Urban Popular Culture Research Articles

Antje Dietze and Alexander Vari, eds. Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment: Experiences from Northern, East-Central, and Southern Europe, 1870s–1930s

Antje Dietze and Alexander Vari, eds. <i>Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment: Experiences from Northern, East-Central, and Southern Europe, 1870s–1930s</i>

Pentecostal Culture in Rio’s Peripheries: Graffiti and National Political Agency

In this article, I revisit the formulations of anthropologist Pierre Sanchis about "urban popular culture," with the aim of making comparisons with Pentecostal growth in the peripheries beginning in the 2000s. This growth has revealed comparisons between existing cultural references and new aesthetic and grammatical forms, with repercussions in social interactions, the economy, and local and supralocal politics. These observations are based on fieldwork conducted in Rio de Janeiro favelas. The empirical material that supports the analysis proposed here is also based on data from research conducted at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, which mapped worship places in Rio de Janeiro.

Pentecostal cultures in urban peripheries: a socio-anthropological analysis of Pentecostalism in arts, grammars, crime and morality

Abstract In past decades, Catholicism in Brazil has emerged as a privileged theme in the Social Sciences literature, coming to be recognised as a key element in the formation of a "national culture". For the less affluent residents of the city, Catholicism constituted what Sanchis (1997) called “traditional urban popular culture”. Despite the abstraction contained in the notion of a "popular culture", Sanchis’ perspective has had wide academic repercussion. With the growing presence of Pentecostal Evangelicals in the public sphere, and the percentage of people who claimed to be “Evangelical” in the IBGE censuses since 1990, part of the social science literature began to reflect on the possible establishment of a "Pentecostal culture" in Brazil. In this article, I analyse the formation of a Pentecostal culture in urban peripheries. To this end, I consider that the increase in the number of Pentecostal churches and their devotees in these localities provoked changes in different spheres of social life. This article is based on empirical field research carried out intermittently between the years of 1996 and 2015 in the Acari shantytown (Rio de Janeiro).

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage

Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600–1900: The Beggar’s Gift by Gerald Groemer

Reviewed by: Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600–1900: The Beggar’s Gift by Gerald Groemer Adam L. Kern (bio) Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600–1900: The Beggar’s Gift. By Gerald Groemer. Routledge, London, 2016. xviii, 415 pages. $240.00, cloth; $54.95, E-book. The urban experience has everywhere always derived a lion’s share of its charm from the spectacle of street artists, be they the jongleurs of old-world markets or the jugglers of metropolitan public squares today. In the shogun’s capital of Edo, the proverbial Chinese lion dancers themselves come to mind, though other exemplars of these lowly, and therefore often little-studied, figures abound: standup comic duos (manzai), sand painters, puppeteers, automata operators, peepshow impresarios, blind minstrels, [End Page 142] Zen flutists, Buddhist mendicants reciting benedictions, yin-yang diviners, sacred dancing mimes, vocal impersonators, storytellers, soapbox orators, prestidigitators, conjurers, thimble riggers, acrobats, ladder balancers, basket jumpers, and sword swallowers, to name a few, not to omit professional regurgitators. One such regurgitator (okematsu in Japanese—a term this reviewer admits to not having known previously) would routinely swallow a handful of loose needles and a length of string, then, with neither apparent bodily harm nor dearth of razzmatazz, cough these up perfectly threaded (p. 224). Thrusting us into this dazzling if at times lurid world is Gerald Groemer’s thoroughly researched, well-argued, clarifying, and frequently entertaining Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600–1900. By “street performers,” Groemer means freelancers who, performing in liminal if public spaces such as street corners and market places, were never beholden to theater managers or highbrow tastes, though these artists occasionally moved to indoor performance halls (yose) and stages. Street Performers presents a wonderfully kaleidoscopic view of urban Japanese society during the Edo (1600–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods through these freelancers without devolving into sentimental eulogy for their lost performance arts. Groemer’s main conviction is that “little tells one more about a society than the way in which the arts it supports can free themselves from their immediate determination by economic, political, and social forces” (p. 7). To this end, Groemer (who teaches ethnomusicology and Western musicology at the University of Yamanashi in Kōfu, Japan) judiciously builds on a dozen of his own articles on street performers and related topics, published in major journals over the past two decades. The result may well be his magnum opus. It certainly represents a considerable achievement and contribution to the study of the period’s urban popular culture. As such, it should be required reading for scholars of literature, culture, and history, though it may not be quite broad enough for general readers, let alone for use in college courses. At least two major challenges must have confronted Groemer, the first being that street arts are notoriously ephemeral. The perceived low social status of performers and a Confucian disdain of amusements do not help matters. Detailed reliable accounts of these arts and their particular performances are scant. What records survive range from the likes of oblique references within comic haiku (senryū) to snippets of dialogue in works of fiction (often illustrated), woodblock prints (often texted), works related to the kabuki stage, even legal documents. Groemer admirably marshals these sources, including 83 images by my count (regrettably, there is no list of illustrations—or credits), with the guidance of Japanese scholarship, providing the most comprehensive account in English of these street arts to date, at least since the pioneering work of Andrew Markus. [End Page 143] The second challenge concerns a basic understanding of the shifting identities of these performers. The conventional wisdom has long been that they were the disenfranchised, particularly “nonhuman” outcastes (hinin), the poor, the homeless, the physically or mentally disabled, the economically hobbled, not to mention Buddhist and other sorts of religious mendicants. One surprise, however, is that members from all four major social classes could and did resort to performing street arts. Given the downward social mobility of the day, this is not surprising. Still, the mental image of samurai literally putting on a song and a dance is striking. Samurai were only willing to do...

