ABSTRACT
Part of the reason for this continuing interest is that ‘pop culture’ has gone mainstream. It wasn’t ever thus, and there was a time, pre-punk, when pop culture was still considered to be vulgar, ‘corrupting’, and (in Britain) ‘too American’ (prejudices that were a hangover from Victorian notions of high and low culture). But now pop is much more acceptable, and, for example, in the media, subject matter previously thought to be the domain of the alternative and music press has made its way overground (there is now more space in the mainstream for the coverage of gigs, street fashion, drug culture and so on). Indeed, journalists themselves have often made the transition without much difficulty: in Britain, it’s become a cliché that writers from the punk era now set the cultural agenda on
‘Fleet Street’ publications (from the Roxy Club to the Groucho Club, if you like). Even academia has not been immune. The growth of Cultural Studies since the 1970s has meant that it is now possible to study modules on popular culture, indeed on punk itself, in universities and art colleges across Britain and the USA (I can hear Sid spinning again…).
