“You're an American Rapper, So What Do You Know?” The Political Uses of British and US Popular Culture by First-Time Voters in the UK

Our article draws on research funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (RES-000-22-2700). We are very grateful for this support, and for the contribution made by our research assistant Martin Scott. We also wish to thank the editors of NPS and the anonymous referees of an earlier version of this paper for their constructive and helpful comments.

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of whether and how contemporary forms of popular culture engage young people with the wider world, in particular with respect to the formation of their political identity. Drawing on the result of focus groups and interviews with seventeen-to-eighteen-year-olds, it examines how regional, national and global identities emerge in talk about US and UK popular culture. This empirical focus is set against the background of existing research into the various dimensions of popular culture's relationship to politics. The authors conclude that popular culture can act as a device in the construction of collective, political identities, albeit indirectly, by way of young people's assessment of the source, authenticity and legitimacy of multiple media representations.

Notes

¹ < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = jjXyqcx-mYY&feature = related>.

Our article draws on research funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (RES-000-22-2700). We are very grateful for this support, and for the contribution made by our research assistant Martin Scott. We also wish to thank the editors of NPS and the anonymous referees of an earlier version of this paper for their constructive and helpful comments.

² Tim Blanning, The Triumph of Music: Composers, Musicians and their Audiences, 1700 to the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2008); Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1992); D.L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Culture and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

³ See, for example, Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock'n'Roll (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993).

⁴ Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Mark Mattern, Acting in Concert: Music, Community, and Political Action (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (London: University College London Press, 1998).

⁵ James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

⁶ Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1979); Paul Cantor, Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Douglas Kellner, Media Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).

⁷ Darrell West and John Orman, Celebrity Politics (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003).

⁸ Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).

⁹ David Marquand, The Decline of the Public: The Hollowing Out of Citizenship (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); Danilo Zolo, Democracy and Complexity (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).

¹⁰ Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

¹¹ Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 242.

¹² Pippa Norris, Virtuous Circle: Political Communication in Post-Industrial Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Peter Hall, “Social Capital in Britain,” British Journal of Political Science 29:3 (1999), pp. 417–461.

¹³ John Besley, “The Role of Entertainment Television and its Interaction with Individual Values in Explaining Political Participation,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 11:2 (2006), pp. 41–63; Marc Hooghe, “Watching Television and Civic Engagement,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 7:2 (2002), pp. 84–104.

¹⁴ Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (London: Duckworth, 1998).

¹⁵ John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (London: Prentice Hall, 2000).

¹⁶ Jonathan Tonge and Andrew Mycock, “Citizenship and Political Engagement Among Young People: The Workings and Findings of the Youth Citizenship Commission,” Parliamentary Affairs 63:1 (2010); see also Colin Hay, Why We Hate Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

¹⁷ David Buckingham, The Making of Citizens: Young People, Politics and News (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 34.

¹⁸ David Buckingham, The Making of Citizens: Young People, Politics and News (London: Routledge, 2000), 175.

¹⁹ Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone, and Tim Markham, Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 6–8.

²⁰ Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone, and Tim Markham, Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3.

²¹ Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone, and Tim Markham, Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 6, their emphasis.

²² For a contrary view, see Liesbet van Zoonen, Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 53–68.

²³ For a contrary view, see Liesbet van Zoonen, Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 105–122.

²⁴ Jeffrey P. Jones, Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

²⁵ Putnam, Bowling Alone, pp. 241–243.

²⁶ See Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements, and Mattern, Acting in Concert.

²⁷ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).

²⁸ B. Szerzynski and John Urry, “Visuality, Mobility and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar,” British Journal of Sociology 57:1 (2002), pp. 113–131.

²⁹ Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 240.

³⁰ Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Political Conservatism and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2001).

³¹ See Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements, and Mattern, Acting in Concert; Marc Steinberg, “When Politics Goes Pop: On the Intersection of Popular and Political Culture and the Case of the Serbian Student Protests,” Social Movement Studies 3:1 (2004), pp. 3–29; Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

³² Jones, Entertaining Politics.

³³ Kevin Barnhurst, “Politics in the Fine Meshes: Young Citizens, Power and Media,” Media, Culture & Society 20:2 (1998), p. 216.

³⁴ Ramaswami Harindranath, Perspectives on Global Culture (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006).

³⁵ Paul Nee, “Television and Global Culture: the Role of Television in Globalization,” in Georgette Wang, Anura Goonasekera, and Jan Servaes (eds), The New Communications Landscape: Demystifying Media Globalization (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 194.

³⁶ Des Freedman, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The Politics of Television Exports,” Information, Communication & Society 6:1 (2003), p. 26

³⁷ Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, “Patterns of Involvement in Television Fiction: A Comparative Analysis,” European Journal of Communication 1:2 (1986), pp. 151–171; Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

³⁸ Nee, “Television and Global Culture,” p. 193.

³⁹ Russell Dalton, “Citizen Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation,” Political Studies 56:1 (2008), pp. 76–98.

⁴⁰ Peter Dahlgren, Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Sonia Livingstone (ed.), Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005).

⁴¹ Henrik Bang, “‘Yes We Can’: Identity Politics and Project Politics for a Late Modern World,” Urban Research & Practice 2:2 (2009), p. 121.

⁴² We conducted thirteen Focus Groups and twenty-four one-to-one interviews. All respondents have been made anonymous and represented by capital letters (the facilitators appear as “I”) and the reference indicates the system of numbering we used to identify our data. The data from the research will be available through the ESRC Data Archive.

⁴³ Daniel Biltereyst and Phillippe Meers, “The International Telenovela Debate and the Contra-flow Argument: A Re-appraisal,” Media, Culture & Society 22:4 (2000), pp. 393–413; David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2007).

⁴⁴ Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering (eds), Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

⁴⁵ Martin Scott, The World in Focus: How UK Audiences Connect with the Wider World and the International Content of News in 2009 (London: Department for International Development, 2010).