ABSTRACT
Across a period of about four hundred years the meaning of popular had expanded from non-elite legal practices to anything widespread and generally accepted to culture that is popular. The common thread in these shifts of meaning is the idea of non-elite practices of production and consumption. When Henri Lefebvre embarked on his three-volume Critique of Everyday Life his aim was to formulate the concept of the everyday, bringing to developed language and conceptual clarity a practice that was named and yet not recognized adjudged unworthy of knowledge. As a result of his work, and the work of others, everyday life is no longer adjudged unworthy of knowledge. To live an authentic and exciting life we have to escape the everyday, much in the same way as to produce culture we have to reject the popular. The rest of this chapter will concern itself with the difficulties of defining popular culture.
