Do Americans have a culture?

[Deja Q]

We go "ooh and aah" when reading or watching about other cultures (whether it be wholly accurate or not).

Do we have our own?

[salinen]

1. Is having a culture of violence

count as having a culture?

[wickywom]

2. one word...

jazz.

[benburch]

3. Does Yogurt count?

:D

[RandomKoolzip]

4. This is an insulting question.

I can't believe you'd actually ask such a bullshit question.

[Deja Q]

8. I think the other 6 responses speak for themselves.

In other words, explain why it is insulting.

And there is nothing bullshit about the truth. It's an insult to call our 9-to-5-then-spend-money-on-junk-food-while-listening-to-britney-spears'-manufactured-corporate-tunez-before-suing-her-for-being-awful a culture.

[RandomKoolzip]

11. Huh, I guess the Blues, minimalism, Twain, Pynchon, jazz, rock,

"Mystery Science Theatre," Pauline Kael, Dos Passos, third stream composition, Edward Hopper, Frank Capra, Spike Lee, OutKast, Andy Warhol, Ornette Coleman,"The Godfather," Anthony Braxton, to name just the first things that came to my head, never existed.

You have choices, you know.

[Deja Q]

12. Thank you... And I owe you an apology...

I was thinking of modern day mainstream corporatized America, conveniently forgetting about other genres.

What's that bumper sticker say, "I'm drowning in the mainstream"...?

Please forgive me.

[RandomKoolzip]

13. It's okay, you don't need to apologize...I have to say the same stuff

to my wife all the time. She tends to forget that America is a great fucking country that has produced some of the richest culture the world has ever known, albeit not exactly the most highbrow.

[Nevernose]

20. For the sake of argument,most of the stuff he mentioned ARE mainstream

Just for the sake of argument,most of the stuff he mentioned ARE mainstream.

FOr all of the "McCulture" enthusiaists out there: while I do not neccessarily agree with you about the evils of corporate America, most of the stuff that RandomKoolZip just mentioned are the result of corporate America,as well.

Someone had to find the cash to produce "It's a Wonderful Life"; someone thought that Outkast was commercially possible; some asshole thought "The Godfather" would make them a mint.

The system we Americans are living in -- although distinctly American and not European -- has its roots in the year 900AD or thereabouts, so start looking for a viable synthesis and quit harping about a failed antithesis. Sheesh.

[RandomKoolzip]

21. You are correct, sir.

America's highbrow culture and its lowbrow sister culture are both great in their own way. Time has ways of knocking the highbrow down to size, too....

All the best rock musicians of the fifties were just trying to get rich (Ask Bo Diddley.). It's only recently that we've seen this cleaving of high (anti-corporate) and low (procorporate) culture; the divisions used to be less opaque. Since corporations have seen their profits and their level of control soar past their needs, the sociological implications of the official corporate-sanctioned culture have become decidely sinister...it's hard to imagine a post-modernist semi-ironic appreciation (thus elevating said totem to high-brow shelf) of Usher in ten or twenty years, unlike the cults of snarky enshrinement which emerged around previous cultural effluvia such as "Gilligan's Island" or Disco.

Thus the simultaneous political polarization. We're fighting not just for America's good name, her political soul, but her cultural soul as well. But love it or not, all of our culture is OF capatalism. The market drives the arts....but that market is now officially too fucking huge.

[DrWeird]

15. Hmm, but does that all fall under "American culture?"

"blues, jazz, (rock), Spike Lee, Outkast" Would also fall under African-American culture. These things were rejected, for the most part, by mainstream American society when they arrived, although much has been coopted, particularly rock. And then they have their own subcategories, there's a blues culture, a hip-hop culture. MST3K, while near and dear to my heart and yours, barely registers as a blip on the radar of most people, I'd suspect. Would a particular piece of art such as "The Godfather" or a particular artist, like Hopper, be the culture? Is there a particular cultural event, music, food etc. that unites all Americans like one fines in tight-knit cultures? It's sort of a philosophical debate, and I think that was the spirit of the question asked in the OP.

