CULTURE

 Raymond Williams (1983) calls culture ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English
language’. Williams suggests three broad definitions.

1. ‘Culture can be used to refer to ‘a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’.

2. ‘Culture’ might be to suggest ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group’.

3. ‘Culture can be used to refer to ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’.

IDEOLOGY

 Graeme Turner (2003) calls it ‘the most important conceptual category in cultural studies.

 Ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people.

 A second definition suggests a certain masking, distortion, or concealment.

 A third definition of ideology uses the term to refer to ‘ideological forms.’ This usage is intended to draw
attention to the way in which texts (television fiction, pop songs, novels, feature films, etc.) always present a
particular image of the world.

 A fourth definition of ideology is one associated with the early work of the French cultural theorist Roland
Barthes. Barthes (2009) argues that ideology (or ‘myth’ as Barthes himself calls it) operates mainly at the
level of connotations, the secondary, often unconscious, meanings that texts and practices carry, or can be
made to carry.

 A fifth definition is one that was very influential in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is the definition of ideology
developed by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Althusser’s (2009) main contention is to see
ideology not simply as a body of ideas, but as a material practice.

POPULAR CULTURE

 Popular culture is simply culture that is widely favored or well-liked by many people.
 A second way of defining popular culture is that it is the culture that is left over after we have decided what
is high culture.
 A third way of defining popular culture is as ‘mass culture’.
 A fourth definition contends that popular culture is the culture that originates from ‘the people’.
 A fifth definition of popular culture is one that draws on the political analysis of the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci, particularly on his development of the concept of hegemony.

HEGEMONY

 To refer to the way in which dominant groups in society, through a process of ‘intellectual and moral
leadership’, seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society. (Gramsci, 2009)

COMPROMISE EQUILIBRUM

 The compromise equilibrium of hegemony can also be employed to analyze different types of conflict
within and across popular culture.
 A sixth definition of popular culture is one informed by recent thinking around the debate on
postmodernism.
 The main point to insist on here is the claim that postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes
the distinction between high and popular culture.
 Finally, what all these definitions have in common is the insistence that whatever else popular culture is, it is
definitely a culture that only emerged following industrialization and urbanization.
 THEORIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

CULTURALISM

 Theory of culture - the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life.

 It aims to reconstitute what Williams calls ‘the structure of feeling.’ By structure of feeling, it means the
shared values of a specific group, class, or society.

 Culture always exists on three levels:

1. There is the lived culture of a specific time and place, only fully accessible to those living in that time and
place.

2. There is the recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts: the culture of a period.

3. There is also, as the factor connecting lived culture and period cultures, the culture of the selective
tradition.

MARXISM

 Marxism is a body of revolutionary theory with the purpose of changing the world.

 Marxism insists that all are ultimately political.

 The Marxist approach to culture insists that texts and practices must be analyzed in relation to their
historical conditions of production (and in some versions, the changing conditions of their consumption and
reception).

 Products of Modes of Production:

i. specific ways of obtaining the necessaries of life.

ii. specific social relationships between workers and those who control the mode of production, and

iii. specific social institutions (including cultural ones).

 A classical Marxist approach to popular culture would above all else insist that to understand and explain a
text or practice it must always be situated in its historical moment of production, analyzed in terms of the
historical conditions that produced it

Theodor Adorno (1991) and Max Horkheimer (1978)

 They coined the term ‘culture industry’ to designate the products and processes of mass culture.

 The products of the culture industry, they claim, are marked by two features: homogeneity and
predictability.

Malcolm Arnold (2009) and F.R Leavis (2009)

 They had worried that popular culture represented a threat to cultural and social authority, the Frankfurt
School argue that it produces the opposite effect: it maintains social authority.

Leo Lowenthal (1961)

contends that the culture industry, by producing a culture marked by ‘standardization, stereotype,
conservatism, mendacity, manipulated consumer goods’, has worked to depoliticize the working class – limiting its
horizon to political Authentic culture has taken over the utopian function of religion: to keep alive the human desire
for a better world beyond the confines of the present. (Horkheimer 1978) 11 and economic goals that could be
realized within the oppressive and exploitative framework of capitalist society.
  The culture industry, in its search for profits and cultural homogeneity, deprives ‘authentic’ culture of its
critical function, its mode of negation. Commodification (sometimes understood by other critics as
‘commercialization’) devalues ‘authentic’ culture, making it too accessible by turning it into yet another
saleable commodity.

