Frankfurt School

As soon as the mass media appeared, many of the scholarly researchers brought advanced theories on popular culture. Thesis emerged and each one was a probe to give an in-depth understanding of the audience reactions to media texts and cultural artifacts. This essay will attempt to comparing and contrasting the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School, two key theories that helped unlock and unveil structural codes of media texts. Both schools, shaped by particular historical conditions, studied the processes of cultural production, the audience reception and use of cultural artefacts. Despite having different set(s?) of understanding about the strength and power of the audience, they also share some positions in their approach. Both the similarities…

electronic dance music song has affectively been advertised to the masses as a clear embodiment of “popular music” through its peak in summer popularity that occurred in July for a solid three weeks. However, when examining beyond the cultural popularity of song, the repetitive lyrics in which the singer Daya repeat’s “don’t let me…” thirty eight times with the supporting sound an the vague relation to any particular meaning in the songs melody, creates a hollowed form of what exemplifies the…

Popular culture is an ambiguous and fluid concept with no absolute definition, so far. Many theorists have studied popular culture and have come to different conclusions, by critically analysing The Frankfurt school of thought alongside the Culturalist school of thought an argument will be made towards which is more useful to the study of popular culture. Using relevant case studies to aid in the argument. The Frankfurt School (1923) stemmed from classical Marxist ideology. This group of…

to feel as a part of something, but what happens when a persons views and beliefs are completely different from the norm? In order to feel understood, these people will seek out others that share in their ideas and feelings, often times forming a subculture. The Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of thought analyze popular culture in an attempt to examine the formation and the purpose of subcultures in society. Through personal observation and interviews I was able to analyze the Gothic…

Critical theory is, in my opinion, best defined by Marx(1843), as the ‘self-clarification of struggles and wishes of the age’, a general applicable definition that does not take into consideration a specific historical time, place or political problem. In order to talk about critical theory and its genuinely critical features I believe it is essential to make a clear distinction between critical theories and scientific theories. According to Frankfurt School there are 3 main categories of…

women in their music. This feministic viewpoint states that rappers often refer to women in derogatory terms such as ‘ho’ or ‘bitch’ and it seems like women are satisfied with it. But, why? This is what Dr. Smith-Cooper is trying to figure out. Since this scenario is quite contradictory if thoroughly thought of. In this study, she recruits five women to give their input on why they are hip-hop fans. The social theory being investigated is Marxist theory in which the development of cultural…

In 2001, Michael Haneke directed a film called, The Piano Teacher. Haneke’s view, as conveyed to the viewer, is not to rail against pornography, per se, but to rail against its impact as generated by a capitalist-patriarchal society. This stems from a similar modality of thinking introduced by Linda Williams in 1989, in which she “...moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does…” (Slade 656). Haneke’s method is…

The culture industry argument, established by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, is a critique of mass media, which refers to the industrialization of culture, where the masses are not the only source of mass culture; capitalism serves the masses, and treats them like commodities for their own benefit (McAnany & Wilkinson, 1996). Adorno and Horkheimer chose to call it culture industry, rather than mass media, because they believed that in mass media, masses had some influence upon the creation…

Highmore, Ben. “Familiar things.” Ordinary Lives. London and New York: Routledge, 2010: 58-85. In Ben Highmore’s Ordinary Lives, his chapter “Familiar things” is an insight into the argument of the meaningfulness of objects in our everyday lives. Highmore’s claim begins by creating a relatable situation in saying that there are tons of things in our homes or daily lives that we interact with but pay no attention to. Highmore goes on to say “Things act on us and we act on things. There seems to…

1 CHAPTER 1INTRODUCTIONThe culture industry’s cycle of assumptions is the interaction between the director(culture industry), the author (hip hop artist), and the audience (White consumer). Together thethree combine to create ideological outcomes that reflect and reinforce historically negativeWhite racial attitudes. Interrogating all three aspects of the cycle assists in understanding thecomplexities of the culture industry’s racial representations and White racial attitudes as well…