The `Africanization` of Salvador: Race, work, and politics in post-emancipation Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

ABSTRACTThe Old Republic in Brazil was characterized by urban social unrest in the wake of the final abolition of slavery. This article examines contemporaneous social struggles within the transport industry and carnival festivals of Salvador da Bahia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Urban transport and public popular culture provide windows into social contests over the meanings of modernity and freedom in the newly formed republic: Class struggle in the transport industry in post-emancipation Salvador was simultaneously racial terrain, conflict over popular culture had political and economic roots and both were interrelated within a broader contest over the meaning of modernity and freedom for the majority of the population. Persistent grassroots resistance to Eurocentric and draconian elite policies reached turning points during the 1910 presidential election and the 1919 general strike, forcing Bahian elites to take a more accommodationist approach to popular classes of society. Discourses on Africa mediated this transition and eventually became a central feature of racial and political hegemony.

Horseracing and liberal governance in nineteenth century Leicester

ABSTRACTThe old Leicester racecourse, which in 1866 was renamed Victoria Park, was a location in which opposing views of the proper use of public space played out. The reformers who took power in Leicester in 1836 aimed to advance liberal governance by abolishing the races and creating a place for rational recreation. For the aristocratic supporters of the races, led by the Rutland and Howe interests, the racecourse was a place for the display of symbolic power, and for exercising the military force of the county yeomanry. In an open political confrontation in 1850, the county interest, supported by people of all classes in the town, won. In the following decades, the Liberal council was reluctantly drawn into direct management of the racecourse and in doing so was reliant on the symbolic authority of the institutions of the county. This article is further demonstration of the popularity of race meetings with all classes in nineteenth-century society, and evidence of the contested nature of the project of liberal governance. It argues that aristocratic interest in urban race meetings as opportunities for the exercise of political and social influence extended well beyond the reforms of the 1830s and points to the need for broader consideration of the role of landed society in the shaping of urban popular culture.

Dr. Corry’s National Diorama of Ireland and Irish Performance in Nineteenth-century Urban Popular Culture

Dr. Corry’s National Diorama of Ireland and Irish Performance in Nineteenth-century Urban Popular Culture

Reading Psalms, and other urban poems, in a fractured city

This article was an attempt to (re-)read Psalms in the context of fractured cities, marked by socio-economic inequalities, woundedness, migration and exclusion. It explored urban motifs in selected psalms and considered their possible meanings in relation to both the socio-cultural contexts in which they were written but also how they could be read and understood today. It proposed the Psalms as urban poetry, and considered poems of praise, lament and resistance. It brought the Psalms into conversation both with �remixed� psalms and also with other urban poems. A �remix� is a technical term usually associated with altering, adding or changing songs or music into a new version more appropriate or suitable for a new context. It is essentially a genre that emerged from within urban popular culture. Finally, I suggested that an understanding of the Psalms as urban poetry of praise, lament and resistance, in conversation with other urban poems, can serve as a resource to unshackle our faith from the temple, from one city, or from human institutions, evoking a daring new imagination for a new people, new city and new creation.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The article explores contextual readings of the Psalms as urban poetry, and retrieves other urban poems from different genres, both in order to inform urban theological discourse and contextual theological reflections on the fractured city.

