Do Americans Have a Culture?

akhivae
10 min readJun 29, 2023
Many people are probably laughing at the fact that my American culture collage puts Taylor Swift next Mark Twain and Call of Duty next to a Grant Wood painting. But today’s pop-culture is tomorrow's treasured artefact. The ancient’s of the past would probably laugh if they knew we put old pots in museums.

Hallyu, is a term that refers to the growing global popularity of South Korean entertainment and pop-culture. Once viewed as second rate in comparison to American and Japanese entertainment, South Korean music, television, movies, brand names and fashion has won millions of new fans across the world. The hallyu phenomenon has generated significant media attention across the globe and has drawn comparisons to analogous trends like the British Invasion of the 1960s.

But I always found it interesting is that there is no corresponding phenomenon for US entertainment and pop-culture, despite being significantly more popular. US musicians regularly make the Top 100 charts across the world, and in many cases completely dominate it. Hollywood blockbusters, like Titanic, achieve a level of global popularity so intense and widespread that the film became a sensation even in the most remote and isolated regions of the world like Afghanistan, under the Taliban, in the 1990s. The 2017 Pixar animated film Coco was so well-received in Mexico, that local cultural commentators wondered how it could be that the US media could do a better job at representing Mexican culture, than Mexicans themselves.

US entertainment has been so universally popular for so long that that its success is now taken for granted. A quick Google search revealed the existence of multiple KPOP fanclubs in…

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