"Let's Talk about Love"

To me, Chapter 6 seems to be more of a criticism against the ways in which Celine Dion’s voice is in contact with the audience. Wilson would argue that it is essentially “a volume business” which identifies Dion’s music as a piece of luxurious commodity and a technical plus ethnic role model that both intimidates people into low-creativity and engenders didactics to persuade audience into mainstream incorporation. It looks like the critics of mainstream highlights the evaluation of the cultural impacts upon the receivers. Not only do they emphasize the quintessential values of the “high brow/low brow cultures”, but also are they highly concerned about what values the different cultures would bring to the mass audience. Wilson’s examination of Dion’s music indicates that mainstream may fall short in enriching the audience in terms of personality cultivation and perhaps creativity as well. In this regard, I was wondering would the music (or other cultural forms) community of subculture help improve the shortcomings that the mainstream fails to bring. If so, in what ways would subculture contribute to enhance the connections between cultural outcomings and audience in terms of the influence over the receivers?

Wilson also argues in the illustration of the case of Dion that corporate mainstream culture has become globalized and hybridized with indigenous cultures. In this sense, the globalization and hybridization in fact create a popular mainstream identity that is recognized by worldwide audiences in a variety of areas. It seems to me that this global commercialization in the form of popular music establishes such an “imagined community” that people from different countries with different cultural backgrounds are assimilated into this community and are together identified as “citizens” of pop music world. And yet, how would local subculture distinguish itself in front of the juggernaut of globalization? Would it see this trend as an opportunity to expand its sphere and connect to its outside counterparts communities by joining this “shrinking world?” Or, could it be that the globalization eventually erodes the autonomy of subculture and harms its chances for future development?

Off of my second question, I have long been struggling with the question that does the definition or conception of subculture designate to a more universal application wherein worldwide subcultural community members recognize and enjoy a commonality? Or could the term of subculture be redefined according to various geographical norms so that one mainstream cultural form might be transformed and localized into a culture of underground or non-mainstream? Wilson’s example on this issue is the Iraqi copycat of American Idol and the Iraqi barber fights all the way against all odds through the competition, which irritates the mainstream in Iraq. The fact is that when Dion’s mainstream music bothers critics at home, “My Heart will Go on” seems to arm the Iraqi barber with an identity of subcultural taste that separates him from mainstream. So what would we make of the story regarding the cultural transformation in this sense?