Out of all the readings, Fiske is perhaps the most pedagogical, but I really like the way that he distills popular culture down to something ultimately created by the people. He also argues that people can be redefined simply as a shifting set of social allegiances, and the aggregation of people converging together is more or less culture, but in a very fluid and uncontainable way. I think that these statements really reflect back upon the Chinese government’s failures during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, because they assumed that they could simply neatly package up a cultural ideology for the masses, in a “ready made” fashion, for mass consumption, within a containable and controllable space.
In the aftermath of this forced cultural ingestion, it was almost natural that a form of entertainment would arise that rebelled against the strict ideological norm of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Prior to this period of time, Chinese music had been more strictly traditional or politically rooted. But Teresa Teng's music was entirely different- it was at once musically soothing, with clear elements of western influence, and also rejected China's previously inward-tending and ideological music. This new type of music represented a rejection of China's previous isolation from the world, and was impelled by and through the development of new technologies (such as the cassette and tape recorder) that allowed for the mass dissemination of this newer free, "alternative". I actually wanted to write my essay on this because I thought it was just such a major act of defiance, and a clear example of the social fragmentation that was ironically what the government did not want. One can also argue that these songs were received subconsciously as an extrapolation of political thought, because they represented an unofficial and palatable music form that mirrored the rise in