an ancient healing procedure in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is now a superficial beauty trend consumed by the masses. According to John Storey (2006), popular culture can be characterized as “culture which originates from ‘the people’” that is “authentic”, “folk culture”, just like gua sha. Other definitions focus on the concept of mass consumption and commercialization, or the struggle between the resistance of subordinate groups in society and the forces of incorporation working in favour of dominant societal groups (Storey, 2006). Gua sha ticks all of these defining boxes. There is a common misconception that gua sha is a new, quirky phenomenon made to sooth and improve the appearance of your face; however this false impression utterly disregards the cultural, medicinal and historical reality of gua sha. So, what really is gua sha and how d...