Recently, in the rhetoric class I teach at Boston University, we read an essay that included a forward by Arthur Clarke. I opened the discussion by asking who Arthur Clarke was. My students all just looked at me. They must practice variations on the blank stare late at night in the dorms. There’s a bit of deer-in-the-headlights in there, but there’s some defiance too. Rather than skim the reading for hints, they continued to stare at me, sinking down in their chairs a little bit, as though gravity had somehow just strengthened. It’s hard to tell whether there’s any shame in that stare, but I hope there is.
Maybe it wasn’t so bad—after all, they’re 19 years old and Arthur Clarke’s heyday was decades ago. And I could close the gap easily: “How many of you have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey?” I waited for the hands to go up. They didn’t. As I described the plot and HAL’s big red eye, one girl said, “there’s an alarm app for that.” I felt a little like crying, but I pressed on.
“How about Stanley Kubrick?” It’s simply not possible that fifteen intelligent college students don’t know Stanley Kubrick, right? Wrong. More stares.
“The Shining?” I hoped my voice didn’t indicate my level of desperation. A couple of them had seen the film and a few more had heard of it, but at that point, it hardly mattered. I had to go four references deep to get even a glimmer of recognition. My original point about Clarke, ethos, and his stamp of approval on the ideas in the essay was irretrievably lost. More than that, I was troubled. Was I becoming one of those teachers who talks about trudging to school for miles uphill each way and resents the modern conveniences afforded to kids these days, or the kind who starts sentences with, “back in the day, we didn’t have…”? Did their unfamiliarity with the reference reflect more about them than it did about me?
This wasn’t the first time I’ve bombed when making a pop culture reference I was certain my students would understand, if not find helpful. Despite my efforts to keep up with the breathless pace (and, often, the inanity) of current pop culture, my students and I don’t share the same reference points-each year, I get older and they get younger. Still, some pop culture references are so important and endemic that they transcend pop and simply become culture. And my students should know them. Still, I have to question my perspective. Are these references as culturally relevant as I believe they are, or are they simply relevant to me?
The first time this happened was in 2008 when I was teaching a tenth grade honors English class. We were talking about invented realities and I brought in a wonderful short story (Jennifer Shaff’s “Leave of Absence”) about a girl who conjures up Spock–the Vulcan, not the doctor–to keep her company as she copes with the loss of her parents. During our discussion, a student raised his hand and asked, “Who’s Spock?”
“Someone please tell Jonathan who Spock is.” I lobbed the ball back to them, but they met me with that stare. Not a single one of them knew Spock. They’d heard of Star Trek and they knew William Shatner from the Priceline commercials, but that was it. Sure, Star Trek was before their time (this was before the recent movie reboots), but the show and characters are so deeply embedded into popular culture that one doesn’t even need to have actually watched the show to understand the reference. And given how much ground that show broke, surely it constitutes straight-up culture, not just pop culture.
The next time was in 12th grade World Literature. We were reading The Stranger and I played The Cure’s “Killing an Arab.” No one knew the Cure. I pulled up a picture of them on the internet and the kids laughed at Robert Smith. “How many of you know Marilyn Manson?” I asked them. Most of them did. I told them that artists such as Marilyn Manson were a subsequent generation of goth, not the inventors of it, that gothic music had grown out of punk and that bands such as The Cure helped define it. The term “gothic” is actually much older than that, I tried to explain, referencing architecture, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein. By now, you know the look they gave me. To them, gothic just means goth, which is synonymous with “emo”—the depressive kids with multiple piercings, pale skin, black boots (Doc Martens still exist, but aren’t as popular these days), and dark clothes.
My high school students impressed me when most of them recognized James Brown and some recognized B.B. King when we watched the Mohammed Ali documentary When We Were Kings, but none of them knew Simon and Garfunkel or Neil Young. They were famous around the same time, so what was the difference? James Brown is by far the most visually recognizable of all of those musicians–I wouldn’t expect my students to know Neil Young by sight–and he was arguably more famous across the board than the others. As famous as “Sounds of Silence” and “Mrs. Robinson” are, it’s a lot more likely that one will hear James Brown’s “I Feel Good” blasting from an open window. Brown carries more cool cred than the others and probably has greater universal appeal both as a musician and a person. And perhaps the fact that my students know him demonstrates the ability of certain cultural giants to stave off obscurity by justifiably passing through the narrowing bottleneck of pop culture relevance.
