Popular art and so-called mass culture have become a kind of “wonderland”1 and must be understood as a central phenomenon for contemporary intellectuals to address. This is, not least, due to their role in compelling us to broaden and rethink a part of the vocabulary and conceptuality of certain academic disciplines (such as aesthetics, for example), because of their leading role in shaping our sensus communis. More generally, such attention also has to do with their undeniable impact and influence on people’s opinions and taste preferences, their choices as consumers of commodities of all kinds, and even on their sociopolitical views at a global level. On this basis, attempting to craft an adequate theory to fit mass-art forms has become one of the major preoccupations for art theorists, sociologists of culture, and also philosophers in the last decades, in a somehow comparable way to the preoccupation for attempting to accommodate avant-garde artworks in the twentieth century.2The implications and consequences of the above are manifold. Such implications include, for example, calling into question the typically modern dualistic distinctions between the spheres of so-called high and low cultures, serious and popular music, masscult and midcult, etc. In a similar way, also the no less typically modern “segmentation” and “compartmentalization” of culture in the supposedly separate and autonomous fields of what is “purely” aesthetic, ethical, economic, political, etc., have been progressively brought into question by certain developments of contemporary popular culture, especially from the mid-1960s until today, inasmuch as today’s widely aestheticized world of “aesthetic capitalism” and the “society of the spectacle” seems to be characterized by processes of mutual, dynamic, and ongoing interaction and intersection between all these related domains. Where, in referring to so-called aesthetic capitalism, on the one hand, we don’t want to demonize it and portray the existing reality in an apocalyptic way (so to speak), but, on the other hand, we don’t aim to uncritically celebrate it as the supposed “triumph”3 of an unlimited beauty available for everyone. Rather, we believe that, in the face of these and other analogous phenomena, it is better to assume a well-balanced and critical attitude, and thus to uncompromisingly recognize that, if “capitalism has turned aesthetic,” this does not mean that “life under capitalism has necessarily become fulfilled, that it entails human flourishing, that labor has finally been organized ‘according to the laws of beauty.’ Far from it! Rather, it has become ‘aesthetic’ insofar as the production of value now draws heavily upon ‘creative industries,’ on the labor of the ‘creative classes,’ on aesthetic strategies of distinction and the modulation of affects. . . . Surplus value now springs from speculation in the realm of the ‘Spectacle’ itself, and many contemporary marketing strategies widely appropriate classical aesthetic discourses.”4The consequences of all this are vast, multifaceted, and—from the point of view of the system of different academic disciplines—they play an especially important role in contemporary debates in pop culture theory and aesthetics, especially if one no longer understands aesthetics as limited to a mere philosophy of the fine arts grounded solely in the paradigm of disinterested contemplation but is rather able to broaden its framework in order to also include quotidian aesthetic experiences, on the basis of a general view of “the aesthetic” as what has been called “a matter of practices.”5 Depending on one’s particular research perspective and theoretical framework, however, the consequences of what has been said above are vast and have ramifications not only in the field of philosophical aesthetics but also in other fields such as sociology, cultural studies, and political philosophy. For these and yet other reasons, popular culture definitely deserves serious attention at various levels, including the philosophical, inasmuch as contemporary philosophy (also profitably intersected with, and combined to, different disciplinary approaches or methods) may prove to be able to offer significant and fruitful conceptual tools to provide new insights, to develop stimulating analyses, to decipher in original ways several defining phenomena of our time, and to arrive at renewed investigations of popular culture also with a specific focus on sociocultural and political criticism.In our view, such authors as Critical Theorists of society (Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and their legacy until today) are still a great source of inspiration to critically inquire into processes concerning the assimilation and domination power of the culture industry as “social cement,” the technical reproducibility of art, the critical potential that is intrinsic to the aesthetic dimension, and the role of political commitment in contemporary art and aesthetic practices. In turn, thinkers like Michel Foucault also can be inspiring in a context such as the present, thanks to their arresting observations on the concept of criticism itself—which implies a critical confrontation both with actualité (its limits and their possible overcoming) and with the possibilities of self-construction, through processes of desubjection and subjectivation—or stimulating analyses of the concepts of the production of the order of discourse, of the possibilities of resistance that are the fundamental condition for the exercise of power, of the construction of truth regimes and of the disciplinary and normalization power that is functional to configuring and preserving the existing society of surveillance. Equally stimulating in a context like the present one can be the theoretical and sociopolitical perspectives disclosed by cultural studies and postcolonial theories, and finally the strictly philosophical insights