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What is Consumer Culture?
Michael Williams ‘04
On Feb. 13, the Villanova University Ethics
Program continued its lecture series on ethics and popular culture with
an engaging talk titled “Taking Consumer Culture Seriously.”
The lecture, given by Dr. Vincent Miller, associate professor of theology
at rival Georgetown University, explored the politics of consuming the
culture of others with specific attention to music.
The music industry today is ripe with
samples of old music given a new spin through the use of technology. Artists
as varied as P. Daddy and Moby use sampling of other artists with reckless
abandon. Dr. Miller paid close attention to one instance in particular,
where the aforementioned Moby creates a techno bestseller called “Natural
Blues” by sampling the voice of Vera Hall, a 1950s Negro songstress
and her spiritual rendition of the song “Trouble So Hard.”
“This appropriation represents a creative misuse of Vera’s
original song, and what was once a powerful negro spiritual has been reduced
to a redundant though admittedly catchy techno club song,” said
Miller.
However, he did highlight the one positive
aspect of Moby’s theft; it exposed a piece of culture and the voice
of Vera Hall to millions, even if it was in a form different than the
original.
According to Miller, “consumer culture
is a multidisciplinary field which converges on the idea that, in all
human societies, consumption has an essentially cultural structure, and
is central to the cultural—as well as material—reproduction
of social lives and relationships.” Taking this definition into
mind, he sought to show the danger of taking things out of their cultural
context. “The only way to preserve the stability of accepted meaning
in our cultural consumption is to link things with their origins.”
This way culture is and can be presented in more than “abstract
predigested chunks.”
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