STRUCTURALISM

 Structuralism is a way of approaching texts and practices that is derived from the theoretical work of the
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
 Based on this claim, he suggests that meaning is not the result of an essential correspondence between
signifiers and signified; it is rather the result of difference and relationship

TWO DIVISIONS OF LANGUAGE

1. Langue refers to the system of language, the rules and conventions that organize it.

2. Parole refers to the individual utterance, the individual use of language.

TWO THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO LINGUISTICS (Saussure):

1. Diachronic approach, which studies the historical development of a given language, and

2. Synchronic approach, which studies a given language in one moment in time.

STRUCTURALISM TAKES TWO BASIC IDEAS FROM Saussure’s work:

 First, a concern with the underlying relations of texts and practices, the ‘grammar’ that makes meaning
possible;
 Second, the view that meaning is always the result of the interplay of relationships of selection and
combination made possible by the underlying structure. I

GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Feminism - Post Feminism - Queer Theory

Gender and Sexuality (Feminism)

 Four Types of Feminisim:

1. Radical feminists argue that women’s oppression is the result of the system of patriarchy, a system of
domination in which men as a group have power over women as a group.

2. Marxist feminist analysis the ultimate source of oppression is capitalism. The domination of women by men is
seen because of capital’s domination over labor.

3. Liberal feminism differs from both Marxist and radical feminists in that it does not posit a system – patriarchy
or capitalism – determining the oppression of women. Instead, it tends to see the problem in terms of male
prejudice against women, embodied in law or expressed in the exclusion of women from specific areas of life.

4. Dual-systems theory represents the coming together of Marxist and radical feminist analysis in the belief that
women’s oppression is the result of a complex articulation of both patriarchy and capitalism.

Bell Hooks (1989)

 A political movement concerned with women’s oppression and the ways and means to empower women –
what Bell Hooks (1989) describes as ‘finding a voice’.
Michèle Barrett (1982)

 ‘Cultural politics are crucially important to feminism because they involve struggles over meaning’.

Lana Rakow (2009)

 Feminists approaching popular culture proceed from a variety of theoretical positions that carry with them a
deeper social analysis and political agenda’.

Christine Gledhill (2009)

 She advocates a feminist cultural studies ‘which relates commonly derided popular forms to the condition of
their consumption in the lives of sociohistorical constituted audiences’.

Gender and Sexuality (Post Feminism)

 It can be used to describe a type of feminism, a theoretical position within feminism, and a tendency in
contemporary popular culture.

 To really understand post-feminist popular culture it needs to be situated in relation to de-traditionalization

Gender and Sexuality (Queer Theory)

 Queer theory, as Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (1995) explain, ‘provides a discipline for exploring the
relationships between lesbians, gay men and the culture which surrounds and (for the large part) continues
to seek to exclude us.

 Simone de Beauvoir’s (1984) observation that ‘one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one’.

 De Beauvoir’s distinction establishes an analytical difference between biological sex (‘nature’) and gender
(‘culture’), suggesting that while biological sex is stable, there will always be different and competing
(historically and socially variable) ‘versions’ of femininity and masculinity.

Post Modernism

 Postmodernism is a term current inside and outside the academic study of popular culture.

 Postmodernism is a culture, which offers no position of ‘critical distance’; it is a culture in which claims of
‘incorporation’ or ‘co-optation’ make no sense, as there is no longer a critical space from which to be
incorporated or co-opted.

 Affirmative culture is a realm we may enter in order to be refreshed and renewed in order to be able to
continue with the ordinary affairs of everyday life.

