Pop Goes the Culture

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Almost immediately, however, the intellectuals' appreciation of some pop began to lose its prickly ironic edge. Robert Venturi, the father of architectural postmodernism, was not joking in Learning From Las Vegas (1972), his analysis-cum-celebration of neon, billboards and America's plebeian pop architecture. Soon the creators of kitsch were sophisticated enough to make fun of themselves even as they were creating new kitsch. The producers of TV's Batman (1966-68) played up the primary-color silliness for camp effect. "Charlie's Angels was great camp," says the show's co-producer, Aaron Spelling, "and the audience accepted it as such." Today, after a generation of taken-for-granted irony, it is often hard to know what is smirky and what is serious. Smart yuppies and new wavers say they are fans of The Jetsons and The Joe Franklin Show and the Jerry Lewis telethon. And they mean it. Sort of.

Critic Greil Marcus finds himself defending even dumb pop. "If a Swedish director wanted to make a Rambo," says Marcus, "it wouldn't be very convincing. Only Americans are arrogant, vulgar and moronic enough to make a fantasy like that credible. But I'll put our vulgar moronism versus their refined elitism any day. I'm not saying Chuck Berry is better than Flaubert. But I also don't want to live in a world where there's only one or the other."

Those refined elitists, the Europeans, happen to like our vulgar moronism. One recent week in Britain, five of the top ten singles were by black Americans. Last year two-fifths of French movie box-office receipts went to U.S. films. A catalog detailing such worldwide U.S. hegemony is a source of pride and some embarrassment. Most of the 47 radio stations in Lima, Peru, play mainly American pop music. In Nairobi last week, ten of the 16 movies playing were American, and in a record store at the Sarit Centre shopping mall, a poster of Joe Piscopo, of all people, is on the wall -- not far from the ubiquitous Sly Stallone. The Rambo prototype, First Blood, was a big hit last year in Peking. The A-Team has been the most popular series in Argentina for three years running, beaten only by the Oscar telecast, always the highest-rated show.

Big Boy, the familiar giant plastic waiter, stands in front of his restaurant in Jakarta. Pizza Hut is in Buenos Aires. And foreigners have it our way at nearly 2,000 McDonald's (pace Dwight). Stopping for a Big Mac in Singapore, says a young customer, is "like walking into a bit of America." Last October in Kenya's rugged Rift Valley at the foot of a remote volcano, nomadic Maasai gathered for a rare tribal ceremony. Young warriors' heads were shaved. An ox was ritually slaughtered. And at the edge of the encampment, a concessionaire sold Coke by the bottle.

Everyone everywhere can drink Coke (almost $3 billion in foreign sales) and wear Levi's ($600 million) and watch Little House on the Prairie (broadcast in 110 countries). The lingua franca dispersion of English is both a cause and an effect of pop's global reach, but American pop commodities are also successful abroad because they work. Blue jeans are well designed and rugged. Most Hollywood filmmaking is technically impeccable. "American TV is extraordinarily beguiling to the Poles," says Sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb, who lived in Warsaw for 18 months, "for the technical quality alone."