Jazz Resurgent

2021 ◽  
pp. 507-524
Author(s):  
Ted Gioia
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Emerging Technologies ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Opposite Trend ◽  
Green Book ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Lady Gaga ◽  
Musical Excellence

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, many pundits announced the “death of jazz,” yet recent years have shown the exact opposite trend. Jazz has returned to popular culture, whether one looks to rising stars such as Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings, or to popular artists (Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar) who draw heavily on jazz influences. At the same time, jazz started showing up in hit movies such as La La Land, Green Book, and Whiplash, where it was mythologized as a touchstone of musical excellence and artistry. All these trends served to reinvigorate a jazz tradition that many had written off as moribund, creating a powerful convergence of historic styles and new commercial styles. This chapter also explores the jazz vocal scene of recent decades, and its contribution to this broadening of the genre’s appeal. Other artists discussed include Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding, and Bobby McFerrin. The chapter concludes with an assessment of jazz’s relationship with the emerging technologies of the digital age.

History Has Its Eyes on You

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Maslon
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Technological Advance ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Personal Preference ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Consumer Habits

A generational change at the beginning of the twenty-first century intersected with the technological advance of the Internet to provide a renaissance of Broadway music in popular culture. Downloading playlists allowed the home listener to become, in essence, his/her own record producer; length, narrative, performer were now all in the hands of the consumer’s personal preference. Following in the footsteps of Rent (as a favorite of a younger demographic), Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton emerged as the greatest pop culture/Broadway musical phenomenon of the twenty-first century; its cast album and cover recording shot up near the top of music’s pop charts. A rediscovery of the power of Broadway’s music to transform listening and consumer habits seems imminent with the addition of Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen to a devoted fan base—and beyond.

The Platformization of Culture: Webtoon Platforms and Media Ecology in Korea and Beyond

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Heekyoung Cho
Keyword(s):  
Digital Age ◽  
Media Analysis ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Serial Production ◽  
Digital Platform ◽  
Cultural Medium ◽  
Art Production ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article examines the webtoon (wept'un)—a term coined in Korea to refer to webcomics—which is arguably the most pervasive and powerful form of digital serial production in twenty-first-century Korea. Webtoons have developed by utilizing various potentials that the digital platform offers, such as open solicitation, (partial) free web/mobile distribution, profit from advertisement and page viewing, and transmedia production. As a new cultural medium, the webtoon is thus inseparable from its platform and organically tied to its distinctive platform ecology, which is different from the ecosystems that other (global) mega-platforms create. Engaging with the insights from recent studies of platforms and utilizing empirical media analysis, I argue that Korean webtoon platforms demonstrate the continuing and intensifying dependency of art on platforms—a process that I call “the platformization of culture”—and that this specific type of platformization is reinforced by what I call “the artist incubating system.” The case of webtoon platforms reveals a number of telling aspects of media ecosystems for art production in the digital age—aspects that are spreading and expanding to various fields of art.

scholarly journals Fifty Shades of Bluebeard? Dukas'sAriane et Barbe-Bleuein the Twenty-First Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-438
Author(s):  
LAURA WATSON
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Fifty Shades Of Grey

AbstractWith the appearance of opera videos in 2013 (DVD) and 2015 (YouTube), Paul Dukas'sAriane et Barbe-Bleue(1907) has been revived for twenty-first-century audiences. Not only has this formerly obscure work migrated to a mass-media landscape of personalized digital consumption, but its cultural recontextualization has also been extended to the interpretations staged in those opera videos. Both challenge historical, feminist readings ofAriane. Updating the action to modern scenes of abduction and captivity, these productions recast Ariane as victim and reframe the opera as part of the present discourse on sexual violence. As these recent productions ofArianeresonate with broader aesthetic tendencies in current popular culture, I trace parallels between the opera and three such examples from 2015. Selecting works that exemplify the trend of repackaging the Bluebeard tale as contemporary drama, I cite the filmsFifty Shades of GreyandRoom, and the Netflix seriesThe Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Conclusion: Sincerity Dreams

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Rutten
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Cultural Paradigms ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Inclusive Analysis

This conclusion reflects on today's dreams of renewing or revitalizing sincerity and rejects the notion that they are outdated or do not deserve any of our attention. It cites the work of several scholars to show that sincerity is anything but obsolete in twenty-first-century popular culture. Indeed, today's strivings to renew sincerity have not been neglected by scholars such as R. Jay Magill Jr., Epstein, and Yurchak. The rhetoric on new sincerity has been addressed in thoughtful analyses of contemporary culture that have helped the author in crafting a comprehensive and geographically inclusive analysis of present-day sincerity rhetoric. In post-Communist Russia, debates on a shift to late or post-postmodern cultural paradigms are thriving with at least as much fervor as—and possibly more than—in Western Europe or the United States. This conclusion discusses the newly gained insights which the author's sincerity study offers.