But even those references we think couldn’t possibly become obscure aren’t immortal. The first semester I taught at BU, one student in my sci-fi class hadn’t seen Star Wars. She was good-naturedly chided throughout the semester until she watched it. That was five years ago. Now, there are a handful of students in each class who haven’t seen Star Wars, and given episodes I-III (and maybe VII-IX), it’s even more important that they know the “real” ones and not lump them all together.
My references to science fiction indicate my own personal and pedagogical interests—my insistence that students know Star Trek and Star Wars sheds light on my value system, which is connected to my upbringing and life experience. My dad used to watch Star Trek, and anything that captured his interests captured mine, or at least immediately escaped frivolousness. He watched Star Trek for some of the same reasons he (and I) later watched MacGyver—a fondness for action, but also a desire to watch imaginative television that depicted people in difficult situations in which they relied on their intelligence, wit, and resourcefulness to survive. My parents brought me as a baby to a drive-in screening of Empire Strikes Back, and as I grew up we watched The Cosby Show, Happy Days, Mary Tyler Moore reruns. I didn’t love everything, but I was positioned at a very early age to engage in and appreciate pop culture and to familiarize myself with the tropes of storytelling, and I was lucky to have the opportunity and means to do so. Clearly, many kids grow up without easy access to some of these reference points or without parents to steer them. On the other end of the spectrum, just as many kids grow up with unfettered access to the mountains of crap out there, where they remain engaged or even just distracted as the landmarks of popular culture slip through the cracks.
Sometimes I worry that I’m exercising a teacher’s prerogative toward self-indulgence, but these pop culture staples not only inspire a slew books, movies, and TV shows that my students do know–how much funnier would Family Guy be if they caught half of those references?–but seminal science fiction continues to inspire scientists, technology, and countless aspects of contemporary and future life. Being able to trace ideas back to their artistic and cultural beginnings, or at least to the introduction of the ideas to the masses, allows a broader view and appreciation for how inspiration, concepts, and tropes have developed to reflect real life and the knowledge we’ve gained over time. Popular culture is like a parallel view of history—key moments in popular culture can provide insights into human nature and the trajectory of civilization just as key moments in history can.
Still, I like the idea of creating a pop culture litmus test to gauge exactly where our pop culture knowledge diverges, or where that of the younger generation ends. I’m not talking presidents and countries and the type of stuff one (hopefully) learns in school, but beyond that, I have to admit the criteria for such a list would be difficult: what’s the age requirement/limit? Are some references so obvious that including them on a list is silly, if not insulting? Does a show or book reference automatically include all the actors/characters? And what about books in general-even though I know and am saddened that five times as many students have read Twilight than Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s hardly surprising given how much more difficult it is to read than watch television or movies. I think books belong in the category of knowledge that one should learn, or at least begin to learn in school, as the list is endless for even the most informed and voracious reader. I think I’ll borrow from the Supreme Court and say we’ll know it when we see it.
Post ideas in the comments if you have them, but here’s my list so far, aside from the works already mentioned: Woody Allen, Tang, Stevie Wonder, Kevin Bacon (and the game), Sonny & Cher, Saturday Night Fever, National Lampoon, Mork and Mindy, Frank Sinatra, Golden Girls, Twin Peaks, The Coneheads, The Clapper, David Hasselhoff, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Super Mario Brothers, Qbert, Gilligan’s Island, Andy Warhol, The Goonies, Saved By the Bell, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, Urkel, The Godfather…okay. Maybe this is an endless task, but I suppose that’s the beauty of popular culture and its ability to become so ingrained in our consciousness.
As I think about drawing up such a list, I also think about how responsible I am, or should be, for teaching pop culture. Most people absorb popular culture as they’re living it. They don’t know what will stand the test of time, but if they’re paying attention or sometimes simply not living under a rock, they’ll later be able to access the reference. But what about all the pop culture moments already passed? The teaching of history is narrative and contextual—if each event were taught discretely, some pretty significant causal relationships would be overlooked. Pop culture is the same. Out of context—out of the students’ context especially—the value of that information is decreased, which is why relatively few pop culture references survive the generations. Still, if someone doesn’t introduce the references, if someone doesn’t say hey, this the first movie (and book) in which an AI in space tried to kill its human operator, then the younger generations can’t discover, or rediscover, what stories transcend time and why. Shows such as South Park and Saturday Night Live help by making pop culture references inherent to accessing the comedy or plot, but it’s easy to watch an episode and not even know that a reference has sailed overhead. I guess that means it’s incumbent upon the older generations to nudge younger folks toward these treasures, to pull them up from the past like one would pull an old toy from the depths of a sandbox.