The Streetcar in the Urban Imaginary of Latin America

The electric streetcar was a significant marker of modernity in Latin America, but its symbolic power rested as much in its ability to establish a presence in urban popular culture as it did in its contribution to technological change. By using the concept of the “urban imaginary” we can reveal the multifaceted and shifting role of the streetcar as a symbol of progress and a site of danger, destruction, and death in the public mind. In newspapers, comics, songs, poems, stories, and movies, the masses imagined the streetcar as central to the daily life of the city and used it to make meaning out of the chaos of the rapidly evolving modern city. Themes explored include the ordering of bodies, labor conflict, violence, the spectacle city, and the afterlife of the streetcar.

'What say the citizens?' in Shakespeare's Richard III?

Shakespeare’s residency in London coincided with a period in which the City underwent unprecedented demographic growth and commercial expansion. By the 1590s two thirds to three quarters of the adult males resident in the City were citizens, at the time a uniquely urban identity that denoted a person who possessed ‘the freedom’ and was thereby entitled to the economic and political privileges of enfranchised inhabitants of a city or borough. These phenomena were transforming urban popular culture, yet their impact is largely unregistered in studies of Shakespeare and popular culture. The article seeks to direct attention to the presence and significance of the citizen, citizen languages and the culture of citizenship in Richard III , the play in which the word ‘citi- zen’ appears more often than in any other Shakespearean drama yet is rarely the focus of critical enquiry. The relative critical neglect of the citizens and of ‘citizen language’ more generally in Richard III stems from the widespread perception that its freemen are ultimately complicit in Richard’s tyranny. The paper challenges such views and focuses attention on Richard’s sustained effort to play the citizen to secure the crown.

Urban Migrants and Religious Networks: Malawians in Colonial Salisbury, 1920 to 1970

Non-indigenous migrants dominated the African population of Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia's capital city, until the mid-1950s. ‘Nyasa’ labour migrants (from British colonial Nyasaland, now Malawi) enriched urban popular culture and played a major role in the development of the country's industrial and rural economies. Despite this, people of Malawian origin have been marginalised from political life during both the colonial and postcolonial periods, and neglected in Zimbabwe's urban historiography. This article foregrounds ‘Nyasa’ migrants in the city, highlighting three of their religious expressions that emerged in Salisbury and became a prominent feature of the city's urban culture and religious landscape. The ‘Church of Central Africa, Presbyterian’ (CCAP), Yao or ‘Chawa’ Muslim associations and the ‘Nyau’ society became well established in colonial Salisbury and continue to be associated with people of Malawian ancestry in contemporary Harare. These religious groups played a role in the construction of new urban identities and helped migrants to create a sense of belonging in the city particularly during periods of rapid urbanisation and political change. By exploring life histories and archival sources, this study furthers our understanding of Zimbabwe's urban past while informing current debates on identity politics, citizenship and belonging in the region. It raises two new issues: firstly, ‘Nyasa’ labour migrants were among the first Africans to work and settle in Salisbury during the colonial period, and many used religious networks to establish themselves within new urban communities. Secondly, despite the longevity and depth of their commitment to urban life in Salisbury (and later Harare) these migrants have been targeted by exclusionary state policies at moments of political and economic crisis, during both the colonial period and since 2000. The Zimbabwean government's selective accounts of national identity ignore these histories of migration and marginalise important minority groups because they lack cultural ties to the land, despite their central role in the shaping of Zimbabwe's cities.

