December 21 marked an epoch. Psy, the stage name of 34-year-old Park Jae-sang, became the first artist to get 1 billion views on

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问题    December 21 marked an epoch. Psy, the stage name of 34-year-old Park Jae-sang, became the first artist to get 1 billion views on YouTube with Gangnam Style. But global blockbuster hits, in whatever genre, have come to seem a US niche market. It was Michael Jackson’s popularity in the 1980s that started this global style in pop culture. In contrast to, say, The Beaties, who had an unmistakably English style that became globally popular, Jackson’s music, an ingenious collection of disco rhythms and nonsense phrases, didn’t seem to come from any culture.
   Why have Americans so dominated the globalised part of popular culture up till now? The US has little in the way of cultural infrastructure abroad, like Germany’s Goethe Institutes or the British Council. And that should not matter.
   The US has benefited from intangible advantages. It uses the lingua franca, the cultural equivalent of printing a reserve currency. Their home audience may be the pivotal advantage US artists have. As the writer Todd Gitlin put it years ago: "By the time it leaves our shores, US popular culture has been ’ pretested’ in a heterogeneous public—a huge internal market with hybrid tastes and a tradition of juxtaposition and recombining disparate elements, melting them down into a Hollywood melange."
   But you could as easily say "dumbing down" as "melting down" . Culturally speaking, the diverse US audience gives and it takes away. An American artist who wants to appeal to a variety of US cultural communities does so not by mastering the cultures of others but by stripping away those elements of his own that might require explanation. US society is indeed diverse, but for that very reason American popular culture is homogeneous.
   Americans understand this poorly. What the US has is not a national genius but wealth, prestige and glamour. The world is always curious about how wealthy, prestigious and glamorous people dance, fight and fall in love. Obviously, the producers and venture capitalists who drive the entertainment industry will happily turn their focus towards any country that can produce blockbusters.
   But the heart of the problem is elsewhere. Should the US reputation for mismanagement, profligacy and trillion-dollar government deficits continue to grow, non-US corporate executives would at some point ask why they are paying an architect to design a conference room like those in Manhattan. Culture follows wealth, prestige and glamour. As the US share of these declines, the world’s viewers may come to prefer Sleepless in Seoul to Sleepless in Seattle.

It’s implied in Paragraph 5 that Americans____.

选项 A、misjudge the intention of people abroad buying from them
B、exaggerate the role of creativity in their popular culture
C、overestimate the glamour of their popular culture
D、fail to meet the needs of the producers and venture capitalists

答案A

解析 推断题。第五段指出美国人并不知道海外人士购买其产品(接受其文化)只是因为人们好奇有钱、有想象力、有魅力人士的文化生活而已,而美国目前的财富、影响力、魅力地位决定了全世界人们对其文化的关注。由此可见,美国人没能正确判断海外人士购买本土产品的意图。所以A项正确。
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