(FORTUNE Magazine) – MADONNA. Guns n' Roses. Vanilla Ice. M.C. Hammer. 2 Live Crew. Let's face it: You don't really know anything about any of this stuff. You're probably too old or too harried or too stuck on your own generation's pop culture icons -- be they Sinatra or Elvis or Jagger or Springsteen -- to care about current pop culture. These days, though, you can't escape it the way your dad could yours. It's everywhere: in the news, on the tube, in the malls -- even occasionally in FORTUNE. It is the marinade in which our kids soak, which is potentially frightening because we understand so little about it. And, as the second-biggest U.S. export, it largely forms the rest of the world's view of what America is. In the past, pop culture has been a pretty reliable barometer of the national mood, a mirror of the times in which we live. So what is its message today? The plain truth is that you can relax: We are living in a relatively placid, nonrebellious age. No, it's not quite the 1950s. The streets are far more violent, the culture more salacious, public speech more raw; on the plus side, women and minorities can today be full-fledged members of society, and the air breathes easier without the likes of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover around. But it's not the 1960s: No revolution is afoot.

Most of today's pop culture reflects what marketing research consultancy Yankelovich Clancy Shulman calls ''neotraditionalism.'' It synthesizes the positive aspects of traditional values -- stability, home, family -- with the personal freedoms that proliferated in the wake of the sexual revolution and the women's and civil rights movements. How can we be so sure times are dull? Rent these recent top films: Pretty Woman, Ghost, Goodfellas, Home Alone, and Dances With Wolves. You'll see a Beverly Hills version of Pygmalion starring a perky hooker with a heart of gold, a fantasy romanticizing widowhood, a classic gangster flick, an amusing kid caper, and a lavish cavalry-and-Indian s movie. Turn on the radio: Aside from rap music and the occasional blast of heavy metal, you'll find soft rock and soul-jazz vocals dominating the airwaves. Country music -- probably the most direct pipeline to the heartland mind-set -- has lost all traces of the old ''outlaw'' movement epitomized by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Today's lowbrow anthem is Lee Greenwood's mushy ''I'm Proud to Be an American,'' a stark contrast to Johnny Paycheck's 1978 hit, ''Take This Job and Shove It.'' On TV, avant-garde shows like Twin Peaks and Cop Rock have failed for lack of interest. Prime time is ruled by Cheers, a sitcom that -- like I Love Lucy -- is messageless but well written and acted, and by America's Funniest Home Videos, which -- like Candid Camera -- appeals to our love of watching others make fools of themselves. Even rap music, which is probably the most creative pop culture happening these days, thumps to a largely neotraditional beat. Sure, its lyrics are randy and often angry, but they mostly alternate between outrageous teenage bragging -- nothing new or radical there -- and funky preaching. The message: Life on the streets is meaner and more unforgiving than ever, but the way out is to stay off drugs, stay in school, and take responsibility for yourself. NOW STEP BACK to 1970. Top movies included M.A.S.H., Catch-22, Joe, Woodstock, and Patton. This grab bag of two antiwar films, a lament for blue- collar life, a rock & roll love fest, and a glorification of war reflected that tempestuous year's headlines. Musical innovators (and drug abusers) Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were about to flame out but were still pounding out hits. On TV, Archie and Meathead were about to begin their intergenerational political squabbles on All in the Family. Bookish folk were buzzing about Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a scathing sendup of Park Avenue liberals schmoozing with Black Panther revolutionaries. Its author, Tom Wolfe, is today hard at work on a new novel -- about real estate developers. If the message of the media is fuzzier than it used to be, that's partly because of the technological explosion in the ways pop culture gets delivered. Twenty years ago most folks had three channels on their TVs, plus the ''educational'' (public broadcasting) channel. Today, if you like country music, or old movies, or hard-rock videos, or sports, or even bad old TV sitcoms, you have your very own cable channel aimed right at you. We are flooded with so much that one popular radio format today touts what it isn't: no rap, no hard rock. Back then there was no People magazine, no Entertainment Tonight, no MTV, no VH1, no TNN, no VCRs, no video rental stores, no music videos, no corporate sponsors for rock tours.

