David O. Week 1

After reading Storey’s article “what is pop culture” which defined, what pop-culture is and defined the ideology that goes along with it, I decided to correlate that with The Jay Leno show.  Jay leno in almost all of his shows late at night, has a segment called “Jay-Walking” where he goes to various cities with a camera crew and asks random individuals with a microphone easy questions that every American should know.  I recently saw an episode of Lay Leno where he would alternate asking a pop-culture question with a news questions.  One for instance was “who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?” Hint: “His father was president of the United States” (of course nobody knew it is the address of the White House).  Then he asked many participants “who lives in a pineapple under the sea” and everyone knew it was SpongeBob.  This I also related it to our discussion of high-culture and pop-culture discussion in our previous class.  In past decades this author claims on pg. 7, Charles Dickens, and Film Noir defined our American culture more specifically, pop-culture because they were popular at the time.  Jay Leno has many other segments of his J-Walking experience, asking many people about U.S. history and even went to a college graduation ceremony and asked many former students obvious questions similar in nature.  Today watching, such things as these segments which bring to light the stupidity of the American public can now be considered part of pop-culture in a sense.  I stand by that statement, because this author defines “pop-culture” as a mass culture that is liked and viewed by many.  It is what is left over from what we define as “high-culture” and something that originates from the people (pg. 8-10).  In this Jay-Walking segment not only people are viewing it but the people who view the Jay Leno show and are familiar with him are now ironically part of the production and produsage of this pop- culture.  Follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er18Mh3Va6M