provided by such contemporary thinkers as inter alia Theodore Gracyk and Richard Shusterman. According to the former, author of a trilogy of very influential books on the aesthetics of popular music,6 “until recently, the interdisciplinary field of aesthetics . . . was either silent about, or hostile to, popular culture,” on the basis of the predominant idea—or, as it were, of the standardized preconception—that the latter is always “aesthetically impoverished.”7 For this reason, although the study of popular culture represents, by now, a quite established academic field, most investigations have been developed within frameworks like sociology or cultural studies that value popular art only “as a social practice,” that demand “evaluative neutrality” in approaching this subject, and that “explicitly dismiss the importance of [its] aesthetic dimension.”8 In turn, the latter has fittingly observed that, until recent times and, to a certain extent, unfortunately still today, “popular art has not been popular with aestheticians and theorists of culture. . . . When not altogether ignored as beneath contempt, it is typically vilified as mindless, tasteless trash”;9 however, from Shusterman’s original pragmatist perspective, it is possible to claim that popular art “has the power to enrich and refashion our traditional concept of the aesthetic” and, for this reason, it definitely “deserves serious aesthetic attention,” especially in the case of certain art forms that are able to suggest “a radically revised aesthetic with a joyous return of the somatic dimension which philosophy has long repressed.”10The domains of popular art and mass culture are enormously broad and deeply articulated, and they include many different practices and experiences that range from photography to cinema, from commercial novels to comic books, from design to popular music, videogames and today even the global universe of social media networks. In turn, each of these different fields is not narrow, simple, autonomous, and windowless like Leibnizian monads,11 but is, in contrast, complex, as exemplified by the multiplicity of different genres and subgenres that form the “constellation” of contemporary popular culture at a global level, quite often with a significant connection also to oppositional styles and subcultures.12 From this point of view, fashion also surely deserves to be included in the general context of contemporary popular culture broadly understood. As has been noted, indeed, “Fashion is a branch of aesthetics, of the art of modern society. It is also a mass pastime, a form of group entertainment, of popular culture. Related as it is to both fine art and popular art, it is a kind of performance art.” during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “fashion became part of the popular consciousness, and the mass manufacture of clothing enabled it to become part of popular culture. Fashionable dressing as a popular mass phenomenon and as a leisure activity in its own right has been influenced by the other leisure activities of ‘the machine age’: sport, music, the cinema and television, all of which produced whole new ways of dressing.”13In the present special issue of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture (JAPPC) on the topic “Contemporary Popular Culture and Social Criticism,” we offer readers a powerful collection of original articles and interviews dealing with a wide range of experiences and practices that represent the universe of popular culture. As is suggested by the issue’s title, what characterizes our approach is the specific focus on the question of whether popular culture can contribute to a critique of certain aspects of the present age, and thus to social and political change. If this is so, then we believe that it is also (and especially) important to investigate how, when, and to what extent popular culture is capable of contributing to the aims of criticism and sociopolitical transformation.As we have said, we understand popular culture as a complex universe that includes manifold aesthetic practices that, in turn, are often able to display a profound influence and great impact at a global level also from a sociopolitical point of view. The issue includes contributions on different experiences and arts of our time written by scholars with expertise in their different but over-lapping research fields. The first two contributions, written by Max Torvald Ryynänen and Bahar Tahsily, are focused on popular music and cinema, respectively. A specific focus on the critical, philosophical, and political potential of rap music is provided in “Can the (Non-)Subaltern (Understand) Rap? Rap as Vernacular Critical Theory.” In this contribution, Ryynänen shows how rap lyrics, which often make reference to canonical authors and texts of literature, philosophy, and feminist theory, should be considered themselves as a form of critical philosophy that, as such, deserve to be read as such. In her article “Culture Industry and Orientalism in the Movie 300,” Tahsily brings the work of Edward Said and Theodor W. Adorno together in an analysis of Zack Snyder’s famous film 300. This specific mixture develops an analysis highlighting, on the one hand, how the conflictual relationship between East and West is a media construct, for example, starting from the use of negative stereotypes about middle Easterners and Muslims; on the other hand, it suggests the need to look in the direction of a different constellation of media, that can integrate different cultural models. The third contribution is authored by Dominika Czakon and Natalia Anna Michna, and shifts the focus of attention from popular music and cinema to contemporary art practices and experiences. In fact, in their article entitled “Art Beyond the Anthropocene: A Philosophical Analysis of Selected Examples of Post-Anthropocentric Art in the Context of Ecological Change,” Czakon and Michna directly