Contents What Is Popular Culture Music Hip-Hop New York Style Art Movies and TV Manga and Anime The Internet and Gaming The Printed Word Megamusicals Fashion Changing Times What Did the 1980s and 1990s Do for Us Timeline Best of the Era Notes on Sources Find Out More Glossary Index
What Is Popular Culture What do you enjoy doing in your free time Do you enjoy listening to music or playing computer games Do you enjoy watching movies Or perhaps you like flipping through the pages of a magazine to find out about the latest fashions Chances are that a lot of other people like the same movies television music games books or magazines as you This makes these pastimes part of a popular culture The word culture can be used in many ways but in this book we mean culture to be the arts such as film music books and design Culture can also include elements that are part of everyday life such as travel and the clothes people wear Where does popular culture start Popular culture might be different in different countries or there might be trends that appeal to lots of people around the world Sometimes a trend is linked to an invention such as the Internet and it appeals to everyone and becomes a part of popular culture The World Wide Web changed people’s lives midway through the 1990s as it enabled them to shop online For the first time ever people could order books or music from new websites such as Amazon or sell their unwanted goods on auction websites
such as eBay Popular youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s In the 1980s and 1990s youths would spend their time listening to rap on their boom boxes or perhaps pop on their Sony Walkmans They might go to the local video arcade to play video games such as Donkey Kong or Pac-Man or later in the decade go to their friends houses to play Dungeons and Dragons or The Legend of Zelda on their home computer BMX biking skateboarding and inline skating were fun and fashionable Roller discos were at their peak in the 1980s but had virtually disappeared by the end of the 1990s Special effects and computer-generated images CGI of films impressed movie goers and 3-D films tried to make Jaws 3 even scarier The Rubik’s cube filled many a frustrated hour in the 1980s as people tried to figure out how to get all of the same color squares onto the same side of the cube
