In comparison to the nations of western Europe, how new and original was the culture of the USA...

In comparison to the nations of western Europe, how new and original was the culture of the USA? Was the culture of the Americans influenced by many cultures, even non-European ones? Can it be described as a new culture far removed from the Old World? Many people seemed to think so.

>It is natural that we should regard American literature as a small branch or province of English literature. None the less there is another view to be taken. The American art-speech contains a quality that... is not inherent in the English race. This alien quality belongs to the American continent itself.

>There is a stranger on the face of the earth, and it is no use our trying any further to gull ourselves that he is one of us, and just as we are. There is an unthinkable gulf between us and America, and across the space we see, not our own folk signalling to us, but strangers, incomprehensible beings, simulacra perhaps of ourselves, but other, creatures of an other-world.

>To a keen European eye there is an indefinable yet undeniable something in the whole makeup of the born American that distinguishes him from the born European.

>Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans. It has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has made its mark upon them- generation by generation they become more and more like the people they eradicated.

The only distinctive American culture that is kinda relevant globally is Black Music.

We are all Americans now

> American music
> American foods and even traditions like halloween and black friday and the cola santa
> Consumerism
> American teenage culture, and now "tween" culture
> American programs and aps for social media
> Veeky Forums

Anyone claiming the US has no culture are blind to the sheer volume of contemporary European culture that is derived from overseas

>> American music
Like country and bluegrass? Lets be honest, its Jazz, Blues, Rock and HipHip

>> American foods
Like fast food?

>and even traditions like halloween
Halloween is American now?

>and black friday and the cola santa
nope

>> Consumerism
hardly something american

>> American teenage culture, and now "tween" culture
And I though we all admire tibetian woodcarving

>> American programs and aps for social media
software is technology, not culture

>> Veeky Forums
the imitation of a sri lankan silk painting board?

>Anyone claiming the US has no culture are blind to the sheer volume of contemporary European culture that is derived from overseas

Sorry fatty, but it is mostly McDonalds & MTV that is distinctive for the US.

It's actually posts like this that prove the other user's point, you're consuming so much American culture that you think that
"real" American culture is the most stereotypical thing that comes to your mind.

The US has a huge complex about culture. Roughly until WW1, it's way of living was basically a mix of english nobility wannabes and rural shitters from all over Europe. The rural population naturally developed a more distinct culture, simply because rural culture depends on its environment.

Literature was a small branch of English literature, with an almost exclusively English tradition and an almost exclusive English style. Melville and Poe could have been English authors as well, except of course some purely American topics, but still with an English style.

Where they started to develop something on their own were Short Stories, which were more of a Russian thing before, and music.

After WW1 and especially after WW2, I wouldn't say that US literature was an English branch. American literature has its own style now and some distinctive features, like having social commentary as its raison d'être.

So while it was a European culture, it wasn't one under Reagan and after the cold war ended it changed again and has very few connection to contemporary european culture beyond sharing a lot of cheap entertainment.

Americans are as genetically and racially distinct from Europeans as Mexicans and Brazilians.
The sheer amount of miscegenation has resulted in a hybrid group of people. It's idiotic to treat them as one people, like expecting people in Bolivia to read Cervantes and watch bull fights

Then please enlighten me what distinctively American culture I am consuming so much. Because honestly the culture around here feels distinctively European.

>t. has never been to Europe beyond sightseeing
Entertainment for plebs is all american culture, but else? They behave differently in social situations, they use other ways to resolve conflicts, they have another view on tradition and family (your post is the best example, you take black friday, literally something invented by salesman in the last 50 years as an example for tradition).

Thinking about it, the US's global cultural impression is rather small compared to it's politic or economic footprint. Literature, arts, philosophy, lifestyle, sports, food. all next to nill, the only really culturally dominante thing from the US is music, mainly black music which is dominating globally since at least the 1920's. Ironically, Americans of "white" European descent didn't develop anything of cultural interest for Europeans, it was just a bad copy of what they already had, but Black music was hot.

>This is what makes good business men. And in this the American is like the Jew: in that, having conquered and destroyed the instinctive, impulsive being in himself, he is free to be always deliberate, always calculated, rapid, swift, and single in practical execution as a machine. The perfection of machine triumph, of deliberate self-determined motion, is to be found in the Americans and the Jews. Hence the race talent for acting. Only Americans and Jews suffer from a torturing frictional unease, an incapacity to rest.