If my students let me, I’d love to bring in a list of a dozen references and see who has heard of what, and perhaps even how they came to know them. I might be pleasantly surprised. After all, just the other day I heard one of the students talking about attending a screening of Casablanca. Sure, she couldn’t remember the name of the movie–she referred to it as that “old black and white movie that’s supposed to be romantic and there’s a guy playing the piano”–but that’s better than nothing, isn’t it?
Tags: music, pop culture, teaching, television, work
I think a huge part of knowing references depends on what you do for fun. If you don’t read a lot you wont recognize a ton of famous books. If you don’t really like movies, and so only watch what comes out recently in theaters, you’re not going to know about 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I still can’t help but refer to the emo-kids as kinderbats. I just hold on to precious hope that they’ll grow up into goth-kids and live on Joy Division and Nick Cave, and make the semi-Victorian look a thing again, because I like being able to find floor length velvet skirts in regular stores, thank you late 90’s.
At this point I’m pretty sure that the Steampunk aesthetic is going to be responsible for that, so… poor goth-kids.
I really think a huge part of my cultural touchstones for the past was embedded with my parents — especially my mom in regards to music. I was intimately familiar with Simon & Garfunkel, the Alan Parsons Project, Cat Stevens, Dan Fogelberg, Jim Croce, Renaissance, etc. because that was what my mom listened to. I didn’t start becoming familiar with the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, et al. until high school and college, really.
This is so true. I have a better knowledge of music from my parent’s generation than my own, and b/c I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV, I have a huge knowledge gap on references to shows and movies that I “should” know.
My dad, who was a (white, American) WWII baby, grew up as a military kid in Tokyo during the Occupation of Japan, only to come back to the US and find that he had basically missed all of pop culture and the emergence of rock music, etc. To this day, he has no idea who some of the most famous musicians in the world are! So my knowledge of my parents’ generation of pop music comes almost entirely from the parents of my childhood friends, with their huge record collections and their old hippie stories.
Agreed. My parents were more folk fans, so I grew up listening to Joan Baez, Judy Collins, John Denver, Jim Croce, some Beatles, etc. The hardest rocking album they had was the Eagles’ Greatest Hits. So the only place I heard Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, etc. was on the radio, where they never mentioned song names because they assumed everyone knew them. To this day I can’t identify Zeppelin songs by title.
You didn’t mention The Princess Bride.
Inconceivable!
Popular culture is absolutely a parallel view of history, and that’s why the trouble with a lot of pop culture references, especially ones involving comedy, is that so many of them are hopelessly dated by references to current events that are now considered history…and a lot of people don’t know or care about that history. I’d say that a good 75 percent of the entire backcatalog of Saturday Night Live would be incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t have a solid grasp of the political and social history of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — who Gerald Ford or Gary Hart or Ross Perot are, for example. It’s the same thing with something like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and British history in the late 1960s — there are some really wicked, viciously satirical jokes in there that aren’t about dead parrots or lumberjacks, but if you don’t know about Rhodesia or Edward Heath, the joke sails over your head, and you lose an interesting perspective on British history because of it.
I’d very much like to see history and pop culture taught more closely together, without pop culture being relegated to a second-class status by ‘serious’ historians. (Though as one of those pop culture historians, I may be biased here.) And not just for the obvious examples like M*A*S*H as a reflection of American involvement in the Vietnam War, or Richard Nixon making a two-second appearance on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in. Why does the 1993 Coneheads movie, which deals heavily with themes of immigration and cultural assimilation, involve a scene where we see the two INS agents turning away a boat full of what appear to be Haitian refugees — smack in the middle of the 1991-94 Haitian refugee crisis? If I were teaching a class on humanitarian issues, I’d absolutely include that scene as part of a broader lesson plan.
tl;dr, history and pop culture go hand in hand, and as long as people think history is boring then some of the best and cleverest bits of pop culture aren’t going to be able to stand the test of time.
True–I watched an SNL episode from just a couple of years ago recently and it made fun of Herman Cain pretty hard and I had forgotten basically everything about him (for example: took me several minutes to remember why they were making pizza jokes).
I remember when I was TA’ing a class on Ancient Greek history and I tried to use the (first) Gulf War and the full of the Berlin wall as helpful metaphors for understand something. They looked at me as if I were talking about the Spanish-American War; what I was saying seemed like it was just as “historic” and dead to them as the 4th century BC Greek wars I was comparing it to. These were college freshmen in 1997, so they were even alive for it (and I was only five years older than them!).