PHILIPPINE MODERNITY AND POPULAR CULTURE: AN ONTOHISTORICAL INQUIRY

 Popular culture, according to National Artist for literature Bienvenido Lumbera in his book Revaluation:
Essays on Philippine Literature, Theatre and Popular Culture (1984, as cited in Garchitorena, n.d.), is highly
different from the folk culture and nationalist culture of the Filipinos.
 Popular culture as introduced by the Spanish was "popular" to the extent that it was a "watering-down of
Spanish-European culture for the purpose of winning the general populace over to the 'ideology' of the
colonial regime."
Popular culture at the time was created by colonial authorities, with the aid of the local intelligentsia, to
promote the interests of the Church and the State.
 However, once the native intelligentsia saw the effects of popular culture and knew how to work its way as
propaganda, they soon used the Spanish weapon against them. In the 19th century, through the Propaganda
 Movement, the native intelligentsia used the same forms of popular culture to "undermine the power of the
abusive friars and rally the populace to put an end to colonial rule".
 The advent of American colonialism brought, the properly so-called, popular culture to the Philippines. The
liberal policy regarding the printing press, soon through radio, television and film, increased the circulation
of popular culture forms.
 Early on, the local intelligentsia has the same apprehensions over mass media as they called it
commercialization, or vulgarization of art.
 To see it in Lumbera's lens, "Popular culture is power, and whoever wields it to manipulate minds is likely to
find its literary and technological machinery turned against him when the minds it has manipulated discover
its potency as a political weapon."

HISTORY AND CULTURAL IDENTITY: THE PHILIPPINE CASE by Rolando M. Gripaldo, Ph.D.

 Cultural identity evolves with historical development.

 This paper will argue that Filipino cultural identity is still something in the making within the greater purview
of the Western culture a positive cultural identity which Filipinos can be proud of and which foreigners can
affirm in a favorable light.

HISTORY

 History, on one hand, is defined as the study of the records of the past. This includes written records,
archeological artifacts, ruins, and even traditions and literature orally transmitted from generation to
generation.

CULTURAL IDENTITY

 Cultural identity, on the other hand, is that aspect or aspects of a culture that a people are proud to identify
themselves with and which foreigners usually mention with awe or admiration.

 A nation generally consists of different tribes, and so there is a tribal cultural identity and a national cultural
identity.
 The term culture may be defined broadly as the sum total of what a tribe or group of people produced
(material or nonmaterial), is producing, and will probably be producing in the future.
 Edward Taylor looks at culture as the complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom, and any capabilities and habits acquired by man as member of the society.
 Albert Dondeyne (1964) talks of historicity as emanating from humans, and to my mind so is culturicity
 Charles Taylor thinks of culture as a “public place” or a “common [social] space” by which an individual is
situated or born into, and by which he or she grows in political association with others through a shared
communication vocabulary.
 UNESCO (2002) stresses this collectivity of culture as a “set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual, and
emotional features of society.” It includes “art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value
systems, traditions and beliefs.”
 We all know that civilization grows out of culture. That is why we can say that while we can have culture
without civilization, we cannot have civilization without culture.
 The word culture etymologically means “to cultivate” while civilization originally means “citizen” (from
civitas), which suggests urbanization or city life with a strong political organization and bureaucracy.
 Leslie White (1949) invented the word “symbolate” to refer to a cultural object that comes about from the
act of symbolization, such as a work of art, a tool, a moral code, etc.
 Noam Chomsky (1975) argues that every human being has an innate “language acquisition device.”
 Julian Huxley (1957) classified the social world into “mentifacts” (ideological or belief subsystem),
“socifacts” (social relationships and practices, or the sociological subsystem), and “artifacts” (material
objects and their use, or the technological subsystem).

ARCHAEOLOGIST

 Archaeologists are diggers of past cultures and can only generally uncover the material remains of a culture.
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST

 Cultural anthropologists focus on the nonmaterial or symbolic aspect of culture.

 The pragmatist John Dewey (1960) started it all by arguing that we should not limit art and its appreciation
to art museums and art galleries. We can find art in everyday life; in the quality of experience we enjoy.
There is art when we see a person with a beautiful face walking by, or one who is exquisitely dressed up, or
the elegant clothes in tribal festivals. We find art in a basketball player who gracefully shoots a ball at the
ring, or in a nicely decorated cooked food, or in a superb workmanship by a car technician.

 Mike Featherstone (1991) describes the leveling off process—the elevation of mass, tribal, and popular
(“pop”) culture to an equal footing with high culture—as a postmodernist feature of our present civilization.

IDEOLOGY

 An ideology is a set of values and beliefs that propels an individual or a group of people into action.

IDENTITY

 An identity, ideologically speaking, connotes a feeling of oneness, an emotional acceptance of a totality or,
at least, of features within a given totality that one is proud of, an internal or psychological desire to project
this totality or its features to others with exuberance, and the anticipation that others will recognize and
accept it (totality) or them (features) with respect.

