Standing in an Unknown Space

The Christian community hasn't always responded intelligently to popular culture, particularly those entertainments directed at teens. We have ignored them and, at times, dismissed them out of hand as too trivial for our attention.

At other times, we've broadly condemned the movie and music industries for not promoting conventional morality. More often than not, the Christian critique of popular culture boils down to a legalism defined in terms of accepted sexual practices.

Rarely have we interacted with the popular culture of youth in any meaningful way. Dancing in the Dark, then, is something of a departure. The six Calvin College professors who collaborated on this work not only treat their subject with a great deal of respect, they also offer a more sophisticated and compelling exploration and critique of young people and youth culture than the Christian community is usually known for.

After tracing the emergence of the American teen as a sociological category, the authors focus on the movies, music, and videos that are marketed for, and digested by, teens. They argue that the electronic media now serve as "maps of reality" for youth, teaching them everything from what tennis shoes are in style to what lifestyle to assume.

Popular culture, say the authors, interprets reality and experience for youth, meeting their "primary psychological needs for identity, intimacy, and meaning." In return for such guidance, youth, in what the authors describe as a "symbiotic relationship," provide an audience and loyal clientele for both the decidedly shallow worldview and the products that popular culture peddles.

THE INDUSTRIES of popular culture, however, which are designed primarily to turn a profit and compete in a capitalistic society, are less concerned with the worldview they promote than with the products they advertise. Their goal is less to subvert the values of mainstream America (as the concerned moralists assert) than to encourage and actually train youth to consume. In this light, popular culture is an agent of society, preparing youth for their primary role in a capitalistic culture, that of passive consumer.

And though the authors of Dancing in the Dark are hesitant to assert it, one wonders whether the difficulty in improving popular art is that it reflects and imitates the dominant culture. Changing teen music and movies, it seems, doesn't require laws or censorship; it requires changing capitalism itself.

Even this, however, doesn't constitute the most important critique of the book. Ultimately the book attacks not the culture of youth, but the fact that its consumers have no way of analyzing what they consume.

Partly because of the pace of the electronic media--rock videos, for instance, are so closely edited and quickly replaced and forgotten that they leave no time for critical reflection--and partly because no body of critical discourse, either from within the industry or from the academy or churches, has been articulated, youth are left without the means for understanding and judging popular culture. They are easily manipulated because of being unaware of the ways in which they are being manipulated.

The solutions that the authors offer are, though compelling, rather sketchy. They call for closer community and more interaction between youth and adults--though how this is to be implemented, given the current divorce rates and one-parent families or the economic realities that lead to two-career families, is left largely unclear. Still, the idea that adults participate in, rather than merely condemn, youth culture seems legitimate.

Not surprising, since the authors are all teachers, they also argue for better education. But rather than argue for a return to the basics, the authors contend that the electronic media should itself be an object of inquiry. Young people, by analyzing what they are now only consuming and by creating their own videos and music and movies, would be empowered, able to manipulate and judge rather than be manipulated.

Dancing in the Dark, to its great credit, is itself among the best examples of the solutions it advances. It is a fine piece of scholarship, which is also well-written and accessible to non-academics. As such, its very existence is a reason for optimism; popular culture can be taken seriously, can be intelligently explored and criticized. We should both hope for and work to produce similar studies.

Joey Earl Horstman is a free-lance writer living in Lafayette, Indiana.

Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture, and the Electronic Media. By Quentin J. Schultze, Roy M. Anker, James D. Bratt, William D. Romanowski, John W. Worst, and Lambert Zuidervaart. Eerdmanns, 1991. $13.95 (paper).