The Best Examples of American Culture (chosen by YOU)

hello friends it is me JJ everybody's favorite so last week we had a lot of fun talking about various works of pop culture that are in some ways distinctly American and today we will continue that conversation using the many good examples that you guys left in the comments I really have one of the smartest audiences on YouTube I must say it's true whenever I talk to other YouTube people they're always like man JJ I wish my audience was as smart as yours your audience actually does what you ask them to do whereas mine just spams me with endless comments about what a simp I am anyway declaring a work of pop-culture distinctly American is obviously subjective to some degree many different things will say American to different people but the definition I was using last time and the definition that I am going to continue to use today relies on the following two variables a the work takes place in America and the fact that it takes place in America as opposed to somewhere else is very central to its premise and /or be the audience of the work has to have substantial pre-existing knowledge of American daily life or history or civics or things like that in order for the work to have maximum impact if the audience doesn't have considerable knowledge of American culture by contrast the work will probably seem fairly alienating or exotic okay so that being the criteria one of the most common nominees that you guys offered up was the 1994 Tom Hanks film Forrest Gump for those who haven't seen it it is a movie about a sort of simple-minded guy who lives through some of the most fascinating decades of 20th century America from his humble childhood in the rural South in the 1940s to his success as a businessman in the 1980s what makes the film so good and so powerful is the contrast between the simple decency of Forrest Gump as a man and the wild chaotic energy of 20th century America as personified by some of the other characters particularly his love interest Jenny it is also a film with a lot of ironic humor and one of the running gags is the way the Forrest Gump has sort of unintentionally been respond bowl for a bunch of big important American things from the Watergate scandal to the happy face logo so yes excellent choice Forrest Gump was directed by Robert Zemeckis a man who has produced a number of other very good and very distinctly American films as well including contact Who Framed Roger Rabbit and be Back to the Future trilogy which a number of you brought up as an example of very distinctly American filmmaking as well another name that came up a lot was Quentin Tarantino undoubtably another one of the great aggressively American filmmakers of the modern age his 1994 crime film Pulp Fiction in particular is often held up as one of the masterpieces of modern American cinema Pulp Fiction is a fairly complex film involving a lot of characters but what makes it important from our perspective is just the degree that Quentin Tarantino went out of his way to cram the movie full of as many references to American life and culture as possible so there are key plot points involving American history sports music even fast food you mind if I even the title Pulp Fiction is itself a claim of continuity with the American tradition of Pulp Fiction storytelling which is to say kind of tacky or trashy stories with over-the-top sex and violence which of course is basically Quentin Tarantino's entire as far as TV goes these shows made by Greg Daniels came up a lot Greg Daniels was a writer for The Simpsons a show I celebrated in the first video who went on to co-create king of the hill the American version of The Office and Parks and Rec when you look at that resume it is pretty clear that the man has a gift for creating distinctly American characters and settings I must confess that I haven't seen that much of the office but I have seen every single episode of Parks and Rec and that is a show that is just crammed to the brim with American this Parks and Rec is a sitcom about the government of a fictional city called Pawnee and it is quite Simpsons like to the extent that Polly is used as a stand-in for like the entire United States so most of the characters and settings represent very recognizable archetypes of American suburban life and of course the fact that the main setting is government allows for all sorts of satirical comedy on American political controversies as well very funny show very well-written very American Greg Daniels is also a former writer for a Saturday Night Live a show that many of you nominated as well now a lot of countries have shows that are kind of like SNL which is to say a satirical show featuring comedy sketches about the news and celebrities and politics and society more broadly so SNL is not necessarily a distinctly American idea but it is the best American manifestation of a certain comedy tradition which is to say very current events driven satirical comedy intended entirely for a domestic audience some of your other popular nominees for most culturally American TV shows included Twin Peaks both the original and the reboot The Sopranos and Seinfeld I don't have time to get into all of these shows right now but they undeniably all take place in very vividly realized depictions of the United States and they all tend to presume a lot of pre-existing American cultural knowledge on the part of their audience when it came to the most American video games these were the two most popular nominees by far fallout and GTA fallout is a series now over 20 years old that takes place in an alternative timeline in which all of American social and technological progress sort of plateaued in the 1950s which led to a sclerotic and decadent society that eventually triggered a nuclear war wiping out much of human civilization a lot of the American cultural references that are found in the series thus take the form of the scraps of this sort of warped American society that have survived the post-apocalyptic world as well as the general social commentary surrounding the entire nuclear war theme now I must confess I have never actually played any of the Fallout games some of you told me last week that all out to was probably the best one as far as being a object of American culture goes just because it apparently contained a lot more explicit American cultural references and in jokes than the sequels which apparently got more bogged down in kind of generic sci-fi world building I was hoping I could give fallout 2 a try on Steam but no luck for us Mac users so feel free to just argue in the comments about which fallout game is the most identifiably American now I have however played several of the GTA games over the years a number of you singled out GTA 5 as the pinnacle of the series for our purposes which makes sense since unlike fallout the GTA games have gotten more American not less with every passing sequel so GTA 5 is an elaborate open-world game that takes place in a fictional city that is supposed to be a satire on LA but much like Springfield or Pawnee is really more of a kind of broad satire of the entire United States itself in fact what is most interesting about the GTA universe is how absolutely everything is fictionalized all of the places brands celebrities even government agencies and not politely fictionalized either as TV tropes puts it every website show movie poster commercial not plot important line and comment on the radio is an unfriendly dig or parody of something emphasis on unfriendly I would say GTA is a pretty mean-spirited caricature of America overall an inflated depiction of basically every negative stereotype of American society from an extreme gap between the rich and the poor to a grotesque