To me, this is one of the strangest things about teaching contemporary lit & culture: the books I want to teach are still (to some old-schooler profs) considered too new to be significant, whereas the pop culture that shows up in them is already history to my students. For example, I’ve taught The Hours a few times, and I’ve had to explain why the daughter’s clothes and hairstyle (in the book, not the movie) discomfit the middle-aged lesbian characters — she sets off their gaydar, but she’s actually straight, and that blurring of lines is disturbing and maybe dangerous to them. Not only have my students grown up in a much more queer-friendly world than I did, but they also just don’t get that she looks dykey, even though her combat boots, wifebeater, and shaved head clearly read butch in 1998. So confusing for me, and I’m only in my 30s! I can’t imagine how I’ll feel in 20 years.
When 30 Rock was airing, I was constantly baffled by its relatively low ratings: everyone I knew was watching it!
I feel the same way about a lot of Joelle’s examples, but I think that, especially in an academic context, assuming and insisting on the universality and importance of your own references creates barriers to entry into participation as often as it deepens and enriches the discussion.
I agree completely. I also noticed that just about all the examples are American, and would be well-taught in American Studies classes about popular culture or recent American history. But I shouldn’t have to understand poker to pass statistics (something I had to repeatedly ask for instructions about in high school), and I shouldn’t have to know who Spock is to participate in a 21st-century rhetoric discussion.
As with every decade, some references will survive unsourced, some movies will become classics, and some once-essential media will become future Scandals of Classic Hollywood. And life will go on…
I remember feeling so indescribably ashamed and terrified doing statistics in secondary school because so much of it referenced playing cards and gambling. My upbringing was uber conservative, and I thought FOR CERTAIN the devil would gain influence over me if I participated since face cards and all associated games were the tools of Satan.
However, I also was too timid to say anything to my school teacher for fear of getting into trouble. Caught in this bind I just internalized a massive amount of stress and felt isolated and pathetic. Sorry to ramble, your comment just brought back a slew of memories I haven’t thought about in years.
oh man I made some noises out loud to indicate how much I agree with this
Does Nickelodeon no longer air old TV shows? That’s where I saw most of the old pop culture I knew as a kid. I watched Laverne and Shirley and the Jeffersons religiously, circa 1998.
Full House made it to Nick at Night maybe five years ago? Maybe longer? Laverne & Shirley : now :: the Dick van Dyke Show : 1998.
Marky Mark. The fall of the Wall. Okay, the second one is history, not pop culture, but I’ve met people my own age who don’t remember it and I can only imagine it holds even less significance for those born after it happened. I find that staggering, since it sticks in my mind as a monumental thing.
I remember the Berlin Wall falling as the turning point for me in understanding that history is something that is still happening.
I was in college taking Soviet (!) history class just after the Wall fell. Between that and the Prague Spring the next year, it was an exciting time to study Central/East Europe. And it felt good to be alive (cue Jesus Jones, “Right Here Right Now”).
This reminds me of the time I tried to explain the impact of Mary Pickford bobbing her hair by comparing her to Felicity. Blank stares. I know I do have a tendency to forget just how long ago my teen years were, but there are things that I assume have just passed into the pop-cultural aether that clearly haven’t. The tricky part is figuring out what has.
Thankfully, Jennifer Lawrence stepped up to the plate!
as a young person in the early 2000s, i completely adored VH1’s “I Love The [decade]” series because I felt like they filled in so many gaps in my pop-culture knowledge. my parents grew up in a very small, conservative, religious-leaning town, and TV was a late addition to our household, so i sort of felt perpetually behind-the-times. BUT i did learned a lot about late-80s/early 90s politics by reading my mom’s old Bloom County books.
Oh man, I was so into my parents’ old Bloom County books. I think at some point they got tired of explaining Reagan jokes to me.
Yeah, everything I know about American politics (and a lot of what I know about major pop-culture events) over the last ~50 years comes from reading old Doonesbury collections.
I had my first “old” moment when I was teaching my 11th grade students about irony and mentioned the Alanis Morrisette song (no, that’s not actually “Ironic”), and only one student had even heard of her. I’m trying to keep my pop culture references relevant, but I can only read so much Young Adult fiction.
Although I sort of think tumblr is kind of bringing some older bits of pop culture back as memes. Kids who’re teenagers today might actually be more familiar with some things than folks a few years older.