[RandomKoolzip]

16. If you're going to take that approach, then....

one could argue that there is no such thing as an original culture in ANY country, since all humanity sprang from the same place...is a tribesman banging on a log in Kenya 14,000 years ago doing something intrinsically "Kenyan" while a Maori tribesman doing the same exact thing rocking it "New Zealand" style?

All cultural products are not reduced but enhanced by the unique prisms in which they take up new homes. As a listener, I love certain African musicians, like Fela and Malatu Astatqe, but the blues and funk ("African"-American "mutt" forms) give me more pleasure. This is because the source-hummus that is the original African muse was transmogrified and alchemized by its new practitioners in the New World responding to all sorts of new inputs (Country, folk, Childe Ballads, birdsong, what have you) and intensified to reflect the increasingly mobile, industrialized miasma that America became after they arrived.

To argue that blues, jazz, rock, etc, are exclusively "African" forms does a disservice to those who laid the groundwork for those forms, any trace of the source material in the newly intensified forms is but a whiff. One must credit these other influences, the non-African ones, no matter how politically incorrect it may seem. Blues could not have been invented were it not for whites. Rock was created from an amalgam of country and blues (and never rejected upon arrival, as you claim...the fact is that most listeners had known the genre by the names Rhythm and Blues and Country and Western; four different titles subsumed/incestuously fucked each other and birthed a final hybrid pair, ROCK AND ROLL); the listeners /innovators of these forms allowed multifarious (racial) inputs, thus allowing growth. In other words, these forms are products of the Americanization process, while their antecedents may have come from other places; the relationship between the two is like the relationship between the first wheel and the first bullet train, i.e. merely a trace.

And I don't know that we can speak for other cultures when we speak of a central, "uniting," totem that binds peoples and separates them from other peoples. I'm sure a Cambodian in the fields might bristle at the thought that his culture would be represented by the pop idols his country produces....possibly a child of privilege in the same country might well think that the traditional folk forms enshrined by the dude in the paddy are dullsville....or vice-versa. We don't know.

Plus, America's a big country. Regions have their own cultural geegaws to boost and simultaneously rebel against. As Greil Marcus has written, America is like the cuckoo bird; it is a bird which has laid its eggs in the nest another bird has built (Natives genocided). But those are some fuckin' beautiful eggs, jack. America, to ape a totally hoary cliche, is a soup of hundreds of different cultures. However, to claim that there IS NO culture here is just as false as to proclaim America #1 at everything. The truth is that there is a staggering amount of culture here, and there is a simultaneously disturbing corollary which travels alongside this revelation: there is no single, uniting symbol of "Americanness" we can embrace in our culture, becasuse of America's uniquely "mutt" upbringing.

[Fenris]

5. Would you like a Big Mac and a Marlboro?

Hello consumer culture!

[Reverend_Smitty]

6. According to our president...

we have a culture of life in this country...Now if I could only figure out what that means

[onebigbadwulf]

7. It's called the get fat, shoot your friend, and sue your neighbor culture

Yay!

[Taverner]

9. It is impossible to not have a culture

[BlackVelvetElvis]

10. Yes, we do.

It's not pop culture either, although that garners 99% of the attention of the population. There are wonderful writers, poets, artists, thinkers, teachers and musicians out there that may as well be invisible.
The fact that the lack of attention doesn't discourage alot of these creators of real culture is testament that we do have a culture.

[mopinko]

14. we have a unique culture

we are pack rats, mutts, dumpster divers, improvisers, rule breakers, messy, brawny, stinky, sweaty, amazing.

[RandomKoolzip]

19. Nicely put.

End of story.

[chaska]

17. Yes, the kind that makes your teeth rot.

[sir_captain]

18. There's plenty of culture here in NYC for everyone

seriously, though, NYC is one of the leading cultural cities in the world, easily. The whole northeast, really, is one of the, if not the, epicenters of intellectualism in the whole world, after all.

[barb162]

22. yes and it is rather unique, isn't it?