American Pop

American Pop Penetrates Worldwide

First of three articles

By Paul Farhi and Megan Rosenfeld

Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, October 25, 1998; Page A1

Western-looking mannequins dominate a store display in Beijing By Michael Williamson – The Washington Post)

America's biggest export is no longer the fruit of its fields or the output of its factories, but the mass-produced products of its popular culture – movies, TV programs, music, books and computer software.

Entertainment around the world is dominated by American-made products. It's "The Young and the Restless" in New Delhi, Garth Brooks blaring from a Dublin apartment, or the eager line of people waiting outside a Nairobi movie theater to see "As Good As It Gets." It's Bart Simpson in Seoul, Madonna in Sao Paulo, "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" on Warsaw TV.

Sociologist Todd Gitlin calls American popular culture "the latest in a long succession of bidders for global unification. It succeeds the Latin imposed by the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, and Marxist Leninism" imposed by Communist governments.

Tom Freston, president of MTV, the globe-straddling music network, sees it another way. "Today's young people have passports to two different worlds – to their own culture and to ours," he said.

Once, back when "I Love Lucy" was still in its first run, U.S.-made entertainment could be found only in places with the means to buy it, the technology to show it, and the political freedom to allow it across the border. Now, even in tiny Bhutan, a Himalayan nation so isolated that fewer than 5,000 people visit it a year, street peddlers offer illegally copied videos of Hollywood's latest blockbusters.

The United States is on the newsstand as well. Reader's Digest circulates in 19 languages; its 48 international editions, with a combined circulation of 28 million, dwarf its U.S. circulation of 14.7 million. Cosmopolitan magazine, with its salacious advice on sex and beauty for women, now claims to be the world's best-selling women's magazine, with international sales of 4.5 million from 36 foreign editions and domestic circulation of about 2.7 million. Playboy, not to be outdone, has 16 international editions with an estimated readership of 5 million.

Foreigners see U.S. popular culture intertwined with fast food restaurants, T-shirts, pricey sneakers and shopping malls, even though these exports are not classified as intellectual property. The McDonald's restaurants that are opening at a rate of six a day around the world, the baggy jeans and baseball caps that have become a global teenage uniform, the Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels increasingly demanded by children, are all seen as part of the same U.S. invasion.

Global consumerism and expanding channels of distribution may create more demand for entertainment, but neither says much about why people around the world prefer the American variety to that produced in, say, Venezuela or Japan or France.

The answer is partly linguistic, partly economic, and partly a reflection of the unique historical, racial and ideological development of the United States. Consider:

U.S. products enjoy the competitive advantage of being created in English, the first or second language of choice for almost all of the developed world and much of the developing world.

Films produced in English annually account for between 60 and 65 percent of the global box office, according to the Motion Picture Association of America; except for the occasional "The Full Monty," a British movie, most of these ticket sales are generated by American-made films. Producing in English gives a film immediate entree to some of the biggest movie markets in the world. After the United States, which accounts for about half of all ticket sales, the MPAA lists the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia among the 10 largest for film revenues.

This leads to the inevitable chicken-and-egg question: Is American pop riding on the coattails of English or is it causing the spread of English around the world?

Sometimes it's hard to know which is which. Indian youths, raised on years of American music, now pepper their conversations with words like "cool," "chill" and "happening," all used in their slang form. The desire to appear more American has prompted shop owners in Latin America to add an apostrophe to their stores' names – a seemingly trivial change, except that the possessive "s" does not exist in Spanish. The printing on a French Happy Meal box is in English. So is the language of cyberspace and of international meetings.

Surprisingly, one of the most eager markets for all things American is Vietnam, the United States' enemy for three decades. A war that was lost with bullets a generation ago is now being won with movies and compact discs. Since President Clinton normalized relations in 1995, Vietnamese have begun learning English in huge numbers. Young Vietnamese are also listening to American rock songs in American-style bars and restaurants. One new chain, with branches in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, is called Apocalypse Now, a reference to the movie of the same name and the war itself.

Beyond its glitz and gloss, its sex, speed and violence, U.S. popular culture sells abroad, observers say, because it reflects many of the appealing themes and myths of the United States itself: individuality, wealth, progress, tolerance, optimism.

Said Gitlin, the sociologist, "We are good at producing themes and story lines that appeal to a global sensibility: freedom, freedom of movement, freedom from family, from place, from earth, from roles. And speed – the rapidity of movement, of images, the intensity of kinetic experience. ... They want the sense of motion, and the sense of a private utopia."

To its admirers, this makes U.S. entertainment something bright and new and attractively upbeat. "The United States has little history and it is very open to new things," said David Escobar Galindo, El Salvador's foremost writer. "Europe has many wonderful things, but it is very tied to its past. U.S. culture is fresher."

Jack Lang, France's former minister of culture who is renowned for his protectionist views, appreciates American culture as "pure entertainment. It's without restraint, without shame. ... [It] finds the soul of the child in the adult. This is not pejorative."

There has long been another view, of course. To religious conservatives of all denominations, American culture is still the noisy electronic spawn of the Great Satan, undermining traditional values and encouraging wickedness. U.S. movies and television promote mindless consumerism, others complain, and emit a toxic vapor that chokes the wellspring of native creativity.

In its most extreme form, this distaste can serve reactionary political goals. In July, for instance, the Taliban militia, which controls most of Afghanistan, ordered that nation's citizens to get rid of their TVs, video players and satellite receivers. Such goods were deemed morally unacceptable by the Department for Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue.

The Taliban had already ended television broadcasts in the parts of Afghanistan under its control, but people continue to watch videotapes and foreign television channels on satellite dishes.

A fair number of Americans might even agree with Fidel Castro's recent critique of the United States' "canned culture," which he contended "transmits poisonous messages, in the social and moral order, to all families, to all homes, to all children."

MTV, which is available in more households abroad than in the United States, has discovered that simply exporting its U.S. programming doesn't work. So MTV now has 14 different 24-hour feeds, "all different and all similar," said MTV president Freston. The network's latest one began in Russia last month, with Russian veejays.

The most curious transformation of U.S. pop may be what has happened to rap and hip hop music as it has traveled across borders. Rap has become an internationally popular art form, but such American stars as Snoop Dogg with his alienated pose don't strike a chord everywhere. Japanese rappers sing saccharine songs about traditional, romantic love.

Recognizing that they will never fully swamp indigenous commercial culture, America's major producers instead have sought to join local companies through investing in entertainment companies and production deals.

As such productions imply, the popular culture business is slowly, and perhaps inevitably, becoming borderless.

It is, as Disney once suggested, a small world after all.

Ammunition box

l supremacy (n.) a position of authority

l domination (n.) having control/influence over someone or something

l to impose (v.) to force your belief/opinions on someone

l consumerism (n.) the belief that a society or individual needs many goods and services

l culture (n.) art, literature, music and other creative expressions

l mass production (n.) something that is produced in large quantity, amount, or number

l globalization (n.) the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets

l blockbuster (n.) a notably expensive, effective, successful, large, or extravagant movie

l intellectual property (n.) an idea, invention, or process) that derives from the work of the mind or intellect

l U.S. cultural invasion (n.) the incoming or spread of U.S. culture

l ideology (n.) a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture

l box office (n.) income from ticket sales for a film

l pop (n.) abbreviation for popular culture, or popular music

l individuality (n.) character peculiar to and distinguishing an individual from others

l utopia (n.) an imaginary place of ideal perfection

l denomination (n.) a religious organization