Popular Music As Vehicle Of Popular Culture

With the advent of information technology, the ways different aspects of life work and operate have changed a great deal. Media has always had a great influence in molding the culture of a society. There was a point of time when television and radio were invented and when computer was invented and there was little connection between the two. Time then travelled fast then through the age of cassettes, records, VCDs, DVDs, flash drive and then the internet. Media also started to go satellite on a massive scale and there came a point of time when media and digital communication systems became closely integrated with one another, opening the dimensions to digital media.

In society today, the discipline of anthropology has made a tremendous shift from the practices it employed years ago. Anthropologists of today have a very different focus from their predecessors, who would focus on relating problems of distant peoples to the Western world. In more modern times, their goal has become much more local, in focusing on human problems and issues within the societies they live.

* Media and culture: what we see in the media – powerful effect. Think carefully of the consequences of your action rather than going with the flow of the media

This interpretation must make meaning from the culture in the same way that natives draw meaning. According to Spradley (1979), the structural components of cultural meaning come from what people say, what they do, and what artifacts they use (p. 9). In anthropological field work, he or she attempts to observe and document these cultural aspects. In addition, and more importantly, the anthropologist must then, as accurately as possible, make inferences which parallel those of the natives.

It is a well-known fact that technology and media outlets today play a major role in a person’s life. Generally, a person has access to the media through cellphones, computers, radios in a car and television. It may be perceived by some, even within a technologically advanced society such as America, that media has no effect upon enhancing cultural relationships, though many social networks do indeed connect cultures.

Popular music is often one of the best lenses we have through which to view our own cultural orientation. Many of the artistic and experimental shifts in popular music have mirrored changes in our own society. For instance, the emergence of Elvis Presley as a public figure would signal the start of a sexual revolution and the growth in visibility of a rebellious youth culture. Similarly, the folk and psychedelic music of the 1960s was closely entangled with the Civil Rights, anti-war and social protest movements. In this regard, we can view popular music as an artifact through which to better understand the time and place in which it is produced. In light of this, the state of popular music today may suggest troubling things about our society.

What is the purpose of music in society? Foremost, in layman terms, music is just sounds. However, individuals then use these sounds as a medium in order to spread certain ideas and emotions across society. Naturally over time different types of music become associated with different communities; thus, this identification creates an overgeneralized interpretation of who these communities are and what they stand for. One prime example is the stereotype that jazz and swing was the music of the African Americans in 20th century Los Angeles. Even though it may be true, the stereotype does not give an answer as to why or how jazz and swing became to be known as “black music”. In order to answer these questions, it is imperative to know what conditions

The change tearing through America in the 1950’s persists to this day. 2010 has brought a busier, more materialistic, culture than ever before. The trends of women working outside of the home and increasing teenage autonomy persists. American teenagers are given more discretionary time than ever before in history. Reed Larson studied this continuing trend and explains, “If we look back over the past 200 years, the most striking historic change in young people’s use of time is that youths spend much less time on labor activities today than they did in America’s agrarian past” (160). Some teenagers use

In today 's society, culture is impacting our everyday life, experience and social relations; we are all categorized by our cultural “groups”, but this has changed rapidly throughout the years from one generation to the next. Cultural studies were developed in the late 1950’s, through the 1970’s by the British academic scholars. The British scholars were able engaged cultural analysis and the developed then transformed of the different fields, for example, politically, theoretically and empirically that are now represented around the world.

Music plays a significant rule in our lives. It’s a melody and rhythm we live in. It plays a very essential rule in our day to day to life when it comes to expressing feelings, passing time and for other uses as well. Though we in general may not think about how music has changed so much in the past few decades we must acknowledge the fact todays music is the outcome of the various change in the past. Today’s majority of music we hear is what we define as more as a “westernized” music. Considering other cultures in the world, a huge impact of western music is seen within them. Westernization and modernization are two different words with different meanings and they have two different impacts on a society. Modernization is used to define the improvements and show a progressive transition from one stage to another. Westernization is the concept of being influenced by the customs and techniques of the western society and reflecting them in a non-western culture. This essay will discuss furtherly about the impact of the western society on music cultures of North India and Korea by looking from both the positive and negative point of this impact.

This essay will outline how in today’s society, culture influences our personal identity, our actions, and media. Culture is a primary factor in our lives but it is also how we respond to the culture and identity we are exposed too.

Scholars have attempted to define music, and to be quite honest, it will be a huge challenge to try to weave a definition around the art that is music, because it is beyond definition. However, for the purposes of this work, we shall adopt the definition by Aluede & Eregare (2009), not because the definition is, in itself, complete, but because it captures the very essence of what we look for in the definition of music. Music, according to Aluede & Aregare (2009), is not only an organization of sound but also a symbolic expression of a social and cultural organization, which reflects the values, past and present ways of life of human beings. Also, Jones (1975), cited in Amana and Onogu (2015), defines music as “a language which encodes emotions, aspirations and people’s goals in autonomous and self-expressive arts forms.” These definitions are important in understanding music, because they highlight the fact that music does not only appeal to the feel-good emotion, it is not only used for entertainment; it is a valid form of social expression and this underscores the centrality of music in African socio-cultural life.

"Culture is not an exotic notion studied by a select group of anthropologists in the

Popular culture is a term that holds various meanings depending on where it 's being defined and the context of its use. It is usually recognized as the language or people’s culture that prevails in a society at a point in time. As social researcher Brummett explains in his book “Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture”, pop culture reflects the characteristics of social life, where the publicly are most actively involved. Popular culture is known as the ‘culture of the people’. This culture is determined by the interactions between people within their daily activities, for instance, dressing styles, use of language, greeting rituals and the ways that people behave in public, etc. are all examples of popular culture. Popular culture is also diverted by the mass media (Abbott and Sapsford, 1987).

Throughout the world, popular culture has made an impact, especially on especially to people living throughout the world. The impact of popular culture has several benefits on both individuals and society. Several of the benefits that popular culture has on society are entertaining, informing, and interactions.