 Cultural identity is an evolving thing—sometimes slow, sometimes fast. Usually the dominant tribe of a
nation will assume the national cultural identity.
 It is possible that a civilized nation will evolve into a post-nation. Postcolonial nations of Asia are toying
with the idea of a regional identity while the nations of Europe are gradually being transformed into
post-nations, or they are evolving into a newly emerging regional identity called the European Union
(EU).
 Unfortunately, some nations—usually postcolonial ones or those nationstates that were once colonies—
are still struggling to evolve a cultural identity which they can be proud of, an identity that is not just
racial or ethnic but one that lies above ethnicity.

THE PHILIPPINE SITUATION

Four Groups of Filipinos

1. In the Philippine situation, there are many tribes and in the hinterlands we can still find tribal identities—
small groups of people wearing their tribal clothes and doing their tribal ways. They are Filipinos in the
“cultural citizenship” sense, that is, their national identity is defined in terms of the provisions of the
constitution: namely, they are native inhabitants (born here with indigenous parents) of the country.

2. We can also find a second group of tribes in the Philippines whose cultural identities have been touched by
modernization (which in this context is the same as Westernization) in a minimal way. Some of them sent
their children to school and they are generally aware of their cultural citizenship. They go to urban areas in
either tribal or modern clothes but when they go home, they wear their tribal attire. They identify
themselves more as a tribe rather than as a Filipino.

3. A third group of tribes are those that are more modernized compared to the second group. They send their
children to school and when they visit the urban areas, especially the big cities, they wear modern clothes
and adapt to the ways of modernity. Their identity is defined in terms of their religious persuasion. Some of
the educated attend parties and dance in disco houses. They generally identify themselves as Filipinos. But
when they go home to their native places, they adjust themselves again to their native or religious ways.

4. The last group of tribes is the highly modernized (Westernized). They are the largest group consisting of
various tribes such as the Tagalog, Bisayan, Ilokano, Kapampangan, and others. Their common perspective is
outward or global rather than inward or national.
  The present cultural situation has been described as the result of a “damaged culture” (Fallows 1987) where
there is lack of nationalism and where what is public is viewed in low esteem, without much national pride.

 While culture develops in history and history feeds on culture for its development, some individuals and
groups move faster in cultural and historical development while others lag behind in various stages of
growth.

PHILIPPINE POPULAR CULTURE: DIMENSIONS AND DIRECTIONS THE STATE OF RESEARCH IN PHILIPPINE POPULAR
CULTURE by Doreen G. Fernandez

 “Mass media-generated culture in the Philippines is what can be properly called popular culture, and this is
of recent vintage.”

 “Mass communication research, concerned with content (content analyses) and effects on the audience, is
the earliest form of popular culture research in the Philippines, although it is of course not meant as such.”

 In the middle seventies there came the literature scholars who began to examine film, television, radio, and
comics as modes of fiction and drama - in different media.

 Any literary product reaching the people was getting there through the media, and that reach, that power,
needed to be studied, analyzed, evaluated.

KOMIKS

 The first Filipino comic strip was "Kenkoy," which first appeared in 1929, its main character a city slicker
through whom creator Antonio Velasquez commented on "the foibles of Filipinos grappling with the new
manners and mores brought about by urbanization."

 By 1931 other comic strip characters joined slick haired Kenkoy, almost all of them modelled on American A
comics characters: Kulafu, who roamed the mountains of Luzon as Tarzan did Africa; Huapelo, the Chinese
corner store owner (long a stock figure of fun in Philippine life, fiction and drama), Saryong Albularyo, the
barrio doctor whose last name meant quack; Goyo and Kikay, local counterparts of Maggie and Jiggs, and so
on through the years and the changing fashions to eventually include today's superheroes, horror stories,
science fiction, preternatural creatures derived both from lower Philippine mythology and from Western
sources

 And so there appear Dyesebel the siren; the flying Darna; the Medusa-like Valentina, characters from
Philippine folklore, otherworldly royalty and nobility out of the quatrains of the awit and cordo, freaks of
many persuasions like phantomanok (phantom and rooster) and horse-bodied Petra, magical agents of good
like Karina and her flying kariton (pushcart), historical figures, sports figures, and in a more realistic vein,
people from daily life - martyred mothers and drunken fathers and business executives and blue-collar
workers.