confront what they define as “post-anthropocentric art.” More precisely, moving from a comparison of traditional anthropocentric art and specific post-anthropocentric works, the authors provide an aesthetic-political framework for this new artistic field, which, according to the authors, is characterized by its ability to critically react to contemporary ecological and social problems.The next three contributions articulate particular theoretical perspectives on the relation between aesthetic/artistic practices and sociopolitical aspects with regard to photography, fashion, and also new social media. In their essay “Feminism and Italian Photography: Notes on the Inheritance of New Generations from the 1970s,” Cristina Casero and Federica Muzzarelli start from the intersection between gender studies and photography. More precisely, the two authors investigate the history of feminist photography in Italy—from the 1970s to today—in relation to the more general historical, political, and cultural context and also to the influence of some important contributions of feminist thought (in particular, that of the Italian art critic and feminist activist Carla Lonzi). In this way, a reflection is developed on the relationship between new generations of female photographers and the legacy of feminist culture, and on the current space of visibility of women in Italian photography. Simona Segre-Reinach’s essay “Fashioning Teresa Teng: Chinese Chronologies from Nostalgia to Vintage” addresses the figure of the famous Chinese pop singer, expression of a complex cultural identity, not only in relation to her music but also as a fashion icon who still constitutes—twenty-six years after her death—an important influence at a global level. In “The Beauty of Inclusivity: ‘Visual Activism’ from Social Media to Fashion Magazines,” Chiara Pompa develops an aesthetic, ethical, and political analysis of the critique of traditional representations of the body, focusing on the role of fashion and beauty photography and on the rise of new social media, which have been able to successfully challenge some of the main aesthetic standards. A particular attention, in this context, is also given to the investigation of the experience of the magazine Vogue Italia, considered as a paradigmatic example of openness to diversity.In addition to the aforementioned scholarly articles, the present issue of the JAPPC also includes a section of interviews and review essays. In the first interview, Samir Gandesha engages in a conversation with Martin Jay, perhaps the preeminent contemporary US intellectual historian, whose work on Critical Theory has been ground-breaking and profoundly influential, resulting in a wide-ranging philosophical (aesthetic and political) debate on a variety of topics that span with great rigor the meshes of contemporary philosophy, culture, and politics. Among the topics approached and discussed by Gandesha and Jay in their conversation, it is possible to mention here: the Frankfurt School and the trajectory of critical theory; the rise of the importance of social media platforms; the digitalization and commodification of the life-world; the concepts of “algorithmic populism” and cancel culture; the role of art between theory and criticism. The second interview is that of Valentina Antoniol with a significant musician working in contemporary popular music, Eugene Hütz, lead-singer of Gogol Bordello, one of the most relevant bands of the New York and international gypsy-punk scenes. The dialogue between Antoniol and Hütz offers an unusual opportunity to investigate the unique philosophical, aesthetic and sociopolitical aspects related to the music and the different cultural traditions brought on stage by Gogol Bordello, testifying to the band’s assumption of what can be defined as a “philosophical/literary attitude.” Finally, the issue includes a review essay by Stefano Marino, entitled “Thirty Years of Pearl Jam (and Grunge Subculture): 1991–2021,” in which the author fully immerses himself in the grunge subculture that developed in the late-1980s/early-1990s from Seattle, focusing in particular on the experience of Pearl Jam that is celebrating this year the thirtieth anniversary of their debut album Ten. Marino takes this as the occasion to develop a philosophical analysis, with references ranging from Adorno to Marcuse and Debord, that looks at the history and also the actuality of Pearl Jam, paying attention to both the aesthetic dimension and the aspects of political and social criticism that this band has been able to convey with reference to issues such as feminism, the culture industry, environmental issues.Considering the mutual relations between different dimensions (above all, the relations between art, society, and politics), and the way these relations have the power to influence and shape our views at different levels, the contributions collected in this special issue of the JAPPC explore some of the various aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural processes that inform how people experience popular culture and react to it today. The scholars of philosophy, art, fashion, and politics contributing to this volume refer to and apply theories posed by key thinkers of the modern and contemporary age, in order to provide original analyses and penetrating answers to some fundamental questions concerning popular culture in our time. To the extent that this special issue succeeds in contributing to the clarification and disentanglement of such major questions concerning popular culture and its capacity to display a critical, active and perhaps also transformative rather than uncritical and passive relation to some of the aesthetic and sociopolitical challenges of the present age, we hope that our volume may open new horizons, may favor significant advancements within this field, and thus may lead to a better understanding of the matter at issue.