Amid all the clutter, pop culture still holds clues to who and where we are, though they are more fraught with meaning to some than others. On the rapturous side stands Camille Paglia, a humanities professor at Philadelphia's University of the Arts who has become the current femme terrible of academia because of her ''politically incorrect'' stances on such issues as feminism (she thinks it's too self-absorbed) and the value of classical studies (she's for them). ''There's nothing to be ashamed of in America's pop culture today,'' she says. ''It's healthy and fantastically creative. The rest of the world continues to envy us and tries to imitate us. But it's hopeless. The French love our records but can't produce a single good rock group. Italy, Spain, Japan, the same -- hopeless. In Russia the best gift you can give a young person is a T-shirt with the logo of a U.S. rock band on it.'' Cynics like writer and social critic P. J. O'Rourke see little to get excited about. Says he: ''We're back in one of those mindless periods, like the 1950s, where our pop culture actually means no more than it appears to mean. Not that it ever means much, but now it means less than usual.'' For marketers the prevailing neotraditionalism doesn't alter the need to keep up with who's hot and who's not. Says Philip Dusenberry, CEO of BBDO New York, the ad agency responsible for all those Pepsi personality ads featuring Michael J. Fox, M.C. Hammer, and Ray Charles: ''Good advertising wants to be in step with what's happening in the country. If it is, people will nod along with you and agree with your message.'' But in the current climate, neither does it pay for business to push the boundaries too far. ''I think Madonna may have gone over the top,'' says Dusenberry, whose Pepsi ads featuring Herself disappeared after her controversial video Like a Prayer appeared on MTV. ''A lot of kids are turned off by her.'' Well, neotraditional kids anyhow. Some of pop culture's leading creative lights -- people who have gotten rich by feeding America's insatiable appetite for the stuff -- claim they are themselves turned off by the current coziness between creators and corporate product hawkers. ''I'm a fan of counterculture -- of which there is very little right now,'' says Matt Groening, creator of preadolescent underachiever and cartoon superstar Bart Simpson. ''What's happened is that mainstream culture has gotten so good at marketing pseudo-hipness that it overwhelms other choices that are out there.'' The use of pop music as a merchandising tool has become so pervasive that signs of a minor backlash are emerging. Recently the Black Crowes, a heretofore little-known rock band, was fired as the opening act for ZZ Top on a tour sponsored by Miller Lite. Their sin: They had publicly bad-mouthed commercialism. The rewards of rebellion? Their album immediately soared to the top of the charts, and the band made the cover of Rolling Stone. GROENING'S DISTINCTION between culture and counterculture is the key to understanding where we are today. Usually pop cultural barriers are broken, and new forms born, out of social discontent. Bad times spawn good pop culture; good times spur business as usual. Jazz, blues, and country music were the children of hard times. Before it became mainstream, rock -- the other lasting form of American pop music -- also rolled because creative young outsiders rebelled against sexual and social repression. Rap emerged from the ghettos, where life is tough and spiked with the smell of crack, not microwave popcorn. Now consider Roseanne and Married With Children, two brash contemporary TV sitcoms clearly designed with shock value in mind. Compare them with the saccharine Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver of the 1950s. ''Basically, they're still showing Father Knows Best,'' says Robert Thompson, professor of television at the Cortland campus of the State University of New York. ''It's packaged with a more hip, snide attitude. But the basic premise of all these shows is a heterosexual, monogamous couple at the head of a nuclear family living in a detached house in the suburbs. And underneath all the sniping, there's still a lot of familial love.'' Ground-breaking pop culture need not frontally attack society's mores. But when it's good, Groening argues, ''it both entertains and subverts. It satisfies the audience on one level but causes them to question some cherished assumptions on another.'' By that measure, Madonna qualifies as the current queen of counterculture. Sure, she's an overpublicized, vertically integrated, one-woman entertainment conglomerate. Nor is her act all that new: Her ''Material Girl'' video is only a slightly more ironic version of Marilyn Monroe's ''Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend.'' Marilyn's nude pinups in the premier issue of Playboy (December 1953) were much more shocking in the context of those times than Madonna's unclothed antics today -- and Marilyn apparently slept with a President and an Attorney General, not just Warren Beatty. But for all her slick commercialism, Madonna does constantly test and toy with mainstream culture's sociosexual attitudes. The woods remain full of folks who see this sort of outrageousness as proof that pop culture spells the end of civilization. Some oppose it for the same reason they oppose cookies and french fries -- as junk food for the brain; others believe the devil is implicated; still others just want to see culture stop with Shakespeare or Dickens -- artists also denigrated as pop culturists in their day. True pop culture aficionados love nothing more than when educators assail Bart Simpson, or MTV bans Madonna, or 2 Live Crew is arrested for obscenity, or Ed Sullivan refuses to show Elvis's (shudder) pelvis. To them, this means their culture -- the stuff they've chosen to consume over the high-minded alternatives that bear society's official seal of approval -- is still worthy of devotion. That's really what pop culture is saying about America all over the world: We may sometimes be banal, our taste isn't the most refined, and sometimes we're downright crude. Like Bart, we can be comfortable with underachieving. But we're still striking a nerve, still breathing, and the rest of the world still holds us in awe. So hang in there, Madonna. Someone even more outrageous is bound to come along soon and pick up where you leave off.