BRIC POP: The Blog

Anyone like me who is an avid BRIC-watcher turned their attention yesterday to the Ural city of Yekaterinburg (one of my favorite in Russia).  In a sign that the alliance of the next four big emerging economies has come of age, Russia hosted their B IC counterparts in an inaugural BRIC Summit, which was more or less a breakout session of the SCO (that’s the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, for Russia, post-Soviet Asian countries, and China, not the Santa Cruz flavor of UNIX).

It was rather amusing to finally see mass media talking about the BRICs as thought the idea just happened last week.  I thought I would be more excited about this get-together, but it turned out that all anyone wanted to talk about was economic and political multipolarity and toy with the idea of a collaborative reserve currency.  Yawn.

What happened to the India that put on that Bollywood show at Davos a few years back?

Or the China and Russia who staged cultural extravaganzas around getting and holding the Olympics?  Brazil sure as hell knows how to throw a little party every February.

In a bid to be taken seriously as the counterweight to the G7, the BRICs may have erred on the side of sobriety too much.  I think it may be that they haven’t yet figured out what connects them on a cultural basis.  OK, they’re big, have lots of people and resources and are getting richer.  But the conventional wisdom is that the BRICs seemingly don’t have anything else in common.

In developing BRIC Pop, I devoted several topics to what cultural parallels one could observe from these seemingly disparate countries.  These included:  vibrant, ambitious youth cultures, well-packaged religion, cultural Marxism, color in design, wide-open Internet cultures, the role of family, and lousy hip-hop.  I’ll try to cover a couple of those over the next few days.  In the meantime, here’s a reprint from an article I wrote a few weeks back, to get my BRIC Pop exploration restarted.