Avant-garde art in everyday life: early-twentieth-century European modernism

Beginning around 1910, vanguard artists demanded that true art go beyond the intellectual and transform daily life. This volume highlights the work of six influential European artists who took this idea into the wider world, where it merged enthusiastically with demands in the industrial marketplace, the nascent mass media, and urban popular culture. Featured are Piet Zwart, a Dutch designer who brought his minimalist aesthetic vision to ubiquitous items like biscuit boxes and postage stamps; Karel Teige, leader of the Czech avant-garde, who produced brilliant book and journal designs; his compatriot Ladislav Sutnar, who brought modernist good to tableware, clothing, and children's toys; Gustav Klutsis, who pioneered using photomontage for political purposes; Lazar (El) Lissitzky, who produced some of the most exciting book, poster, and exhibition designs of the 1920s and '30s in Germany and Russia; and German artist John Heartfield, who worked exclusively in photomontage to design book covers, journals, and agitational posters for the Communist cause.

Beyond Rock. Social commitment and political conscience through Popular Music in Australia 1976 - 2002. The case of Midnight Oil

The work and career of Midnight Oil illustrate a case of interaction between culture and politics in Australia. Furthermore they represent an example of social commitment from the sphere of urban popular culture. For a quarter of a century Midnight Oil offered a critical and ideological interpretation of the Australian social and political evolution. Aware of and sensitive to changes and events happening around them, five Sydneysiders thought about Australian identity in terms of what they considered to be their national challenges from a universal perspective. Hence, they approached issues like pacifism, Indigenous rights and environmentalism and developed a social and political discourse based on the defence of human rights and a condemnation of capitalist excesses. Through more than a hundred songs and almost two thousand gigs the band urged politicians to reassess the institutions. At the same time they criticized people’s apathy asking them for a deeper engagement with the development of the country’s welfare. Finally, in December 2002, Peter Garrett quit his singer-activist journey to launch a political career by joining the Australian Labor Party, for which he is the current Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth in the Julia Gillard Government. It is thus that now we can make sense of the extent to which the political and social message of a rock band can actually generate enough credibility to allow for the lead singer´s transition from the stage to parliament.

“O fantasma de um clássico”: recepção e reminiscências de Favela dos Meus Amores (H. Mauro, 1935)

O filme Favela dos meus amores (1935), de Humberto Mauro, cujas cópias se perderam, foi muito bem recebido pela crítica e pelo público, tornando-se objeto de culto e memória nas décadas seguintes. Neste artigo pretendo articular, a partir dos fragmentos documentais que nos informam sobre o filme, três aspectos principais: 1) o papel de “Favela...” na construção de uma nova identidade nacional e de uma nova cultura popular urbana, tendo como centro o Rio de Janeiro; 2) os aspectos ideológicos e estéticos da recepção crítica do filme; 3) Seu papel como objeto de memória da história cultural brasileira. A partir destes três eixos de análise pretendo mapear o impacto de “Favela...” na formatação de uma nova cultura “nacional popular” no Brasil, cujo sentido ideológico era disputado à esquerda e à direita.