 Since 1972 and Martial Law, the komiks have also been used by government agencies to carry such
developmental messages as the Green Revolution (home vegetable gardens), housing programs, and family
planning.

 The content - the dreams, the hopes, the values, the vision of life, the escape from reality (that suggests the
reality escaped from), the problems and their solutions, the total world view reflected in the komiks -
definitely makes the komiks popular culture.

 Although not created by the consumers, these are created for a popular and not an elite audience, by artists
who, although motivated by profit, have their finger on the public pulse, their ears cocked to the public
voice, their minds tuned to the public dream.

 Komiks have been studied both from the mass communication and the literary-cultural approaches in
magazine and journal articles, and in theses. An early study was Karina Constantino David's "The Changing
 Images of Heroes in Local Comic Books," 1974. Dr. Reyes' subsequent work is pioneering, since although it
occasionally uses literary norms and methods, it takes the komiks as a phenomenon of popular culture.

FILMS

 The first films shown in the Philippines were short features called cinematrografo, usually presented
interspersed with zarzuela or vaudeville numbers.

 In 1909, two Americans, Yearsley and Gross, produced the first two locally made feature films, both on the
life of Jose Rizal.

 The first full-length feature film, was Jose Nepomuceno's "Dalagang Bukid," in 1919, which used the story
and the star of Herrnogenes Ilagan's zarzuela of the same name, the most successful play of the type (it is
said to have played at least 1000 times all around the islands).

 The first talking picture in the islands was made in 1932 by Musser and titled "Ang Aswang.”

 In 1924, there were 214 movie houses all over the Philippines, thirty-four in Manila, nineteen in Negros,
seventeen in Rizal province, sixteen in Pampanga, fourteen in Laguna, thirteen in Tayabas, and five in Iloilo.

 By 1939 the Philippine movie industry was fifth in the world in the number of talkies produced. There were
345 sound theaters in the country, a 25 percent increase over 1938, and eleven movie companies with a
paid-up capital of almost 430,000 pesos.

 From then the Philippine movie industry moved from the big-studio syndrome to the present proliferation
of small independent producers, battling such obstacles as high taxes, (28 percent of gross earnings) high
production costs, scarcity of raw materials, no government help, little or no professional training for actors
and technical staff, and, most especially, competition from foreign movies which, until the last few years,
had exclusive hold over the first-run movie houses.

 However, the Filipino film definitely has an audience. The movie houses enjoy fair to full occupancy from 9
A.M. to 11 P.M. daily, a phenomenon that has 61 disappeared from the West Television has not usurped the
movie domain, since it is not yet available to the mass audience - the workers, low-salaried employees,
household help, and their families, whose chief entertainment is the movies.

 Of the films that fill the movie houses, an average of 120 each year (in the last five years) are Filipino, but
these are generally the ones that are mobbed, and whose stars - Dolphy, Vilma Santos, Nora Aunor et. a1. -
have become folk heroes or, in the current lingo, "superstars."

 There are no film archives in the Philippines, no film libraries even in the vaults of the former Big Four -
Premiere, Sampaguita, Lebran and LVN Studios - and so the television run is of value to the film student or
historian as being the "living morgue" of the Filipino films that survive.

RADIO

 In June 1922, three 50-watt stations owned and operated by an electrical supply company and organized by
an American, Henry Hermann, were given temporary permits to set up stations in Manila and Pasay.

 The stations were mainly for demonstration, and for about two years provided mostly music for the few who
owned sets. They were replaced by a 100-watt station, KZKZ.

 By 1939 there were four stations owned by department stores, which used them mainly to advertise their
own merchandise.

 Advertising in radio by companies other than the owners began in 1932. Radio control laws were
promulgated at about the same time that these outside advertisements began to be accepted.

 Radio in the thirties is said to have gained almost as much glamor as the movies, since newspaper attention
was lavished on radio personalities, just as it was on movie stars. "Sunrise Club" and "Listerine Amateur
Hour" were the more popular radio shows.
  During the Japanese occupation, all radio stations were closed, except KZRH, which was renamed PIAM.
Reception on shortwave was strictly forbidden, but many receiving set owners risked their lives to listen to
broadcasts of "The Voice of Juan de la Cruz," the "Voice of Freedom" from Corregidor (till May 1942) and the
Voice of America. It was on these hidden radio sets that the underground newspapers depended heavily for
information on the war.

