popular culture

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• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  3/19/2023
  

  We Miss Dr. Strangelove now that We've Learned to Stop Worrying and Forget the Bomb

  by Andrew Bacevich

  Kubrick's classic film forced viewers to confront the possibility that the controls of the world's nuclear weapons were held by fools, fanatics, and outright lunatics. Today, it's too easy to ignore it altogether. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/10/2023
  

  What Anna May Wong's History Tells us About Oscar's Asian and Asian American Moment

  by Katie Gee Salisbury

  The first Asian-American film star got her break when a film company cast ethnic actors in a 1922 film made to test out the new Technicolor technology. But Hollywood's racial politics and commercial imperatives kept other Asian actors from stardom. 

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• SOURCE: LitHub
  3/6/2023
  

  How Superman Became a Christ-Figure

  by Roy Schwartz

  How did the comic book creation of two American Jews, whose origin story incorporates Moses, come to be understood as a stand-in for Jesus? Mostly through the movies. 

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• SOURCE: Financial Times
  3/7/2023
  

  20 Years Later, What is the Cultural Imprint of the Iraq War?

  The US war against Vietnam sparked a broad array of artistic responses, and more importantly became a litmus test for a future generation of leaders. Despite disagreements about the invasion and its serious consequences for the Middle East, the war seems to have left no trace on the West. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  2/26/2023
  

  30 Years Later, "Falling Down" Still Shows the Shallowness of Suburbanites' Views of the City

  by Carl Abbott

  Set in a moment of economic upheaval, racial conflict, and media-driven fear of crime, Joel Schumacher's film reflected the degree of separation between America's suburbs and cities. Today, it's necessary to recognize that its portrayal of hostility and alienation isn't inevitable. 

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• SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
  2/26/2023
  

  How (Some) of the Hip Hop Generation Learned Black History

  Historian Pero Dagbovie traces shifts in hip hop's political messages and says that, to some extent the glorification of materialism replaced a focus on Black history and politics as the genre developed. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2/27/2023
  

  20 Biopics Worth Watching

  It's rare for a biopic to attempt artistic innovation. A critic offers a list of those that succeed. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2/2/2023
  

  The Case for Blondie as the Sound of the 70s

  by Kevin Dettmar

  While the decade's pop scene was undeniably eclectic, there's an argument to be made that the New York group was at the center of the most lasting trends of the 1970s. 

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• SOURCE: WTTW
  1/27/2023
  

  Prof. Hasan Kwame Jeffries on Consulting for Hip Hop at 50 Documentary

  The Ohio State professor served as a consultant for the four hour documentary produced by Public Enemy's Chuck D, which begins January 31. 

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• SOURCE: Oxford American
  1/24/2023
  

  Who Gets to Sing About Revenge in Pop Music?

  by Jewel Wicker

  Do the racial politics of musical genre explain why songs about revenge are celebrated in country music and turned into evidence for the prosecution against hip hop artists (even when the songs in question are fiction)?

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• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  1/19/2023
  

  11 Movies and Shows that Document the March of Technology

  From the office-sized computer to the landline, plot points that hinge on obsolete technology are a fun way to track how technologies structure our lives and our anxieties. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  12/6/2022
  

  Stax Records Co-Founder Jim Stewart Dies at 92

  Stewart's label in its heyday trailed only Motown Records as a purveyor of soul music, and the label's house bands created a distinctive and enduring style associated with Memphis. 

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• SOURCE: UnHerd
  10/28/2022
  

  At 40, Springsteen's "Nebraska" Holds Up as a Harbinger of Rural Despair

  "It sold poorly and due to its troubling themes, Springsteen did not take it on tour. Nebraska was left to speak for itself. Today, exactly 40 years after its release, that voice is no less disquieting."

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/27/2022
  

  Stevie Wonder's "Talking Book" at 50

  Musical collaborators and artists later influenced by Stevie Wonder's declaration of musical independence explain the album's creation and impact. 

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• SOURCE: Vanity Fair
  10/11/2022
  

  Lizzo Talks About the Flute

  The pop superstar touches on numerous subjects, including making history belong to everyone and the historical relationship of racist and sexist stereotyping of Black women's performances looking back to Josephine Baker. 

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• SOURCE: The Bulwark
  10/4/2022
  

  What Lizzo Can Teach the Right about History

  Commentator Mona Charen writes that Lizzo's embrace of an artifact of the founding generation should be welcomed by conservatives, who claim to stand for a history shared by all Americans without regard for identity. 

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• SOURCE: Religion Dispatches
  9/15/2022
  

  "I'm Not Racist, I'm Just Mad Amazon is Destroying Tolkien's Middle Earth with Black Hobbits"

  by Mary Rambaran-Olm

  Viewer complaints that Amazon Prime has defiled the author's fantasy vision with "wokeness" ignore the historical diversity of the medieval society on which Tolkien based his works. 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  9/16/2022
  

  How True is the History in "The Woman King"?

  "'The Woman King' chooses to make resistance to slavery its moral compass, then misrepresents a kingdom that trafficked tens of thousands as a vanguard in the struggle against it."

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• 9/11/2022
  

  Songs for Sale: Tin Pan Alley (Excerpt)

  by Bob Stanley

  American popular music didn't start with Elvis. It emerged when musical fads onstage converged with a new mass market for in-home record players to make song publishing big business. 

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  9/7/2022
  

  "Rings of Power" Speaks to a War-Hungry Audience

  by Daniel Bessner

  Inspired by Tolkien's experiences in the Great War, his fantasy books have been taken as allegories for the fight against Nazism, the Cold War, and the War on Terror. The new series reflects the anxieties of an American empire with neither a clear enemy nor the imagination to abandon militarism.