Black and Tan

“Rock was a derivative of two other popular music traditions in the rural South that existed alongside the Anglo-American one: the country or ‘hillbilly’ music of rural southern whites (country blues and gospel, honky-tonk and bluegrass) and the African-American tradition (blues, rhythm and blues, jazz and gospel music).” (William Romanowski, Pop Culture Wars, p. 209).

When the Seers Are Blind

“In a series of cases beginning in 1957, the Court judged that obscenity and the representation of sexuality were not the same thing and that ‘material dealing with sex in a manner that advocates ideas . . . or has literary or scientific or artistic value or any other forms of social importance may not …

What Huxley Called “The Feelies”

“[T]he court delineated between the transmission of culture and the provision of entertainment, and relegate movies to the fulfillment of the latter. This is most ironic, because the film that led to this case, Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, had demonstrated the power and potential of film as an intellectual and artistic medium. Now, …

Don’t You Love Science?

“The association of eugenics with race, social class and the emerging ideas about ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ cultures was unmistakable. The terms themselves were first used around the turn of the century to describe people of intellectual or aesthetic superiority (highbrow) or inferiority (lowbrow). They were derived from phrenology, a nineteenth-century practice widely used in determining …