In today’s society, popular culture seems to glorify acting “wild” during youth, and even throughout adulthood. Songs and movies both seem to encourage people of all ages to party and behave almost chaotically as the popular song, “Wake up in the Sky” by Gucci Mane, Bruno Mars, and Kodak Black; or even in the hit movie, The Hangover, directed by Todd Phillips. This over-glorification of partying seems like pure immaturity to some people, namely older generations. However, perhaps this culture was created in order to distract the public from what was really going on in America. Isn’t that one of the reasons that American culture began to skyrocket after the Great Depression?
Popular culture seems to serve as a distraction to the public in the way that Americans can dream about partying on the weekends or running away from their life and starting new somewhere else. But due to the fact that many Americans have to work gruelling hours just to pay off loans for their houses or college debt, popular culture can only be a dream for them. This plays into the fact that mainly the upper class gets the luxury to party extravagantly. It’s so integrated into popular culture that although movies may not even be about “partying,” they still incorporate some aspect of partying into the movie so that it’s appealing to viewers. A perfect example of this would be The Interview. This movie, although it serves as a comedy, serves as a message about blindly following the government and once the people see how foolish their leader is, they can start to understand how badly that leader has been running the country. Yet the movie still contains at least two major scenes of partying montages.
And this brings me to my final point, although music can be used to distract the public from their daily lives, it’s still also used to explain the grievances the public has towards the injustice of inequality, such as the Grammy winning “This is America.” Inequality has been present in America since the Europeans came and slaughtered the actual indigenous people of this land. However, inequality seems to have taken a rise due to the fact that now America has Donald Trump for a President. He divides the country and is blatantly racist, amongst sexist and countless other things, and ineffective. The only thing he’s doing is creating a split in the country and he empowers the racists to become even more racist, which literally resulted in the rise of the KKK and the Nazis. Some artists, however, are trying to use their platform in order to combat the racism that Trump has made prevalent in today’s America such as Eminem’s Diss Track.
Overall, popular culture can serve as a distraction from the injustices of society today. After the Great Depression, President Roosevelt tried to unite the country and popular culture helped do this. Roosevelt tried to unite Americans by pitting them against the enemy during the war, the Nazis. Somehow, thanks to our discriminatory President, the Nazis are back and in this country. The amount of songs and movies that address what’s wrong with society has risen due to the fact that the government, and society as a whole, is seemingly going backwards and perhaps if these artists and movies keep addressing the injustice, people will finally begin to see that something is wrong.
Works Cited:
“George Mason University Central Authentication Service (CAS).” Central Authentication Service (CAS) – CAS – Central Authentication Service. Accessed October 9, 2019. https://www-nytimes-com.mutex.gmu.edu/2013/04/07/books/review/fear-itself-by-ira-katznelson.html.
