Page 182 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL THEORY IN POPULAR CULTURE

once pervasive, intrusive, dominating, contradictory, and irresistible. The
evolved aesthetic of ‘the popular’ – news stories in sound bites, music with
predictable lyrical and melodic structures, pre-programmed emotions of movies
and entertainment television, conventions and formulas known by all – this
popular aesthetic plays an inescapable and profound role in everyone’s life
today, from the elite sophisticate who may erroneously think herself above it to
the philistine presumed too dense to express himself through it. The popular
culture competes with and incorporates every other cultural source – high
culture and classical arts, traditional culture and folk arts, face-to-face experi-
ence, everything from masterful creativity to unconscious, inherited practices.
The result is a form of everyday life today that is culturally impure, that is, a life
that is neither traditional culture nor modern culture, that may uncritically
combine the elite, the folk, and the mass, and that is postcolonial and
postmodern in its essence.
The way humans mark the major moments in life always exposes cultural
roots and today reflects this postmodern syncretism. Birth, coming-of-age,
marriage and death are turning points in life and invariably receive ritual treat-
ment in standardized ceremonies that vary from culture to culture. Consider,
for example, how funeral practices illustrate this dynamic. Funerals in Western
culture were historically built on classic liturgy in High Church traditions of
Catholics, Lutherans, or Episcopalians. In Low Church traditions, funerals
incorporated elements of folk culture with increased emotionalism in hymns
and outbursts of response and lamenting. With the incorporation of recorded
music, guitars, and pop songs in such services, the popular culture made its
presence newly felt. But today a single funeral can incorporate every dimension
of syncretic, postmodern culture, as we all saw in late 1997.

Diana’s funeral and popular culture theory
Taking all the above into account, what do we make of a funeral like that for
Lady Diana Spencer, ‘Princess Di’, following her death in a high-speed acci-
dent in Paris on 31 August 1997? What concepts of culture does it underscore?
An estimated 1.2 billion people all over the globe watched the funeral of Diana,
making it one of the most widely shared events in human history. Public
concern over the death of Diana was ritually worked through in this massive
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transnational media experience. In this ‘media event’ we have one of the purest
and best-known expressions of popular culture, most strikingly as seen in the
popular ritual functions of television and the rest of the media apparatus.
The televised ceremony was elitist in its origins within traditions of British
royalty but was distinctly ‘popular’ in style. Variations from the classical funeral
liturgy gave it a pop quality and reflected Diana’s well-known struggles against
orthodox traditions of royal life, Windsor property, marital submission, and the
tasteful avoidance of controversy. The most famous variation from Anglican
liturgy was the allowance of Elton John’s performance of his Diana-adapted

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