Yeah! I mean the comment about Doc Martens not being so popular anymore made me go “someone should tell tumblr cos they’re ALL OVER IT”. There’s some major 90s-worship all through that website, but I suppose it’s aesthetic more than anything
“The More You Know.”
“This is your brain on drugs”
Last week, I showed that PSA and its followup, with Rachael Leigh Cook smashing up the kitchen with the skillet, to my college freshmen and was pleasantly surprised at how many of them had seen it or heard it quoted.
I have a coworker who moved here when he was 13, so he often says he doesn’t get any pop culture refrence before like 1996.
Truthfully I’m pretty sure he doesn’t get any after that either. (“S’mores? You Americans come up with the weirdest things. ” – Actual Quote)
Anyway, I have recommended he watch The Sandlot, for sure, and A League of Their Own, because not only are both of these movies good in and of themselves they also portray a different time period in American culture. He was also unfamiliar with all of the weird horror movies showing around Halloween. And had never seen Scream, which I think is another great example of a movie ABOUT other movies. So even if you haven’t seen a ton of bad horror, you a least take away information about American Horror movies from that movie. And it could also provide a great example of the ways that missing out on parts of pop culture or current events causes you to miss out on a lot of things.
My “reference no one gets” issue is almost always to The HItchiker’s Guide. My Dad gave us those on tape to listen to when I was like 11, so I’ve known the answer my whole life. I was almost universally the only one in my college classes to get those jokes, and that was almost 10 years ago.
I personally don’t get any references made to any actually scary horror movie (Most notably Silence of the Lambs, but also The Shining, The Omen, on and on.) So I do think that in addition to time frame people have their own sortof “Genre” references to pop culture. I’m a huge geek, but I wont get ANY references to the Big Bang Theory, or probably most of the references on it.
This feels a little bit… “dern kids these days!” to me. Those are YOUR cultural references, not ours. We don’t know Mork and Mindy because it wasn’t on TV when we grew up.
Pop culture by definition is constantly changing and evolving according to the popular taste. Why insist that everyone should know these references from the 70s when you probably don’t know our equivalents?
Also, those dead-eyed stares are because no one likes to explain the teacher’s point to them only to be corrected.
UGH sorry guys, this one got my 24-yr-old hackles up.
I definitely got this feel from the piece. Isn’t it obvious why I don’t know what these TV shows are? Because I literally wasn’t alive at that time? It seems to me that the point of this article isn’t “kids these days don’t appreciate anything about pop culture” and is more “time has moved on and I’m surprised by that.”
I’m 10 years older than the original commenter, and “I literally wasn’t alive” for a lot of these pop culture references, either (2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, The Stranger, Slaughterhouse 5, Mork & Mindy, The Godfather, etc.). But they have still filtered into my consciousness in a way that they haven’t for your generation. I think there has to be a different explanation than that you weren’t alive when these things occurred.
yeah, I know the godfather, star trek, slaughterhouse 5… maybe the reason we don’t know the others is that they’re just not standing the test of time, you know?
I think they’ve filtered into our generation (I’m 23) just as much as yours (I knew all the references, and I bet most of my friends would as well) but even so if you weren’t alive when something was popular there is no reason why you would know it now, unless someone went out of their way to expose you to it or you went looking for it. Mork and Mindy doesn’t air on tv anymore, neither does MacGyver, Slaughterhouse 5 came out in 1969, it’s not exactly popping up in the news, on tv, or in everyday discussions so unless you were told about it or it was required reading in school there’s no reason someone today would have heard of it, the Goonies is a children’s movie and unless you were a child in the 80s it’s unlikely you would have seen it. I bet if you went back to those students from 2008 and asked again they’d know Star Trek, from the JJ Abrams reboot but back in 08 it wasn’t really relevant anymore.
I guess what I’m saying is that I think it’s perfectly reasonable for age to be the explanation these students haven’t heard of any of these things, and much more likely that the reason you and I know about them (despite not having been alive when they came out) is because of other external factors (friends, parents, where we grew up, our interests) that lead us to things that there was no real reason for us to know about otherwise.
Yeah, same. I’d get it if he were just as willing to go out and find out what his students points of references are. But maybe I’m sensitive, I moved a lot growing up and didn’t live in my home country until I was 18 so I missed a decent chunk of pop culture. And so whenever I don’t know something the attitude is always “youth these days don’t appreciate quality music” or whatever, and it’s frustrating. It’s also weird how most of the people writing these types of articles assume that everyone will know things from the 1960-1980s, but don’t expect the same for any other time period, like that era was somehow more relevant. Dynasty isn’t any more important than Clara, Lu and Em or even Pretty Little Liars for that matter.
yeah, like can the writer explain the OC, I can haz chzburger, mean girls, and snapchat?
