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Review
| American Popular Culture Through History: The 1990s, by Marc Oxoby. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2003. 270 pages. $49.95, cloth.
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| The historian of popular culture dealing with near-contemporary developments or events faces a special challenge: to analyze the recent past without lapsing into an arid and superficial chronicle or accumulating proto-nostalgic factoids (as in Parker Brothers' recent 1990s edition of "Trivial Pursuits"). Oxoby's monograph is one of a series of period studies edited by Ray B. Browne, a pioneer of popular culture scholarship. So the reader should expect this book to be a serious, though sprightly, search for the larger meaning of our popular culture during the previous decade. To a large extent, Oxoby successfully finds it. A second challenge lies in deciding what to examine. In the broad view which Browne and Oxoby share, popular culture may include anything which reflects or impacts the shared life of the American people. Such a protean conception could have led to a book that is so inclusive that its very comprehensiveness becomes stultifying. Oxoby has avoided this temptation, although he has admitted: "some chapters may seem particularly omnivorous in their coverage" (p. xv). |
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Broadly speaking, Oxoby argues that our recent popular culture represents a counterpoint of diversity with harmonization, without pressures for conformism. The choices have to make in experiencing or consuming are greater than ever before, but these disparate forces soon blend and thereby reconcile rather than splinter our society. Anyone walking the aisles of a supermarket or retail giant will have a surface recognition of the phenomenon. Both popular culture and counterculture are "of the people and by the people," and both can find an expression which reveals much about a congruent national mindset. To show what is shareable and shared, Oxoby begins with two chapters about "Life and Youth During the 1990s," arguing that youth and youth culture are courted as never before, permeating the national imagination. He even suggests this with a photo of President Clinton and his family as epitomizing the ethos of the decade (the book contains twenty illustrations). In the next ten chapters, to argue his thesis, he not only covers the more predictable avenues of popular culture—fads and hobbies, sports, fashions and foods, the performing arts, and advertising—he also delves into such unexpected areas as architecture, travel and tourism, literature genres, and the visual arts. Each chapter contains a photo, usually well chosen, of someone or something evoking the decade, for example, Kurt Cobain, Britney Spears, Emeril, even Michael Jordan with Bugs Bunny endorsing Nikes. |
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Most of the time his approach is dead-on, but there are places where it is less convincing. His analysis works best and is most striking in the chapters on fads, foods, fashion, and advertising. Even music, where audiences have been described as increasingly insular since the 1960s, demonstrates to him an impressive cross-genre and cross- generation reception, though some may feel this section is over-argued. But his inclusion of public architecture seems a stretch, and chapters on literature, the performing arts, and travel recreation suggest more separation by genre or generation, than integration. His conviction that the 1990s was usually youth-oriented is so great that despite his intention to show "how the preceding decades...helped shape the 1990s" (p. xv), he often privileges the 'new' sensations (Britney Spears, for example) over those of more continuous impact or re-presentation (Madonna). Hip-hop and rap have been controversial since the late 1970s, even if their audiences broadened during the past decade, and were seen as disruptive of society as often as expressive of significant social attitudes. For some topics, such as popular literature, sports, or the performing arts, Oxoby sees such diversity within both genres as among them, that he sensibly takes refuge in simply describing distinctive successes rather than trying to make all events fit neatly into his model. |
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All in all, however, Oxoby's insights far outweigh any failings, and the book could be an unusually fruitful classroom tool. If they use it, teachers will learn as much from their students as students from their teachers. It is most suitable for college-level courses, but portions and ideas can be extracted on many pedagogical levels. Oxoby includes a timeline, which could be used to establish who or what is still remembered or not remembered. "Trivial Pursuits" aside, the specific carriers of popular culture are less enduring than the trends themselves. The closeness of near-contemporary popular culture to students' own memories will facilitate classroom reactions; there is noting so frustrating as using examples that, for students, are as meaningless as ancient history. Teachers and students can examine who or what was catalytic and what was ephemeral, in the culture. Above all, in a period where pundits refer not only to "red" and "blue" states, but states of mind, seeing fundamental fissures in our culture and society generally, Oxoby's examination encourages looking for aspects of life in the United States that unite us and illustrate Horace Kallen's old "Melting Pot" concept of pluralism. |
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| Fairleigh Dickinson University, Emeritus |
Kalman Goldstein |
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