The Conservatism of Emoji
...smiley face is now so endemic to American culture that it’s easy to forget it is an invented artifact. The 1963 merger of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of...
Arguing the Web (1): Mash-Up A/V
...his dead-end project is a reminder of how fiercely dominant Western pop music has become. This is a capitulation, an audio essay even, of the last 25 years of American...
The Real Beach Lives of Miami
...posits that Spring Breakers contributes to America’s deep and intractable rape culture. “It’s a film that tells young women that the ‘time of their life’ is getting drunk and exposing...
Got No Shame, Got No Pride
...Machine Head. Rather than shy away from the rising connotations of the rainbow as a marker of gay culture and affiliation, Blackmore responded in 1979 by releasing Down to Earth,...
Sunday Reading
...revolution" ReclaimUC: Stokely Carmichael, "Black power address at UC Berkeley" (1966) 2012 in review: Major higher ed trends A moment of dreaming about higher education "Armed Teacher Training Program" launches...
Virulence in the Virtual
...became her disenfranchisement, and she felt intense guilt at being “complicit in the rape culture that has taken so much away from [her]” (Hernandez). These virulent power dynamics manifest in...
#RhodesWar: Makunyiwe Macala
...culture. When you’re a student in what has been un/fondly dubbed the purple bubble, these three Rs collate into a particular shared—and often redacted—Reality. It is precisely because this Reality...
Heroic tedium and anti-nostalgia
...things of this world? I put out my music with this on the cover. That's how far I have moved beyond petty commercial posturing. Fuck you, here's a rainbow." But...
Straight Men Can Be Bent
...being staged at the Met. I'm no denigrator of the Met; I love traditional opera culture. But it’s unprecedented to see at the Met this kind of visceral erotic thriller—like...
Undivided Essay
...Forget the story. What animates Bae Suah’s A Greater Music is the question of whether there are greater (and lesser) forms of art. Or perhaps “question” is the...
How Bad Is It?
...America is a failure. That is indeed what Morris Berman concludes in his three-volume survey of America’s decline: The Twilight of American Culture (2000), Dark Ages America (2006), and Why...
Beyond Avant-Garde
...opposite of "making it new." Since novelty is the status quo of consumer culture, the avant-garde seeks to advance from that, Groys claims; they must challenge and change the disposition...
Fun Will Find a Way
...acts from a pre-music-video era turned out slick singles about the ups and downs of the leisured life, which was represented by the culture industry as a matter of transgressing...
Not for You
...150 relatively cheap seats to 45 expensive ones, traces an equally meaningful transition in the purpose and function of American entertainment, culture, and consumerism. Studies on inequality tend to focus,...
Everybody's Doing It
...force-feeding their children prescription drugs at a rate no “everybody’s doing it” culture could possibly match with weed, meth, and cocaine. Not to mention the behavioral message that is sent...
#stopcreating
...emerged. Similarly, in music, sampling—entire tracks constructed from other tracks—has become commonplace. From Napster to gaming, from karaoke to torrent files, the culture appears to be embracing the digital and...