What is pop culture? Why do we so often hate to love it and love to hate it? What makes us embrace parts of it and not others? While critics in every era have decried the media and popular culture as posing serious dangers to all facets of society, very few have tried to understand the meanings and social structures that they have created in our everyday lives. Marcel Danesi explores our human desire for meaning and the need to symbolize it in music, language, art, and other creative forms. Showing how culture 'by the people, for the people' validates our common experiences, he offers a variety of perspectives to help us understand the products of popular culture, including music, movies, books, magazines, television shows, websites, advertisements, fads, celebrities, and more. As long as popular media and other cultural arenas continue to play a central role in contemporary society, so too will the conditions that sustain pop culture_even as the designation of what is popular will continually change. Intriguing and entertaining, Popular Culture taps into the fun of pop culture without making us feel guilty for enjoying it.