When culture was a product consumed by the upper classes, it wasn't viewed by them as being subversive or tasteless since it was created for them. However, when you start getting a growing middle class who were not aristocrats but who did begin to have the kind of money and leisure to consume culture, there is the beginning of strain. Cultural products could be produced to appeal to the middle class sensibility, and to the upper classes this was low brow, unsophisticated, something to be scorned, and also perhaps something to be feared, because it could be politically subversive. So the upper classes generally used their disproportionate influence with the government to impose varying degrees of censorship to suppress that which was considered vulgar or dangerous (to their dominance).
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None of [the US (United States) media, reflecting US culture] was being produced with the intent of delivering some sort of ideological message, but it turns out there is one, and it runs deep, and it's one of the big reasons it's popular in the world and why it is scorned by the elite everywhere.
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The message we're delivering is that the individual is not the group to which he belongs, and doesn't have to be bound by that group. We're delivering a message of personal freedom, and it reverberates at least somewhat with all who hear it who are under the control of their betters. (And some of us here who embrace “identity politics” deeply disagree with that message …)
And we in the US prove that when the lower classes cast off the upper class, and rule ourselves, that we can actually be better. The US is the triumph of the gutter, the land of the vulgar and unsophisticated, the huddled masses who became free, who are led but not ruled by their government; and in nearly every way we're leaving all of the nations ruled by the upper classes in the dust.
We're not just complacent about being from the gutter; we're proud of it. A lot of our culture still glories in coming from the ghetto. Some of the attraction of Rap is that it comes out of the black ghetto, and even when it's put on there's almost a requirement that it keep referring to that experience. We gleefully absorb culture from all over the world, and equally gleefully share ours with the world.
“The Culture of the Commons [1]”
For years I've been trying to track down an article I read (on the web) about culture, and how what has traditionally been called “culture” is really the “pop art” of the aristrocracy, and why most governments around the world dispise our “culture,” yet most people around the world love our “culture.”
Here is that article, found deep in my bookmarks file (containing almost 2,600 bookmarks—I should go through my bookmarks file more often).
[1] http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/08/TheCultureoftheCommons.shtml