and vapid entertainment culture but in any case you really have to have a lot of pre-existing knowledge of America to get anything out of this satire since everything is supposed to be something but nothing is ever explicitly spelled out for you now GTA was made by a rockstar north which is a British company although lots and lots of Americans did work on it too but in any case I don't think something necessarily has to be made by 100% Americans in order for it to be a good work of American culture although it does you Julie help an example of a far more culturally ignorant American game made by foreigners would be earthbound which a number of you guys mentioned in the comments earthbound is a Super Nintendo role-playing game released by Nintendo of Japan in 1994 and created by famed Japanese humorist Shinji Sato etoy and don't get me wrong I think it is a wonderful game but it has this reputation as being some sort of clever commentary on American culture that I just think is completely undeserved earthbound does take place in a sort of vaguely American setting in the sense that it has high-rises and shopping malls and hamburger restaurants but beyond that it is only American in the most superficial and stylized way lacking much cleverness or insight or in jokes in fact I would say the game is filled with missed opportunities to make references to American regional cultures or folklore or pop culture so in other words if almost everything in GTA is a parody almost nothing in earthbound is now when they brought earthbound to the US Nintendo of America tried to aggressively market it as a piece of Americana portraying it as like a take on cheesy alien invasion movies and like tabloid culture and stuff but when you actually play the game it's pretty obvious that there's not much evidence that the game was ever intended to be this so as a work of American cultural satire I declare it overrated another sort of supposedly super American thing that I do not personally care much for but a number of you brought up is stuff like the movie Team America world police or the game broforce these are obviously things that present themselves as being super American but the whole premise is that they are satirizing Americanists in the dumbest most one-dimensional way possible so they depict Americanists as being synonymous with a kind of crude violent stupidity as seen in like 80s era action movies I mean I guess you could say that maybe this is some sort of commentary on America attitudes towards violence or u.s. foreign policy or something but in my mind it is really just a kind of one joke caricature of the caricature without much depth it is about as much of a window into American culture as say Austin Powers is the window into British culture all right so now here is another thing that a number of you recommended which I had never previously seen but I sure I'm glad that I did over the garden wall this is a short 10 episode animated cartoon series made by a young American animator named Patrick McHale and it is a very very funny and charming take on American fairy tales I don't want to spoil too much about it because I really enjoyed coming in cold but it is a show that has a lot of fun playing with various clichés and stereotypes associated with a certain kind of American folk story in the tradition of like The Wizard of Oz or Sleepy Hollow it is a very smartly written show with a very strong satirical edge that is nevertheless not quite as blunt as some of the other things we've been discussing like there was this one episode where the two main characters go to visit a school and I was laughing so hard at this episode because it is such a perfect parody of a certain type of American children's story without being an explicit satire of any one story in particular over the garden wall really reminded me of two other things both of which I think are great examples of distinctly American pop culture in their own right The Nightmare Before Christmas which is in many ways I think a similar sort of love letter to some of the tropes of American folklore and cuphead which is of course a pretty explicit salute to some of the cultural tropes seen in early 20th century American animation if you like these you will probably like over the garden wall all right now let us talk about a couple of songs you guys nominated a cool one that I never heard before was the song Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie the son of the famous American folk singer Woody Guthrie interesting names in that family anyway Alice's Restaurant is a very long song from 1967 almost 20 minutes long that is really more of a just sort of long rambling story of a certain episode and Arlo Guthries life what is sometimes known in American culture as a shaggy dog story but it's a very uniquely American story that starts off being a bhoot Thanksgiving before winding into all of these weird and equally American places when I was listening to it I was reminded of the kind of long rambling ballad you'd like imagine an Irish folk singer to have written about taking the pig to the market or something Alice's Restaurant is basically that kind of song but with more contemporary American cultural references a very unique work that is hard to summarize but I recommend it a lot of people also recommended American Pie a 1971 song by dawn mcclain this is another rather long song from the glory days of American folk rock what is it about while the lyrics are famously all over the place here is how the Washington Post put it the song includes references to Karl Marx vladimir Ilyich Lenin or more likely John Lennon the Fab Four the Byrds James Dean Charles Manson the Rolling Stones the widowed bride Jackie Kennedy and the Vietnam War plus many other things that defined American culture at that time including most notably the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper people have tried to suss some deeper social commentary out of this dense stew of cultural references but Don MacLean himself has always maintained that the song was more about capturing the mood of a time than anything else an indescribable photograph of America that I tried to capture in words and music and who is best at capturing a present-day America in words and music uh I'm not really sure that that sort of thing really exists as much these days a couple people said early college dropout era Kanye which I guess I can sort of see a lot of other people said country music in general country music might be a very distinctly American style of music but I think that ultimately it might be a little too regional to engage with more broadly resonant American themes and references I kind of feel the same way about western themed things in general which a number you brought up in different contexts though that's not to say that bo burnham hilarious takedown of the country in Western music industry in the song pandering which a number of you mentioned isn't a wonderful piece of work for what it is a dirt road a cold beer a blue jeans so I hope you enjoyed this little tour of Americana thank you so much for all of your wonderful suggestions my purpose in making these videos was to just call attention to the fact that American culture can in fact be a very distinctive and particular thing in contrast to the sort of bland generic consumer culture of popular stereotype it is a rich and distinctive culture that I for one am proud to be a part of even though I am a Canadian America and Canada are part of the same culture it's fine it's fine you

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 133,392

Rating: 4.9459181 out of 5

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Id: ZcndkDTXeqw

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020