Popular culture gives us an opportunity to comprehend and express the changing of social and political circumstances. Popular culture is a collection of ideas, values, attitudes, perspectives that are formed by and shaped by everyday life, and people's experiences in the society. Popular culture allows for individuals to make sense of their own lives.
Moreover, popular culture is an arena for cultural expression, where new ideas and updates were presented to impact the popular culture itself. Popular culture presents to us the close relationship between art and society - whilst fluid and adaptive, globally circulated popular culture could be remixed and recycled for local regions, and passed on to the next.
The idea is similar to popular music (pop music rather), which expresses (and originated from) the same elements of individual experience. However, this kind of music is often performed by singers who dared to express the art form to the general public, but its meanings and implications shared and understood by the general public.
Popular culture then, is constantly updated - fashion is a good example of this nature - however, different ideas could be expressed on the same media, or vise versa, same idea could be expressed on different medias.
A constant concern exists that globally circulated cultural materials could be introduced into foreign regions, so popular locally that the local culture could be wiped and replaced with imported cultural ideas. Fortunately however, if we look into the cultural circulation in the global community in a historical perspective, culture around the world were constantly imported and exported, critiqued and adapted, accepted... and finally, a localized version could be further enhanced to the extent that it proved worthy to export the re-packaged version of an existing culture.
On a side note, given different social circumstances and contexts, there left little chance for culture to be imported and accepted locally without certain adaptations (see the example of Tanzania novels, as discussed last lecture).
As discussed in a socialist example of Tanzania where young people - men or women - migrated to urban areas for opportunities, only to experience the lack of such opportunities. In addition, young and elderly people experienced great tension in the blaming of current circumstances, developed from this marginalization, alienation of young people in urban sectors (not to mention the government, led by older people, who held traditional cultural values largely incompatible from that held by younger people).
Similar experience could be found in 1960s Mali, which was also a single-party, socialist regime - with great governmental regulation on dressing, behavior, and cultural expressions; in combination with dominant Islamic faith - especially to young people.
("East African Hip Hop", 15 - 19)