Old Settlers, New Negroes, and the Birth of Modernity in Black Chicago

Old Settlers, New Negroes, and the Birth of Modernity in Black Chicago Beryl Satter (bio) Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. By Davarian Baldwin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 363 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $22.50 (paper). Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955. By Adam Green. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 306 pages. $35.00 (cloth). $20.00 (paper). For better or worse, there is a long scholarly tradition of studying black Chicago. Starting with University of Chicago sociologists' distorted early twentieth century investigations that cast the city's African American community as "naturally" vice ridden, it has since expanded to encompass an interdisciplinary array of themes and approaches, from St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's pathbreaking 1948 study Black Metropolis to more recent works by political scientists, sociologists, journalists, literary scholars, and historians analyzing everything from black Chicago's vibrant 1930s-era literary "renaissance" to its changing place within the city's machine politics.1 Now two historians have moved beyond the sociological angles more typical of black Chicago scholarship to look instead at the community's striking cultural innovations, which transformed not just Chicago's culture but that of the nation as a whole. Davarian Baldwin's Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life focuses on the 1910s through the 1930s, while Adam Green's Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago covers the years 1940 to 1955, but both challenge previous accounts of black creativity and, indeed, historians' understandings of cultural renaissances in general, by highlighting the ways that entrepreneurial and market forces fostered exciting new forms of black cultural expression. Both also contest the ideas of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, particularly his 1957 study Black Bourgeoisie, which attacked the black middle class for abandoning older virtues of thrift, hard work, and sacrifice in favor of an embrace of a "world [End Page 383] of make-believe" based upon conspicuous consumption. Baldwin challenges Frazier's underlying assumptions about middle-class respectability, the black consumer culture marketplace, and racial advancement, while Green counters Frazier's dismissive attitude toward the black middle class through a reading of Ebony, the celebrity-besotted black magazine that Frazier saw as the epitome of black middle-class self-delusion. Yet the two books could hardly be more different. Although both celebrate black creativity, they offer radically opposing visions of the relevance of class divisions, political debate, and racial conflict for understanding black (and by extension, U.S.) life. While Baldwin stresses that black cultural innovation was forged in a context of class conflict and often included expressions of resistance to white racism, Green explicitly brackets discussion of racism, intraracial class conflict, and intraracial political battles because, he insists, black life is about far more than these difficult subjects. But if we've learned anything from the past few decades of cultural studies, it is that culture does not exist in a vacuum and cannot be studied as if it floats untouched by the political battles around it. Green claims to be breaking new ground by telling a story of agency rather than declension, but his approach actually hearkens back to an older, inherently conservative tendency to marginalize politics from the reading of culture. The stronger of the two books, Baldwin's Chicago's New Negroes uses innovative readings of black urban popular culture to uncover the values and intellectual vision of ordinary people. In some ways, Baldwin's entire study is an attack on two ideas that were implicit in Frazier's famous attack on the black bourgeoisie: first, that values of thrift, hard work, and sacrifice supposedly abandoned by the black middle class were in fact the most important values for black people to embrace; and second, that the places that fascinated many black Americans, middle class or otherwise—such as sports, movies, music, and self-adornment—could be dismissed as mindless escapism that lacked political content. Baldwin challenges these two assumptions in order to recast our understanding not of the black middle class, but rather of class, culture, and creativity within a black urban context and, more particularly, of...

Babylon girls: black women performers and the shaping of the modern

Babylon Girls is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows—chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like—between 1890 and 1945. Through a consideration of the gestures, costuming, vocal techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers and dancers, Jayna Brown explains how these women shaped the movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era of U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played with constructions of race, gender, and the body as they moved across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements including the cakewalk, the shimmy, and the Charleston—black dances by which the “New Woman” defined herself. These early-twentieth-century performers brought these dances with them as they toured across the United States and around the world, becoming cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of their audiences. Investigating both well-known performers such as Ada Overton Walker and Josephine Baker and lesser-known artists such as Belle Davis and Valaida Snow, Brown weaves the histories of specific singers and dancers together with incisive theoretical insights. She describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by women, both black and white, and she considers how black expressive artists navigated racial segregation. Fronting the “picaninny choruses” of African American child performers who toured Britain and the Continent in the early 1900s, and singing and dancing in The Creole Show (1890), Darktown Follies (1913), and Shuffle Along (1921), black women variety-show performers of the early twentieth century paved the way for later generations of African American performers. Brown shows not only how these artists influenced transnational ideas of the modern woman but also how their artistry was an essential element in the development of jazz.

Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: Naked Lunch, Blade Runner, and Neuromancer

When Leopold Bloom first walks out into the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses, the reader is treated to a series of realistic details about this Irish urban landscape: street numbers, pavement, and the bread van from Boland's. But barely half a paragraph passes before Bloom begins to asso ciate this urban landscape with Someplace in the east (57). As Bloom walks, the landscape of Dublin is overlaid with that of an imagined oriental city: Walk along a strand, a strange land, come to a city gate . . . Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, the terrible, seated crosslegged smoking a coiled pipe (57). Bloom's vision is, of course, built entirely on orien tal clich?s, as well as on images of imported commodities (carpet shops) and urban popular culture (the pantomime show of Turko the Terrible) that are less facets of the Orient than aspects of Dublin itself with oriental associations. Although Bloom's reverie may seem constructed from whole cloth, careful parsing of the allusions shows how the Western city itself is rich in oriental signifiers; Orientalism is already part of the European urban fabric. At the heart of the modernist canon, oriental tropes prove central to the construction of modernist urban space. But this oriental Dublin is also remarkable for its self-consciousness as a literary construction, as Bloom draws a distinction between his reverie and the actual East: Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the track of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. Bloom not only acknowledges the role of orientalist travelogue in constructing his vision of the city, but he even pinpoints his exact source: Frederick Thompson's In the Track of the Sun (1893). This image of the oriental sun is associated with fantasy and error: What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the Freeman leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland (57). Thus Joyce's orientalized Dublin, while demonstrating the degree to which Orientalism already, at the beginning of the twentieth century, structures the Western city, exposes urban Orientalism as a literary fiction. The complex role of oriental tropes in such modernist imaginings of