 But 1945, and the end of the occupation, heralded the real birth of Philippine radio. Within five years after
the war, there were thirty operating stations.

 In 1961, the largest broadcasting chain in the Philippines began to be formed, first as the Bolinao
Electronics Corporation, which became then the Alto Broadcasting System, then the Chronicle Broadcasting
Network, which after Martial Law became the Kanlaon Broadcasting System.

 In the barrio, therefore, where the traditional - and often the only - method of spreading or getting
information was by word of mouth, the transistor radio became a towering presence, bringing news of the
government and of the city and its problems; infusing pop music into the domain of the kundiman;
spreading, in effect, popular culture beyond the urban sprawl and into the rural folk realm.

 The two principal forms of popular culture conveyed by radio are popular music and the radio soap opera.

 Both have been studied in different ways by mass communications researchers, principally through content
analyses and surveys determining the effects on the attitudes of listeners.

 The two principal writers who have used other approaches are: Virgilio V. Vitug, poet and journalist, who
takes a historico-critical approach, and Jose Javier Reyes, who takes a semi-literary approach.

 Vitug, calling the radio soap opera "Pabrika ng Luha at Pantasya,"' feels that the scriptwriters are
"imprisoned" by time constraints (they write two to four scripts daily) and by formula plots, and should
awake to their responsibility to make radio drama an instrument for awareness and education, and thus a
spring of information and truth.

 Reyes studies the female roles in the dramas - the expected and unrelenting martyrdom that make the
heroines dominant over the males, and that causes tears to fall on the audience's ironing boards and asks: is
this reflected reality, the authentic lot of woman in semifeudal Philippine society, or is it instead the source
of an idea that has been successfully implanted through all these years?

 One might note at this point that the longest-running shows on radio were the serials "Ilaw ng Tahanan"
(nine years) and "Gulong ng Palad," recently translated to television, both built on the foolproof formula of
cascades of tears and flocks of martyred women.

POPULAR MAGAZINE

 The first magazine of general circulation (vis-a-vis those of special interest, for example, the religious
weeklies of the 19th century) in the Philippines was probably The Philippine Magazine, published in 1905.

 It cannot quite be called "popular," however, since it was in English, and therefore, not available to the
majority, especially at that time, when the teaching of English had begun only four years earlier.

 Quite obviously, a real popular magazine would have to be in the vernacular, and although there have been
many short-lived publications in this century, the popular magazine was definitely Liwayway, started in 1923,
and which by 1941 had a circulation of 89,000.

 With its sister publications Bisaya, in Cebuano Visayan; Hiligaynon, in Ilongo Visayan; Bannawag, in Ilocano,
and Bicolnon in Bicol, Liwayway became the cornerstone of popular publishing in the Philippines. To date,
only Bisaya and Bannawag remain of the provincial weeklies, but Liwayway is an institution.

 More definitely within the domain of the popular culturist are the women's magazines like Women's Home
Companion, Women's Journal, Mr. & Ms., Mod, and even the spicy Jingle Extra Hot (recently lost to the
anti-smut campaign).
  Dr. Soledad Reyes sees them as escape literature for "bored housewives. . . harried office girls, ordinary
clerks, pimply schoolgirls, old maids, pseudosophisticated college girls, overworked teachers and other kinds
of women - from seven to seventy." They supply emotional crutches, support for sagging morale, assurance
that the reader can be transformed into a ravishing sophisticate through a great diversity of articles (mostly
syndicated) that fall into a pattern of success.

 Then the "intimate glimpses" into the lives of the jet set, the celebrities, the stars. Then a tour of beautiful
places, and finally enough of a dose of psychology, or medicine, or psychiatry to top up the package.

POPULAR MUSIC

 Until as recently as seven years ago, pop music in the Philippines was definitely American. There was
popular music earlier - kundimans, zarzuelas, love songs, street songs, children's nonsense songs - and
although some of these actually found their way into records, they were not sung on vaudeville stages or
spun out on the airlanes.

