High Culture/Pop Culture: Who cares about the difference?

I’ve been humming the tune to Samuel Barber’s symphonic piece Adagio for strings, which features a haunting melody. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs the version I have on my IPod, and if I wanted to see the piece performed, I would likely attend a concert at a symphony hall. Symphony halls, historically, are not exactly what we might think of as a pop culture venue. Indeed, one would likely assign Samuel Barber’s symphonic piece to the level of high culture. But wait a minute, as I imagine the music, I could overlay the images of the Baltimore Ravens losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC division playoffs. But really, if you are a fan of Vietnam War era movies, you might recognize the piece from Oliver Stone's movie, Platoon. I will never forget the images of William Defoe’s bullet riddled body collapsing to the haunting melody of Adagio. Well, movies aren't high culture, they’re pop culture. So what happens when high culture becomes pop culture? I’m reminded of Aaron Copeland’s modern symphonic piece Rodeo that I also have on my IPod. But you might recognize part of that piece of classical music, Hoedown, from the “What’s for Dinner: Beef” commercial. Again, the use of classical music in a television commercial represents the melding of high culture and pop culture. Have you ever seen paintings by Andy Warhol? You know, the ones with the Campbell soup cans. Historically, fine art would have been associated with high art and therefore high culture. So, what happens when fine art is mixed with pop culture, as is the case with an Andy Warhol painting? The mixing of high and pop is a function of our post-modern existence where the lines of difference are blurred, in this case, rendering the difference between high and pop meaningless. The cultural studies approach we take in this course is less concerned with “High” (literary, elitist) and “low” (trashy, banal) culture distinctions. Rather the approach we take does not prejudice one “text” as better (high) or worse (low) than another. Lack of concern for such differences allows us to focus on other things: the social production and reproduction of media content (what we as consumers do with media content and how we reintegrate it into our everyday lives). Furthermore, we are concerned with power and the struggle against that power (resistance) evident in media content and expressed by users of media content. That’s why race, gender, class, ethnicity and national strata are important to the study of pop culture.