The World Doesn't Care About American Pop Culture (As Much As We Think)

Who the hell are the Kardashians?

When I was about 12 years old, my family took a trip to Paris. To my lasting shame, one of our meals was purchased from McDonald's (and I didn't even have the presence of mind to order a royale with cheese). My younger sisters were too preoccupied with their Mulan Happy Meal toys to care about the culinary travesty that had just taken place.

During my freshman year in college I spent a few weeks in Ecuador and had the pleasure of viewing Steven Seagal's Under Siege 2. I was on a crowded bus, surrounded by live chickens and blown-out speakers and old ladies who were not shy about audible flatulence. Needless to say, I do not have favorable memories of that film.

Most Americans who travel abroad have a similarly sobering tale of American cultural imperialism - Simpsons T-shirts in Guyana, outdated Madonna tunes at a bar in Turkey, Nikes and Starbucks pretty much everywhere. It's obvious that various expressions of American pop culture are making inroads into previously untouched areas. And from there, I guess, one could come to the logical conclusion that these ubiquitous symbols of American prosperity/glamor/awesomeness are threatening to the indigenous cultures. Once the kids get blasted with some Black Eyed Peas, they'll lose their taste for...well, whatever passes for music in their backward-ass country.

Scary stuff - imagine a world where everyone reads Stephanie Meyer, listens to Jason Mraz, and thinks Step Up 3 was a good movie. The soulless corporate media machine of America rolls across the globe, obliterates its woefully over-matched/under-airbrushed competition, and smothers humanity with a brain-deadening tapioca sludge of Survivor, Beyonce, and US Weekly...

There's just one problem with this doomsday scenario. Actually, several billion problems. As in the number of people who don't care that much about the slop Hollywood is pushing. 

In Korea, the domestic entertainment industry is far more influential than American imports. I yell at my first-grade students for singing the insipid lyrics of 2PM or Tiara, not Justin Bieber. My middle school girls aren't drawing pictures of Channing Tatum on their desks; they're doodling the faces of equally good-looking and talentless Korean celebrities like Gang In or Rain or some other guy I don't care about. When we go out singing at the  noraebang, my girlfriend saves her most inspired performances for mopey Korean ballads. Korean pop culture is still vacuous, but at least it's Korean.

If you meet a Korean child on the street, or a friendly ajusshi in a restaurant, they might tell you how much they like Rapunzel, Prince, or Michael Jordan. If you go out drinking with a Korean, you will DEFINITELY have this conversation. In my opinion, this shouldn't be taken as an obsession with American pop culture. It's simply an attempt to establish a friendly connection via similar interests or experiences. I haven't watched a Manchester United game in, well, ever, but I mention Park Ji Sung every time I talk to a Korean kid who seems interested in soccer. Likewise, my hometown Minnesota Twins are semi-rivals of the Cleveland Indians, but I always put in a good word for Choo Shin Soo. People like to be friendly, and it helps to have a bit of common ground.

And we've got a lot of common ground, to be sure. Many Koreans have seen Inception, follow the NBA, listen to Radiohead, etc. But there are also some big fucking chasms between Korean and American culture. One of the best examples is Kpop, which is dominated by girl/boy groups assembled by various music-production corporations (even the term "record label" seems a bit too mom-and-pop for these behemoths). The Backstreet Boys would cringe at the cheesy choreography and cringe-inducing lyrics of most Kpop numbers. Kpop is to music what Pixie Stix are to food: a neuron-frying blast of sugar that can be delicious when you're in the mood  to get wild, but usually makes you sick to your stomach. To continue the analogy, Americans over the age of 12 wouldn't be caught dead consuming the stuff. But Koreans lap it up. By the same token death metal and gangsta rap haven't really caught on in Korea. Different cultures like different products.

These guys would sell about a dozen records in the U.S., yet
they're some of the biggest stars of the Korean music scene.

Wright Thompson recently wrote an article dealing with India's expanding cultural influence on Central Asia. In the article he made the argument that Western pop culture was, in many ways, too foreign to be embraced by many Asian societies. One of his best examples pitted Bollywood against Hollywood. American media, he argued, emphasized the glories of individualism to an extent that alienated Central Asian audiences. American love stories often involve the lovers giving a middle finger to their parents and society. They're going to do what they want, and everyone else can go to hell if they don't like it. Blockbusters like Titanic and Dirty Dancing to mind. Bollywood protagonists, on the hand, operate within the system of a collectivist society; that is, they attempt to convince their parents and peers that their love is worthy. This is something many Asians can relate to - defying society isn't quite as sexy/thrilling as it is in America.

A few years before Thompson wrote his article Stephen Asma wrote an excellent book called The Gods Drink Whiskey (which I will happily gush about to anyone willing to listen) that addressed similar issues in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia. Asma wrote that, upon arriving in Asia, he worried that Cambodian culture would be overwhelmed by a wave of American glam-consumerism. He worried about this until he realized that Cambodian kids didn't give a shit about MTV because they couldn't identify with the Western artists on its shows. It wasn't until MTV created spin-off channels dedicated to regional artists that the youth of Cambodia, Thailand, and elsewhere started paying attention. People want to cheer for people that look and sound like them. It might sound tribalistic, but it seems pretty well ingrained in human nature.

You can see similar phenomenon in Korea. Magazines like Maxim, Vogue, and even Men's Fitness all have issues that are primarily dedicated to Korean celebrities and Korean current events. Television programs like Superstar K, while outwardly quite similar to Western programs like American Idol, push a brand of entertainment that is targeted specifically to Korean tastes. When you really take a close look, most of the homogenizing of world culture is occurring in the packaging, and not so much in the actual product.

It's tough to argue that the world's metropolises are starting to resemble each other more than ever before. There is quite a bit of cross contamination; it's startling see Korean casino adverts featuring Pierce Brosnan, or a Coldstone Creamery on every corner of Seoul. And let's be honest - Dunkin' Donuts needs to calm down and quit opening a new shop every 3 blocks. But the sky isn't falling just yet. The West won't be achieving cultural hegemony any time soon. Some aspects of Western culture are undoubtedly appealing to people of other nations, and those people have every right to adopt them. They are discerning, intelligent humans capable of making their own decisions, and it is sneakily condescending and paternalistic to think Americans should curtail the spread of their own culture because Asia/Africa/etc. just can't resist the sexy shininess of it all.

It's evident Korea and the rest of the non-Western world would like to sample some of America's wares. And its just as obvious that they find other tidbits unappetizing. The end result is a sometimes fascinating, sometimes bewildering fusion of cultural elements that bears the brand of globalization while still maintaining a distinctly local flavor. It is, to borrow a phrase from Southeast Asian T-shirts, "Same Same But Different."