 In 1973, however, Joey Smith and his Juan de la Cruz band experimented with what later came to be called
Pinoy rock. The sound was heavy Western rock, but the lyrics were in Pilipino, and pleaded for "our own
music." Soon came a group called the Hot Dog with a slowed down, melodious beat, and a hit with a title in
Taglish, "Pers Lab" (lyrics in Taglish and colloquial Tagalog).

 When serious poet Rolando Tinio translated an album of American songs into Pilipino for singer Celeste
Legaspi, producing songs so beautiful they seemed newly composed, the Pinoy trend was on. The Broadcast
Media Council gave the spontaneous movement a boost by requiring each radio station to play at least three
Filipino songs every hour (an indication of how much American music was being played).

 Some radio stations responded by having all-Filipino programs, and suddenly Pinoy pop had arrived, aided by
prizes and contests for performers, lyricists, etc. and especially by the Metro Manila Pop Song Festival with
its generous prizes for winning songs. A phenomenal, untrained composer-singer, Freddie Aguilar, went
international with "Anak," in which " musicologists saw, beneath the folk beat, strains of indigenous pre-
Hispanic music.

THE LITERATURE OF POPULAR CULTURE

 The literature of popular culture consists mainly of: a) reportage and feature stories in daily newspapers and
weekly magazines; b) reviews of films, television shows, pop concerts or performances, and very
occasionally, radio programs; c) studies by mass communication undergraduates, thesis writers, and
scholars; d) studies by literature students and scholars; and e) studies by the very few scholars (mainly
originating from the disciplines of literature and sociology) whose consciousness has been awakened to
popular culture as a field of serious research.

PHILIPPINE POP CULTURE AND EXPERIENCE ECONOMY

Economic Societies

Agricultural Society
Industrial Society
Services or Knowledge Society
Experience Society

EXPERIENCE AS PRODUCT
 • Increasing competition in the market means that “goods and services are no longer enough” and that
producers must differentiate their products by transforming them into “experiences” which engage the
consumer.

ELEMENTS OF EXPERIENCE

High degree of
The involvement of
concentration and There is an
all senses One does and
focus element and
undergoes
sense of play
something
and expectation
There is a balance
The perception of One is affected between the
One feels in
time is changed emotionally challenge and
control of the
situation ones capacity to
meet it
The process is
unique and has Contact with the There is a clear
intrinsic value for real thing goal
the individual

EXPERIENCE SECTOR

• Experiences are even more immaterial and intangible than services since the users must be more engaged
than in services because the experience takes place in their minds, being the customer a co-producer.

• The aim of services is to solve the customers’ problems, the experience industry seeks to give the customers
what can be defined as a mental journey (people may experience the same performance in different ways).

• Pine and Gilmore (1999) take “the experience” beyond the provision of goods and services to the
recognition of experience as a distinct economic offering. As an economic offering, experiences can add
value to a business’s goods and services and are distinct from both.

• The purchase of an experience, on the other hand, buys time enjoying a series of memorable events that
engage the consumer in a personal way.

EXPERIENCE ECONOMY

• Experience economy is a notion that intends to conceptualize a new trend in economic development, in
which the driver is people’s search for identity and involvement in an increasingly rich society.

• The “cultural sector” is non-reproducible and aimed at being consumed on the spot (a concert, an art fair,
an exhibition) and mass-dissemination and export (a book, a film, a sound recording).

• The “creative sector” may also enter into the production process of other economic sectors and become a
“creative” input in the production of non-cultural goods

Bille and Lorenzen (2008) reached a tentative demarcation of the experience economy by defining 3 areas:

• Creative experience areas (areas that have experience as the primary goal and where artistic creativity is
essential to its production).

• Experience areas (areas that have experience as the primary goal, but where artistic creativity is not
essential).

• Creative areas (areas where artistic creativity is essential but which do not have experience as a primary
goal: they are not intended directly for the consumer market but instead provide services to business (B2B),
which are built into or around mixed products).
  Much of the experience economy is composed of mixed products that combine experience and
functionality and of companies that attempt, through the use of experience design, experience
marketing, events, storytelling and branding, to invest their products and services with a range of
experiences, histories and values which can differentiate them from those of their competitors.

Definitions of Art and Culture versus Experiences

• From the merger between culture and business, a new kind of economy is growing. An economy that is
based on an increasing demand for experiences and that builds upon the added value that creativity lends to
both new and traditional products and services (Danish government report, 2003).