The election of Barack Hussein Obama speaks volumes about the extent to which America has become a decidedly multicultural nation. But does it, as some pundits surmise, signal the end of a distinctive black popular culture? Certainly, Obama's success highlights what many scholars of black culture have known for some time: African-American culture is intimately related to what we scholars might define as mainstream Americana, neatly packaged with a Motown-era backbeat and the sass drawn from black women's vernacular.

What many folks see as reflecting black popular culture is a commercialized, sanitized, airbrushed version. This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the miniseries Roots. Think about the startling nature of that show when it first aired: slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow—the underbelly of American race relations —on prime time. I read recently there's going to be a collector's edition DVD with commentary and other extras. I think of it as a user-friendly introduction to black life in America.

So you have things coming out of the  everyday experiences of black people that gain a larger visibility because of an artist, because of a TV show, and then the ball starts rolling: It becomes part of somebody's marketing plan, divorcing it from its origins. No one understands this better than Obama.

Whatever I feel about the substance of the man, politically or otherwise, part of his success was achieved by presenting him as a brand that resonated for different audiences at one and the same time. His use of Motown music, for example, was brilliant in that regard.

There is something very superficial at play, not necessarily the man, but what people read in the man. I have been asked, "Is he seen as 'less black' than other African-American candidates?" I wouldn't say "less black"; I would say less threatening—someone those in mainstream white America could imagine as their neighbor.

The sudden visibility of the first black First Family also has put a spotlight on some of the mundane, everyday practices within black communities that have not reached the mainstream or that have been appropriated but misunderstood. A good example is the media sensation caused by the "fist pound" (although neophytes in the media called it a "bump") between Obama and his wife, Michelle, after the close of the primary season.

I was among the dozens of scholars of black culture who received calls from the media in search of the cultural genealogy of what some whites interpreted as a threatening gesture but which, in the black community, was simply an intimate public moment between a husband and wife. As I told many reporters, it is something I do daily with my own daughters, an act of affection. The campaign season was full of such questions; the Obama presidency is akin, for some, to having the first black family move into an all-white neighborhood.

All of this bodes well for those of us who make meaning in both the mundane and the exceptional in African-American life and culture. There's little doubt in my mind that Obama's presidency—and its long-term influence and implications—will usher in an exciting period in the study of black popular culture. It also promises to provide an unprecedented opportunity, and inspiration, for black artists and entertainers, as they scout and interpret new cultural terrain.

Like Amiri Baraka's notion of the "changing same" in music—something akin to an improvisation on a known entity that produces new music at once different and familiar—true black popular culture is not something you buy over the counter. It's something that is renewable, produced as a reaction or antidote to market forces. So, just when you think it's mainstream, something else comes along that's clearly saying, No, it's not. What makes black popular culture so compelling as a subject for study—and what will continue to do so—is its ability to remake itself, time and time again, even as some of its very tenets are continuously appropriated as emblems of American culture.

Thirty years ago, when you could hear a Motown recording on any radio station in America, suddenly, you have hip-hop emanating out of the Bronx. Now, of course, it has been appropriated as an emblem of black and American culture. But rest assured that in some other quadrant of the culture, some group of kids is creating something new that very much resists such incorporation. It is that aspect of black popular culture that makes it so exciting for those of us who study it, and there's little indication that that will change in the next twenty-five years.

Neal is the author of four books, most recently New Black Man, published in 2005; he is a contributor to many online news outlets, and his blog, Critical Noir, appears at http://blogs.vibe.com.