5/25 The Merchants of Cool Video Response

5/25 Angel Truong The Merchants of Cool Video Response

            The documentary The Merchants of Cool relates to the course theme of popular culture and how there is a power struggle that involves having culture be capitalized and dynamic showcasing the commodification of it. First relating to Stuart’s Hall’s reading, popular culture has a power struggle because the dominant group, the marketing team, takes culture from the subordinate group, teenagers, to establish trends that takes part of consumer and popular cultures. For example, the concept “cool hunting” involves marketing companies to collect data from the small percentage of trendsetting teenagers and commodify their culture before it blows up. This is a form of cultural hegemony in the capital world where companies exploit the culture of the trendsetters and make it popular by emerging the culture in their products such as Sprite with underground hip hop. The product and cultural practices get marketed and advertised which makes them popular culture and everyone, especially teenagers, fall for it. The product and culture then becomes a trend rather than the “cool” unique things that trendsetters do by themselves. So, the dominant group or marketers now have power over what is popular culture which undermines the small percentage of teenagers that practiced it before it was commercialized and common. This then forces the trendsetters to find another cultural practice that will continue the cycle. Therefore, the documentary reveals the process of creating popular culture that involves studying teenagers and exploiting them for economic benefits. 

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