I find I have a lot more knowledge of and access to — and often, interest in — my students’ reference points than they have to mine. Which does make sense, I guess, as I’ve actually been alive for all of it. But I’m way more likely to ask them to tell me about One Direction (and listen, and ask follow-up questions) than they are to not stare at me like mannequins when I mention the Simpsons.
Yeah if you’re really insistent on connecting to your students through pop culture…maybe take some time to find pop culture that will actually be useful in helping you connect, rather than just throwing references to bad tv shows at them (seriously, there is a reason Mork and Mindy did not make it to 2013).
Yeah, same. It read a little bit like “these are my cultural references and they also just happen to be the most important cultural references everyone should recognise”.
Exactly, it rather reminds me of this comic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2253 (Text: “I hate what teens listen to. Pop music peaked at the exact moment when I was most emotionally vulnerable to trite love songs.”)
Similarly, I have heard of most of these things (National Lampoon, the 6 degree of Kevin Bacon game) but I could not tell you why they’re relevant, important, how they came about or what their impact has been. Is it enough that I’ve been exposed briefly to these things? Or do I need to analyze their impact on culture (other than being, at one time, popular)?
Yeah, as a fellow 24 year old, I actually did know a lot of the references mentioned in the post (partly I was super into the I Love The [decade] shows, partly I play a lot of bar trivia, partly I’m pretty into being a nerd and a lot of those are nerd references), but I don’t see why we need to ensconce them as the canon of pop culture. Also, the majority of the things that the author listed are things that a very specific group of people who were around at the time of her childhood were engaging with — Americans, as mentioned above, and I’d also argue that this is a list of stuff white people cared about. That doesn’t make it better or worse, but it’s not as universal as she’s talking about (or, there are things that were super relevant to other communities at those times that don’t make her list).
I also thought about the race thing, which just emphasizes the creating barriers to entry point that another commenter mentioned above.
I also think it’s interesting to think about different sub-cultures and why they do or do not get absorbed into pop culture (and what signifiers or references make it through)–but maybe pop culture is its own sub-culture entirely, and simply not universal.
The whiteness aspect of this article is strong. Why Mork and Mindy and not 227? I know James Brown and not Neil Diamond because my family is black. I know Star Wars and the Star Trek because my family has a bunch of nerds in it.
It is strange that the writer recognizes that her pop culture knowledge comes from her father’s interests but does not realize that other people’s pop culture knowledge can come from other places. And that makes the entire point of a litmus test, silly. There is no selection of pop culture that EVERYONE should know.
Agreed. I get most of the references she lists, but my first reaction was also UGH because they weren’t things I ever liked (or, often, watched/read), they were things I basically memorized by route because older people kept making references to them and insisting on explaining it to me. It was like memorizing Shakespeare except unlike the Coneheads, Shakespeare was actually interesting and not even my English teacher actually expected us to laugh at the jokes. Are today’s older people watching Miley Cyrus’s and One Direction’s music videos so we get the references in whatever Family Guy-type stuff the next generation puts out? I’m not, so I’m not going to insist that they watch the stuff I grew up with either.
I noticed that the author talked about being into what her dad was into, which makes sense and explains why she values the shows and people that she values. But she certainly didn’t talk about what her grandfather was into. Pop culture changes with time, pretty much by definition, and while I understand the impulse to share the things she has enjoyed, I can’t agree with resenting her students’ ignorance of former pop culture.
Yeah, and this is why they got rid of the analogy questions on the SATs – because not everyone knows about crew and polo or Mork & Mindy or Star Trek. Cultural bias! (Not that there aren’t other problems with the SATs and standardized testing in general).
I live for the day one of my lecturers references Golden Girls. I AM SO PREPARED
I think that the pop culture references that are important to an individual are pretty subjective, it’s hard to say which references everyone *should* understand.
The list given is obviously American in focus, and whilst I’ve heard of most of them, I think a few must not have made it into Australian pop culture.
I also agree that the references that filter down to you depend so much on your age (I’m 29), your parents, and I also think whether you had older siblings. I’m an only child whose parents weren’t really into commercial TV, and didn’t tend to watch movies at home, so whilst I get a lot of music references, I’m slower on movies/TV. However, a friend of mine who has encyclopedic knowledge of 80s/90s pop culture has two older brothers who are 10 years older than her, so I think she got tons of knowledge from her brothers.