Live Long and Prosper: Rebooting Star Trek and Reimagining Fandom

Film Reboots ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
Erin Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Star Trek ◽  
First Century ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Way

This chapter looks to Star Trek, a reboot that employed a time travel narrative to simultaneously cast the Star Trek universe as a new continuity and strategically recast iconic characters in a parallel timeline. The chapter asserts that the reinvention of Star Trek property as a twenty-first-century blockbuster required an investment not only in its narrative strategies, but also in a discursively reimagined audience, one that included both pre-existing and future fans. It demonstrates the way in which Star Trek highlights the intersecting logics of the film reboot and the mainstreaming of fandom in popular culture, both of which grow out of serial strategies designed to exploit new and established markets.

Twenty-First-Century Virtue

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Shannon Vallor
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Contemporary Problem ◽  
Emerging Technologies ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
First Century ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Ethical Decisions ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Classical Traditions

This chapter identifies the growing difficulty of making ethical decisions—choices that aim at the “good life”—in our present human condition, one in which the unpredictable, complex, and destabilizing effects of emerging technologies on a global scale make the shape of the human future increasingly opaque and hard to fathom. The chapter suggests that this twenty-first-century challenge for ethics, which we can identify as a state of acute technosocial opacity, is best addressed from a particular philosophical tradition: virtue ethics. It argues that the classical traditions of Aristotelian, Confucian, and Buddhist virtue ethics offer us more resources for managing this contemporary problem than do other, more modern moral theories. The chapter concludes that only the cultivation of distinctly technomoral virtues will preserve humanity’s chances to live well with emerging technologies, and flourish in an increasingly opaque future.

From Linear History to Discursive Constellation

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-128
Author(s):  
Paul Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Martial Arts ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Children's Television ◽  
First Century ◽  
Combat Sports ◽  
Ultimate Fighting Championship ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter argues that any attempt to construct a linear history of martial arts in media and popular culture as it exploded after the 1970s cannot but fail. The sheer proliferation of martial arts images, themes, texts, and practices precludes easy linear narrativization. Accordingly, Chapter 5 argues for the need to move ‘From Linear History to Discursive Constellation’ in our approach to martial arts in media and popular culture. The chapter attempts to establish the main discursive contours that appeared and developed through the 1980s—a decade in which ninjas and Shaolin monks explode onto the cultural landscape. This is followed by attention to the 1990s, in which three major events took place in the same year: the first Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the Wu-Tang Clan’s release of their enormously popular album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), and the appearance on children’s television screens around the world of ‘The Power Rangers’—all of which took place in 1993. The chapter then attempts to track the major discursive tendencies and contours of martial arts aesthetics through the first decade of the twenty-first century, up to the mainstreaming of combat sports in more recent years.

The Future of Epic in Cinema

2018 ◽  
pp. 119-132
Author(s):  
Pantelis Michelakis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
First Century ◽  
Genre Criticism ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter explores the ways in which the generic label of ‘epic’ might be deemed relevant for Ridley Scott’s film Prometheus (2012), and more broadly for the ways in which a discussion about the meanings of epic in early twenty-first-century cinema might be undertaken outside the genre of ‘historical epic’. It argues for the need to explore how ‘epic science fiction’ operates in Scott’s Prometheus in ways that both relate and transcend common definitions of the term ‘epic’ in contemporary popular culture. It also focuses on the unorthodox models of biological evolution of the film’s narrative, suggesting ways in which they can help with genre criticism. When it comes to cinematic intertextuality, a discussion about generic taxonomies and transformations cannot be conducted at the beginning of the twenty-first century without reflecting on the tropes that cinema animates and the fears it enacts at the heart of our genetic imaginary.

Anecdotal Evidence

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Cubitt
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Image Databases ◽  
Streaming Video ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Anecdotal Evidence ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Twenty First Century

Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminism and postcolonialism have become. Anecdotes are ecocritical because they focus on encounters, concentrated moments of crisis when social ordering and ecological forces clash. Bringing ecological criticism to bear on case studies of popular culture in the twenty-first century, Anecdotal Evidence argues that the humanities have a vital role to play in rethinking politics today. Treating contemporary Hollywood movies, streaming video media, and mass image databases as anecdotes about waste, debt, and obligation reveals the deep intertwining of history and ecology in culture. An original take on Anthropocene anxieties and technological paranoia, the book proposes that the digital humanities still need the traditional skills of close reading to understand our contemporary condition. Only because the environment has a history is it possible to intervene environmentally. Because we continually misrecognise the historical production of environments, the first task of ecocritique is to bring our formative concept of ecology into crisis. Its final task will be to achieve the good life for everything connected by the historical implication of humans in ecology, and ecology in humans. No politics can be undertaken in our times except through media: ecocritical humanities have a key role in rethinking ecopolitics in the twenty-first century.

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