The TV world is all in a frenzy after an episode of Modern Family aired showing Lily, a two-year old, uttering the f-bomb. According to cast members, she actually said, “fudge” but the producers bleeped out the word and had the characters react as though she actually swore. It was all a key part of the show. Profanity has certainly invaded pop culture and especially TV over the years. We’re a long ways away from the quaint 50′s and 60′s when there were clear rules about certain words that could never be uttered in television. But is prime-time broadcast ready for major curse words or is that best left to the backwaters of cable TV?
R.E.M., one of the most successful and innovative bands from the 80′s and 90′s, decided to call it quits and announced their breakup on their own web site. Here’s what they had to say:
“To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening.” R.E.M.
This was a great band and even though they hadn’t released much of note lately (duh…that’s probably why they’re calling it a day), they had some amazing songs and lasted a very long time as a band. They’re not often mentioned in the same sentence as say the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (except maybe in this sentence). But they truly were an amazing band. I remember first listening to them in my dingy apartment in Boston while lying on my post-college futon with a cheap mattress and thinking, man these guys can rock. We’ll all miss you, R.E.M.
So young actress Rooney Mara will be taking on the role of Lisbeth Salander in the Hollywood remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. For those of you who missed out on the Stieg Larsson book trilogy, Lisbeth is a goth chick from Sweden who’s all attitude with some hacker skills and an awful lot of body piercings. It’s a big stretch for Rooney, who recently made a splash playing Mark Zuckerberg’s irate ex-girlfriend in The Social Network. Daniel “007″ Craig will star opposite her in the David Fincher directed film. This is the second time the story will hit the big screen. The Swedish version, starring Noomi Repace as Lisbeth, has already been in theatres and on Blu-Ray/DVD. It didn’t get quite the screen time here in the US that the Hollywood version is bound to receive when it comes out in 2011. I’m interested in seeing this one, since I’m a fan of mysteries and thrillers–everything from classic authors like Edgar Allen Poe to contemporaries like Tony Hillerman and Elaine Flinn. Stieg Larsson’s so-called Millenium Trilogy was a page-turner across all three books. The original Swedish movies adapted well, but it remains to see whether Hollywood remains true to the story or gets lost in romance and special effects.
OK, so pretty much everyone who follows the ups and downs of pop culture knows that the extremely popular TV show Glee is putting on a special tribute to The Rocky Horror Picture Show for this Halloween. The tribute will air on October 26 at 8pm on Fox and it will be pop culture from 2010 meeting pop culture from 1975. For anyone who’s been living in a time warp for the past few decades, Rocky Horror is a kitch cult classic that inspired a wave of midnight performances in the 70s and 80s where audience participation was the norm.
Here’s a video of the full performance of the classic song, Time Warp. Meh, I kind of think the original was a lot better but it’s still fun to see this revived for another generation.
So kick back on your favorite chair or cheap mattress with a tub of ice cream and get ready for some campy fun on Glee!
What is pop culture? It means a lot of different things to different people. If you’re a lazy slug and rely on Wikipedia for all of your answers in life, then popular culture is defined as:
the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century.
In fact it’s not a bad definition but it only scratches at the surface. For me, pop culture is an ever-changing landscape of what’s appealing to the masses at any given point in time. Part of the mystery of pop culture is that society’s needs and wants change and are in a constant state of flux. A phenomenon that is called a part of pop culture today might not have even entered the greater public consciousness if it had taken place a month earlier or later.
You can find pop culture everywhere, in TV, film, books, and even in games. It can be found in nearly all media.
Pop Culture is increasingly found in video games. Of course, you’ll find references to current events in all sorts of games, including console games, but it’s more and more prevalent in games for kids, such as Poptropica, Poptropica SOS Island, and Club Penguin or littered throughout game aggregation sites like MiniClip, where mini-games can be created and published on a variety of topics. Sometimes it’s only a day or two (or less!) between the time something hits the popular culture radar before it appears somewhere online as a game.