It might help if we old folks got a feel for WIDELY shared cultural reference points among teenagers and college kids that are remembered longer than 24 hours or so because people feel deeply about them one way or the other. I hope that those reference points exist. Does Lady Gaga inspire the same large-scale insanity that Madonna used to? I hope so. For my friends and me it was the Specials and the Pretenders; I was a lucky kid. (Bronies, while my hat’s off to them, don’t count – that is still a niche.)
And if those common reference points don’t exist, maybe they don’t need to. I doubt it, though. I wouldn’t trade the first time I saw “Close Encounters” or “The Shining” for anything. Or that Cramps concert at the Avalon in 1998.
Heartily agree. I try to keep up with pop culture, especially as the mother of an almost-11-year-old, but there is so much of it (and so much of it that is expressly not for me) that it’s a challenge. My best effort is in books – I try to read the same books my little bookworm girl is reading. It’s been very rewarding on the whole.
Did you see Close Encounters when it came out? I saw it in the theater, and since I was a little kid, it kinda freaked me out. I went to see the Cure and the Smiths and Duran Duran as a teenager in the 80s, but I don’t expect anyone to remember them now in the same way that my generation does.
“Being able to trace ideas back to their artistic and cultural beginnings, or at least to the introduction of the ideas to the masses, allows a broader view and appreciation for how inspiration, concepts, and tropes have developed to reflect real life and the knowledge we’ve gained over time. Popular culture is like a parallel view of history—key moments in popular culture can provide insights into human nature and the trajectory of civilization just as key moments in history can.”
I mean, if it’s a class on pop culture or a class on science fiction then sure, part of the task at hand may well be developing that broader view/appreciation. But as far as just what people ought to be familiar with, just walking around, not everyone is going to have that appreciation or understanding of those topics (or any other), now or at any other period in history, ever. Space Odyssey and Stanley Kubrick will never going to totally disappear, since the kids who are interested in film/sci fi will definitely trace back ideas etc (and this will be easier than ever thanks to being alive in the information age) and find out about it, and the rest of the population may never hear about it, and… that seems totally fine, and the same as always. Only the elite/super educated have ever really had a solid grasp on ideas’ origins. if anything memes/internet are leveling the playing field compared with most of human history.
I’ll just go to xkcd for my comment:
In high school, I was chatting with one of the “cool” teachers when we saw a plastic bag get picked up by a gust of wind and blown into the air. “So that’s an American Beauty moment,” the teacher joked. Someone about my age offered, “They did that on Family Guy too.”
In undergrad I always found it vaguely embarrassing when my profs would relate something to pop culture in an attempt to connect. The times it DID work weren’t so much pop culture comparisons as looking at a specific piece of media.
Yeah, I wonder if maybe plenty of them got the reference but just thought it was super awkward and didn’t know how to respond?
No-one speaks up or admits to knowing the answer even if you ask “What’s two plus two?”, so I’d be astonished if the average teenager would admit to recognising a pop culture reference that’s not socially rubber-stamped as Cool.
What if pop culture is too relative to even be universal? Let’s deconstruct everything!
Pretty much every time I read an article bashing YA books, the writer decries the current crop of YA because REASONS and complains that nobody’s reading Tamora Pierce or Robyn McKinley anymore… or some other author who THEY read when they were young and therefore everyone else should be reading those authors and nobody else. Now, I’m a huge fan of Pierce and McKinley and their books LITERALLY changed my life and world view as a kid. But. BUT.
Time does not stand still.
New books are written and published, new movies and tv shows and comic books and music come out. New memes get popular, new history events happen.
It’s really, really weird when people insist that the only culture that has value is the culture they’re familiar with, and expect everyone else to have the exact same experiences and influences that they have.
There’s some really great, seminal SciFi and Fantasy that are no longer read at all except by huge hardcore nerds who go looking for it, and historians. They’re works that laid serious foundations and did things for the first time that nobody else was doing… and most people haven’t read them. This doesn’t stop them from reading/watching and enjoying current SciFi and Fantasy, from reading/watching current works that have built on those foundations. And there’s nothing wrong with not being familiar with the entire history of a field.
I get that same “how can you not KNOW this” feeling, especially as I get older. But I’m also very familiar with feeling that, having grown up in a small town as a big dorky nerd with specialized interests nobody else around me was even aware of let alone into. It’s not inherently bad that other people don’t have the same cultural touchstones as you. It just means they have a different history and lived experience that you have.
