thoughs on identity and mainstream

[taken from my notes]

It is one of the central features of my way of thinking that we, as a discipline (and throughout academics, for that matter) do not spend enough time, energy, and effort theorizing mainstream society, mainstream culture. We in Cultural Studies are now used to thinking about a diversity of subcultures, a diversity of ways of rebelling, a diversity of alternate ways of professing/expressing identity. When it comes to mainstream culture, however, we tend to stay close to our established structures

The key distinction which I feel we consistently fail to make is between “mainstream” and “dominant.” I have used these terms trying to explain stuff to many people and have been met with the response: “aren't they the same thing?”

If you want to understand my theory, then I need to be ultimately clear here: No, they are most certainly not the same thing. In fact, one of the most consistent mistakes I feel us culture studyists make is conflating the two, making them the same. This is how we equate whatever is politically or ideologically dominant with whatever is culturally dominant. This is our mistake.

True, the two definitely have, I believe, a very intense relationship, but when we make them the same, we are making mainstream culture simplistic, and whenever I see anything that's portrayed as simplistic, I immediately think “hmmm, someone either doesn't want to tell me what's going on, or they don't want to spend the effort figuring out what's going on.”

Some brief definitions for these very different words, then. Mainstream, to my eyes, is what's ultimately popular. It's the cross-section of things that are generally accepted. While not being some bland, generic average, it is everything that doesn't horrifically offend us, everything that the majority in sheer numbers would accept.

Dominant, on the other hand, is a clearly political (in the macro sense) term. It is a term relating to power, to domination, to one group trying (and, since we are talking about “dominant” here, generally succeeding) to impose its will on everyone and everything. It is the patriarchy, the heteronormatives, the ethnically pure, the political (in the micro sense) group in charge, the dominant way of thinking.

Let's go in simple terms for our examples. I'm going to be pulling a lot of stuff together here, and it might seem that I'm talking in about 1,000 different directions here, but please, bear with me...I will, as they say, be coming to an ultimate point.

Example one: food

I remember going to a Mexican restaurant with my father on one of my first visits home from college. I asked him if there were any Mexican restaurants when he was a kid, or, indeed, any ethnic restaurants at all. He told me that there were none. I had a real problem imagining a life where I could not get ethnic food. Is a life without good Chinese worth living? Put me in a restaurant which does decent Sichuan, and I am one happy person. In fact, one of the best things about moving to Ohio was good proximity to Lebanese and Indian food. I am spoiled by the fact that I can walk up the road and get gyros and grape leaves that rock.

I remember reading an article about the spread of Chinese restaurants across the country in The Journal of Popular Culture (find that title), and it argued that Chinese restaurants were originally visited by patrons who wanted the “unusual” experience. In order to expand and become palatable to people across the land, these restaurateurs had to adopt their cuisine to mainstream standards, tone down the tastes and textures which were (at the time) incompatible with mainstream American tastes.

As these restaurants spread, however, more and more people got to experience them. There began to form great hordes of Chinese food junkies across this great country. Chinese recipes found their way into American cookbooks, into notions of American cuisine. And while many dishes (such as Chop Suey or Fortune Cookies) are about as Chinese as a hot dog, they brought enough people into these ethnic restaurants to the point where having a Chinese restaurant in town is now no longer unusual for anyone. Hell, my wife's small hometown (Paulding, OH) has a pretty decent Chinese place.

Other cuisines did the same thing. Mexican restaurants are now everywhere. And they are not just the “weird food” outposts; they are generally part of the mainstream restaurant landscape. Hell, many “Mexican” dishes (most of which are more Tex-Mex than anything, but anyway...) have found their way into standard restaurants and food purveyors. McDonalds's across this nation have sold Breakfast Burritos. Yes, the burrito is now mainstream American.

This does not mean, however, that this popular acceptance has led to these cuisines unabashedly invading all elements of life. The grocery store (one of the gate keepers of dominant food culture if there was one) still only selectively stocks Chinese and Mexican ingredients. Nobody thinks twice about Cajun food, but my grocery store will not, e-mails to the manager aside, stock andouille sausage.

Example two: music

There has always been a racial division in American music. When Billboard first started music charts, the original categories were “Country and Western” and “Race Music.” Today's “Urban” music chart is no different.

Rap started to become mass popularly aware in the eighties. While there were obviously some precursors (there are strong ties to Jamaican music, particularly “dub,” which some scholar much more versed in this field than I could explicate), most people didn't really know anything about rap until the early popularizers, groups like Run-DMC and such, hit big during the time of Reagan.

Now, it didn't take long for rap to become wildly popular among a wide section of the populace. Rap had its own MTV show. Rap started showing up in movie soundtracks. Commercials would show kids rapping, grandmothers rapping, dogs rapping. Rapping became an omnipresent part of the music scene.

From the get-go, rap was not exclusively a Black music form. It was, however, dominated at an early age by African Americans. When rap was still mostly confined to urban areas of major northern cities, it was pretty much a black cultural form. When rap got its own MTV show, it was just a more widely distributed black cultural form. When dogs started rapping on commercials? Not so much anymore.

Is rap still black? It's a question that me and my students battle with on a fairly regular basis. It is true that the majority of rappers are still black, still from inner northern cites. This does not stop white rappers like Eminem from acceptance, however. And the “black thing” is probably not the case with the audience. The audience for rap is pretty much universal at this point, and I'm generally hard pressed to find students who don't like rap.

Is rap mainstream? Undoubtedly. The audience for rap is vast, diverse, and far reaching. Rap is not unusual. It is not a curiosity. While many (myself included) might not like most rap and might avoid listening to it, it is not surprising to anyone when rap or some other element of hip hop culture appears in our movies/television shows/commercials/whatever.

Is rap dominant? Well, this is trickier. If we go on an economic basis, then rap is an area where the artists can quickly move into the production realm, and a black rapper from the ghetto owning his own mega-million record label is in many ways about as resistant as you can get. If we go by broadcast, we get a different answer, because while rap gets radio play on “urban” channels, those channels are inevitably owned by one of five companies...so it is funneled through and used by the dominant. Artistically? Rap does have more critical acceptance than ever, but it is still seen as a lower class of musical expression by many, so this is stupendously difficult to answer.

This dominant thing is tricky.