The symposium on urban popular culture in modern China

The studies of urban popular culture in modern China in recent years have attracted wide attention from scholars in China and abroad. The symposium, which is composed by Ma Min’s “Injecting vitality into the studies of urban cultural history,” Jiang Jin’s “Issues in the studies of urban popular culture in modern China,” Wang Di’s “The microcosm of Chinese cities: The perspective and methodology of studying urban popular culture from the case of teahouses in Chengdu,” Joseph W. Esherick’s “Remaking the Chinese city: Urban space and urban culture” and Lu Hanchao’s “From elites to common people: The downward trend in the studies of Chinese urban history in the United States,” provide valuable insights on the perspective, trend, and methodology of the studies.

Drinking Games, Karaoke Songs, and "Yangge" Dances: Youth Cultural Production in Rural China

This article examines the different ways youth in rural Shaanbei, northcentral China participate in cultural production. It explores the media through which young people express themselves and the roles that social institutions (temples, schools, villages, households), modern technologies (video compact discs), and translocal/transnational mass media (satellite and cable TV) play in enabling youth to assert their presence as cultural beings and producers. Shaanbei youth do not choose between modern forms of entertainment (karaoke songs) or traditional forms (playing drinking games), or between institutionally organized activities and those self-initiated to express themselves. (Rural Chinese youth, cultural production, temple festivals, drinking games) ********** Anthropologists have a long-standing interest in studying the socialization of children and processes of enculturation cross-culturally, yet youth culture has largely remained the preserve of sociologists and specialists of popular culture. The study of Western youth culture has its roots in studies of youth social and cultural movements in the 1960s and 1970s: the Hippies, the anti-war protests, Punks, Beatles fans, etc. (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; Skelton and Valentine 1998). Youth culture in the West seems to be predicated on a self-conscious, relatively coherent set of mental attitudes and behavioral patterns, often dubbed subcultural or counter-cultural. The most important characteristics of Western urban youth culture are the degree of expressivity (e.g., It's loud!) in terms of music, fashion, hairstyle, and manners, and the effort to counter what is perceived to be adult stiffness and conservatism. Though having originated in the West, analytical approaches for studying Western urban youth movements seem to be easily transferable to the Chinese urban context, with the May Fourth Movement and subsequent student culture as prime examples of a self-conscious Chinese urban youth culture. In recent years, the import of rock 'n' roll, disco, hip hop, and rave parties further consolidated and expanded an urban youth style distinct from adult and other cultural productions (Farrer 2002; Moore 2005). (2) One might think that because rural China is portrayed in the media as being impoverished in things cultural (wenhua pinkun), (3) its youth lack the opportunity to have or produce culture. But this depends on where in rural China one looks. In certain parts of rural China, some forms of metropolitan youth culture are emerging since urban cultural forms are rapidly penetrating rural areas, especially along the coast and the peripheries of large cities. In a village near a major urban center (Heilongjiang in northeastern China), Yan (1999) found the local rural youth culture largely derivative of urban popular culture in terms of taste and activities (e.g., billiards, music cassette tapes, printed T-shirts). In Shaanbei, many aspects of youth culture are also drawn from metropolitan pop culture. Although the more education a Shaanbei rural youth receives the more he or she is alienated from village culture and peasant knowledge, the attractiveness of traditional forms of cultural production persists with young people, especially in places like Shaanbei, where such forms of cultural production are still vibrant and popular. Yan (1999) included in his study rural youth's increased consumerism and materialism, increasing premarital sex, the assertion of individual rights and independence, resistance to parents and local state authorities, and a tendency to try new ways of life such as working in the city or traveling. As the focus of this article is on youth cultural production, other aspects of youth life are de-emphasized. Cultural production here refers to the ensemble of mostly expressive cultural activities, and not instrumental activities such as agriculture, employment, and trade. Expressive culture also includes the consumption of cultural products, such as karaoke songs and the necessary accompanying equipment. …