Popular culture is simultaneously authentic and expropriated by capital, necessarily.

Evidence

However, as popular culture has historically become the dominant form of global culture, so it is at the same time the scene, par excellence, of commodification, of the industries where culture enters directly into the circuits of a dominant technology—the circuits of power and capital. It is the space of homogenization where stereotyping and the formulaic mercilessly process the material and experiences it draws into its web, where control over narratives and representations passes into the hands of the established cultural bureaucracies, sometimes without a murmur. It is rooted in popular experience and available for expropriation at one and the same time. I want to argue that this is necessarily and inevitably so. And this goes for black popular culture as well. Black popular culture, like all popular cultures in the modern world, is bound to be contradictory, and this is not because we haven’t fought the cultural battle well enough. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 281

Categorization

• XREF: This unavoidable contradiction in popular culture describes exactly how Muslim cultural products get both celebrated and co-opted within Western markets — the same expropriation dynamic. — connects to: Capital’s dominance is the real message of every cultural product