>Another thing that struck me was the great influence of the Negro. The emotional way an American expresses himself, especially the way he laughs, can best be studied in the illustrated supplements of the American papers; the inimitable Teddy Roosevelt laugh is found in its primordial form in the American Negro. The peculiar walk with loose joints, or the swinging of the hips so frequently observed in Americans, also comes from the Negro. American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro, and so does the dance. The expression of religious feeling, the revival meetings, the Holy Rollers and other abnormalities are strongly influenced by the Negro. American music is most obviously pervaded by the African rhythm and the African melody. It would be difficult not to see that the coloured man... has infected the American behaviour.

>The vivacity of the average American, which shows itself not only at baseball games but quite particularly in his extraordinary love of talking – the ceaseless gabble of American papers is an eloquent example of this – is scarcely to be derived from his Germanic forefathers, but is far more like the chattering of a Negro village. The almost total lack of privacy and the all-devouring mass sociability remind one of primitive life in open huts, where there is complete identity with all members of the tribe.

>Roughly until WW1, it's way of living was basically a mix of english nobility wannabes
This.

I think the biggest thing that people fail to understand about America is that until WW1 they thought of themselves as English and desperately wanted to be seen as English, and were extremely English anyway since long after independence the British Isles were the main source of immigrants.

Read the Great Gatsby sometime. The narrator refers to the English people who attend Gatsby's parties as having an air of poverty to them (or something like that). After WW1 England was bankrupt and broken, and being English-like wasn't cool any more. And so Americans quietly started to forget that for the first ~140 years after their independence they were the biggest Angloboos imaginable.

Even then, right up until the second world war America was still majority English in character. If you'd asked the average American what his race was, he'd have been far more likely to say Anglo-Saxon than anything else. It was only when WW2 created a sense of national unity that the English establishment began to give way. The war was a unifying experience. On the one hand, minorities like Italians and Irish after military service could no longer be shut out of power like they had been. On the other, mass conscription of young men took them out of their communities and blended their original identities into something 'American'. They added a little to the common culture, like pizza and halloween, but the European minorities assimilated more than they gave. And the base, standard American culture that everyone adopted was still really only English culture.

After that, the term 'white' became preferred over terms like 'Anglo-Saxon'. And the American populace at large completely forgot that the founding fathers rebelled not because they had stopped thinking of themselves as English, but precisely because they didn't feel they were getting the rights that were due to them /as Englishmen/.

The Roman empire did not have any major philosophers who were not greeks, the similarities between Rome/Greece and US/Europe are very close.

Even in their art, both Romans and Americans it was/is formulaic and plastic with little originality.

Ah Seneca was greek now
>comparing the modern day US 1:1 on Rome
>using that as an excuse for US cultural impotency
Really?

>Jazz, Blues, Rock and HipHip
So... distinctly American genres?

Yep, Afro-American music is world dominating. Which is interesting because not the culture of the white privileged part of society made it, but the music of the discriminated minority.

It's kinda hard to pinpoint if it's all american. American pop music, movies and food are popular everywhere, sure, but the cultures is still different on how they interact with media and what's popular in their own culture.

>and food
FFs can anyone please tell me what distinctive american food is so popular? fries? burgers? because thats not distinctive american

You can't really claim something is "American" if it's just European with a tiny twist to it.

Americans help popularized it to the point that non-whites see it as American. Ask any third worlder

meh, that makes it western not distinctively American. problem is most American culture is just a copy of Euro stuff. Genuinely new stuff is rare, safe for the aforementioned black music. like burgers & fries was common food with the dutch and germans way before it became American. Hot dog might be something genuine American that made it round the world or chewing gum.

>problem is most American culture is just a copy of Euro stuff.
maybe not just a copy, but lots of stuff co evolved on both sides of the Atlantic as part of a common western culture.

This.
It's only American we-wuzzers that could lump the Americans in with Europeans.
They have no opera, no symphonies, no poetry worth mentioning, no great artists.
American art, music, architecture, literature is childish and undeveloped compared to the masterpieces of European high culture.