Yes. Also, people are still reading Pierce and McKinley.
THE SHINING SUCKS
KUBRICK SUCKS
*runs into van, screeches off into the night*
*a field of white dudes rises from the earth like angry corn to argue with you*
KUBRIK DOES SUCK< and Stephen King thinks so too.
Not that you need external validation
Well, I think a lot of this has to do with how we consume media now. When I was a kid after school was watching reruns on WGN. Now kids are either watching channels just for them (Disney, Nick, etc) and even though we had Nick and the Disney channel, by about 8 pm they transitioned into older shows and movies. Now, Nick at Nite is a separate channel, Disney doesn’t show Monkeys Go Home anymore (which is a shame) and kids can only ever watch their own shows. People used to have one tv in the house and everyone watched together and I think it made a stronger connection to shows because of it, imo. And people watched the same shows. Everyone was watching to find out who shot JR. Now there’s 300 channels and it’s harder to tap into that idea of community viewing which in turn means the pop culture experience is more diverse as well. Additionally, even in the same home people aren’t watching on the same tv. Mom’s watching TV, the kids are streaming on their phones, dad’s got the tablet, etc.. Itused to be everyone understood references to the Sound of Music because they aired it every Easter, along with the Loony Tunes Easter special, etc, and that was what was on so that was what EVERYONE was watching. In short, pop culture is less universal because we don’t share it in the same way. If I want to talk about my favorite show, I log on to the internet and find a bunch of like minded nerds, but no one I’m hanging out with face to face is watching with me.
So one of the *great moments* in my life came when I realized that I should be looking for all of these kinds of out-dated pop culture references in literature. It happened when I was writing a paper about a Jane Austen book and I suddenly realized how much I was missing by not literally living during that time period. I don’t always think it’s so important to teach kids what the references are so much as that they are there. I guarantee someone in that class had a light bulb moment where they thought, huh why didn’t I Google who Spock was?!
As someone who is literally making a name for herself off of catching up on widely read books (and possibly eventually movies) I think there are two levels to this. One, knowing what these cultural touchpoints are, which again is so subjective depending on who is deciding what’s important, etc. The other is this sort of universal fondness for these touchpoints. Yes, I’m aware of the Golden Girls, but what people balk at is that I’ve never watched it. Or that I watched The Godfather and didn’t like it. People don’t just want to talk about these universal pop culture experiences, they want you to have the same experience. Which is fine! Collective cultural experiences are a nice thing to have! But most of the baffled reactions I get are not if I haven’t heard of something, it’s if I have heard of it but haven’t consumed it/didn’t like it when I did.
I have three teenaged borthers. They have watched original Start Trek and Twilight Zone episodes. They’ve seen more than one Stanley Kubrick movie. The two that are currently high school seniors, however, have never taken honors courses and are planning on enrolling in community college next year. I was fairly well-versed in pop culture as a high schooler 10 years ago, but the students who knew significantly more than me about older music/TV/movies tended to be poor students, and rarely engaged with teachers in class.
There’s more to it than generational divide, in other words.
In re: the “real” Star Wars movies —
I went back to watch the original trilogy recently (using the blu-ray versions), and there’s been so much tinkering since the cut I grew up watching that a lot of my favorite moments weren’t realized the same. To take one example, that opening shot of SW IV, the underside of the star destroyer that takes what feels like a full minute to finish passing overhead? THEY SPED IT UP. And added more lasers and explosions, of course, but the beautiful ponderousness and scale created by the original shot was just gone.
I was in college taking Soviet (!) history class just after the Wall fell. Between that and the Prague Spring the next year, it was an exciting time to study Central/East Europe. And it felt good to be alive (cue Jesus Jones, "Right Here Right Now").
Ask your students if they know what a “litmus test” is. I’d be surprised if even 80% of those in my (third-year university) classes could tell me.
I had to explain who Lindsay Lohan is to my younger sister, that one blew my mind a little bit. I thought Lindsay was eternal.
If you’re teaching rhetoric, the only references the students ought to be faulted for not knowing are classical ones. The pop culture of your childhood is disposable ephemera just like the pop culture of today’s youth. Nobody’s SUPPOSED to remember any of it; off to the memory hole it goes, and rightly so.
The need to have common references is an argument to preserve a CLASSICAL canon, not a pop culture one. Give me the expectations of the Great Books any day over this arbitrary set of outdated pop references.
The Brady Bunch. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!