Pop Goes the Culture

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But most important, American pop strikes receptive non-Americans as relaxed and slaphappily loose, even liberating. For Europeans, the cascade of pop arrived in the late 1940s and '50s along with reconstruction; it was as if the Marshall Plan came with its own USO for civilians. "Remember," says Furio Colombo, the Italian president of Fiat's American division, "we were liberated in 1945 by the American troops. That is what American pop culture represents to Europe--freedom, even when it's just a fashion."

Over there, the hierarchies of entertainment still closely corresponded to the more rigid hierarchies of social station. Caught between postwar exhaustion and a tradition of hard-line cultural formalism, young Europeans were a cinch to be enthralled by the out-front vitality of Elvis Presley and James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Mary Martin. "The musicals of the '40s and '50s," recalls Andrew Lloyd Webber, the British composer of Evita and Cats, "came out at a time when your national spirit was able to afford a great deal more than what we in Britain could. You had greater optimism." Fizzy pop culture, American style, seemed easygoing but a little wild too. Even these days, says Bonn's Christian Hoffmann, who has organized a club of Americaphiles, "here in Germany, Kultur is either folk songs sung around the campfire or Bach."

In developing countries where the American invasion has become full-scale only during the past 20 years, its messages are starker. An artifact of American pop is more vivid and more freighted with meaning in Tunis or Bogota than in Berlin or Ottawa. The explanation for pop's seductiveness seems less complicated in Senegal or Bangladesh: America is equated with prosperity and modernism, and pop connotes America. A Tina Turner song playing on the transistor can mitigate (even as it fosters) a Third Worlder's sense of backwater isolation. Charles Kasinga, the executive at McCann Erickson (Kenya) Ltd. in charge of the Coke account, practices applied semiotics. "There is a perceived way of life embedded in each bottle of Coke," Kasinga says. "Coke is modern, with it." Repp Kananga, a young Kenyan, wears his PHILADELPHIA T shirt self-consciously. "It looks like I'm kind of related to this States business," Kananga explained at a Nairobi outdoor cafe last month, "and I want to advertise it."

To people in traditional societies, TV depictions of U.S. family life can be astonishing. The irreverent interplay between Heathcliff Huxtable and his children on The Cosby Show is unthinkable and exciting to young Singaporeans, for instance. Fatalism about entrenched social arrangements is challenged by pop's anything-goes quality. In Africa and Latin America, black American pop stars bring with them an implicit hopefulness; Thriller is thrilling partly as a totem of black achievement. Hollywood does not promote revolution but rather a flashy kind of Yankee individualism--spontaneous, self-reliant and acquisitive. "American film exports the American dream," says Charlton Heston, "which is achievable, not a fantasy. What film has done to the developing world is to change its sense of possibility." Yet a car and a comfy suburban split-level are not reasonably achievable by a Pakistani farmer; thus pop's glossy portrayals of the good life can raise cruelly false hopes.