Pop Goes the Culture

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Each foreign transformation of American pop can be a small anthropological revelation. In New Delhi, the imitation McDonald's sell muttonburgers, while at Free Time, a Paris chain, the big beef pattie comes on baguette-shaped buns -- le longburger. A 15-year-old Indian schoolgirl had a hit record called Disco Diwane (Disco Junkies). One time, an adaptation of American pop returned to the U.S. and popped over the top: among the Beatles' raw material was the music of the Everly Brothers, Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, but the band's worldwide influence was greater than any of their antecedents. Today American pop-culture imagery is being recycled more obliquely by Italy's Memphis group of furniture designers and by French painters mimicking the East Village fashion for graffiti art.

That kind of tutti-frutti exchange is invigorating. Now, however, pop has started feeding off itself in remarkable new ways. Sometimes the self- references are just lazy or parochial. On situation comedies, characters make jokes about other situation comedies. In Stephen King's fiction, a character in a quandary "thought of a cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head," and a forest "seemed alive with hokey B-movie jungle drums." Then there are the stranger entertainments about entertainment, from the small army of Elvis impersonators to the TV game show Puttin' On the Hits, on which ordinary folks lip-sync pop songs. With Entertainment To-

night, pop becomes almost overpoweringly hermetic -- a nightly TV news show that reports personnel changes on TV game shows as major stories.

The '80s are a pop decade, no question, a reclining era of good tans, big parties, beach reading, girl-group music. The stars are bigger than they have been in a long time, selling more billions of dollars worth of records and movie tickets than ever before. Celebrities are more numerous, but their fame is briefer: the half-life even of putative superstardom can be as short as a year. Fads are announced, exploited and abandoned even before Good Morning America can cover them. Philanthropy has turned into a series of prefab, single-issue Woodstocks (Live Aid, Farm Aid, Hands Across America), and the U.S. has twice elected to the presidency a marvelous pop creature who goads Congress with movie dialogue ("Go ahead; make my day!") and calls military uniforms "Pentagon wardrobe." The original make-my-day movie actor has been elected mayor of a town in California, while character actors from ultra-schlock TV shows (Love Boat, The Dukes of Hazzard) run for the House of Representatives (Iowa, Georgia).