“They’ve Taken It All Away. The Only Thing Here Is Me”

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-81
Author(s):  
Charles Lester
Keyword(s):  
American Music ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Way

In the 1940s and 1950s, Cincinnati’s King Records promoted and recorded artists from a variety of genres including country, rhythm and blues, jazz, and gospel and in doing so paved the way for the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll. In addition to its notable contributions to American music and culture, the company served as a model for integration. The King story is more than worthy of local and national recognition, and in the last couple of decades activists, preservationists, and public historians have attempted a number of initiatives to honor the label’s impact on American society and culture, though not without opposition. In fact, recent preservation and memorialization efforts are currently a matter for the courts.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wierzbicki
Keyword(s):  
International Politics ◽  
American Music ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
White People ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter explains how music is considered less as a phenomenon unto itself than as a manifestation of the conditions under which it emerged or receded. The music under consideration represents a wide range of styles that attracted the attention of a wide range of audiences, which sounds have little in common. What these types of music do have in common is the fact that all of them sprang up in a particular cultural environment: the postwar Fifties. A great many forces—technology; the economy; domestic and international politics; relationships between black and white people, between men and women, between young and old—animated American society during the Fifties. The lenses through which the whole of American music in the Fifties is examined here represent forces whose interconnected dynamics between 1945 and 1963 are linked to the fact that, for America, the war ended the way it did.

Lost in the funhouse: Allegorical horror and cognitive mapping in Jordan Peele’s Us

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Keith Booker ◽  
Isra Daraiseh
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
American Society ◽  
Contemporary American Society ◽  
The Way

Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) is an entertaining horror film that also contains a number of interesting interpretive complications. The film is undoubtedly meant as a commentary on the inequity, inequality and injustice that saturate our supposedly egalitarian American society. Beyond that vague and general characterization, though, the film offers a number of interesting (and more specific) allegorical interpretations, none of which in themselves seem quite adequate. This article explores the plethora of signs that circulate through Us, demanding interpretation but defeating any definitive interpretation. This article explores the way Us offers clues to its meaning through engagement with the horror genre in general (especially the home invasion subgenre) and through dialogue with specific predecessors in the horror genre. At the same time, we investigate the rich array of other ways in which the film offers suggested political interpretations, none of which seem quite adequate. We then conclude, however, that such interpretive failures might well be a key message of the film, which demonstrates the difficulty of fully grasping the complex and difficult social problems of contemporary American society in a way that can be well described by Fredric Jameson’s now classic vision of the general difficulty of cognitive mapping in the late capitalist world.

Managing Race in the American Workplace

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Skrentny
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Racial Diversity ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
The Way

This chapter introduces the problems of the roles racial differences play in the workplace. It discusses the changes in the way Americans talk about race and what pragmatic and progressive voices say that they want since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Never before has such a wide variety of employers, advocates, activists, and government leaders in American society discussed the benefits of racial diversity and the utility of racial difference in such a broad range of contexts. Thus, the chapter points out the emerging discourse of race as a qualification for employment, and briefly details the many issues as well as the role of established laws on such an issue. It also lays out the conceptual foundations upon which the following chapters will be based on.

The Rise and Fall of Ace Records: A Case Study in the Independent Record Business

1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald J. Mabry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Rock N Roll

The record industry in the United States was controlled until the 1950s by a half dozen major companies, which produced music directed primarily toward the white middle class. The following article uses the history of Ace Records, a small, regional, independent company, to examine the nature of the record industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The article explains the shifts in demography and technology that made possible the growth of the independents, as well as the obstacles and events that made their demise more likely. It also traces the changes that such companies, by recording and promoting rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll, introduced to the cultural mainstream.

scholarly journals Orcs Lives Matter: Representation of African Americans in Bright Film

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-117
Author(s):  
Shafira Ayuningtyas ◽  
Pita Merdeka
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
American System ◽  
Research Problems ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
American Society ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

Exploring the way Orcs are portrayed in the Bright film are the focus of this research and futher analyzing the ideology within. This research uses the qualitative research method to help answering the research questions on how Orcs are represented in Bright and how representations reflect the ideology of the text. Additionally, Hall’s representation and ideology theories are applied in the process to provide an insight into the research problems. The research found that Orcs in Bright are constructed in a very like ways as African Americans as they are portrayed as the designated bad guys, targets for animalization and victims of police brutality which match the image of African Americans in American society. These portrayals of Orcs leads to the discussion of Orcs’ poor social standing in society in comparison to other races in the film and in result reflects the ideology the text tries to convey that is black inferiority, as shown by the way the American system and society treated them. Overall, this research can be used as a reference for researches on representation of African Americans and racial allegories in literature.

I Come for to Sing

2018 ◽  
pp. 96-114
Author(s):  
Kevin D. Greene
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Music ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Vernacular Music ◽  
Folk Music Revival ◽  
The Way

From 1930 to 1970, a second folk music revival took hold in the United States and Europe, determined to capture and preserve for posterity US and European vernacular music. Critical to this collection of folklorists, academics, political activists, and entrepreneurs was the history and impact of African American music on folklore and culture. Big Bill, quite familiar with the types of country and Delta blues the folk music revival craved stood happy to oblige. Soon, one of the most sophisticated and urbane performers of the age began performing alone accompanied by his guitar for folk audiences from New York to Chicago. Within this community, Broonzy found a culture and environment willing and able to support his transitioning career from black pop star to folk music darling. Along the way, he would meet more individuals who could aid in his career reinvention and he both accepted and rejected their expectations of him and his music.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Lim
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
National Origin ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Way

In November 1993, the editors of Time magazine devoted an entire issue to the dramatic transformations in American society following the 1965 passage of the Hart-Cellar Act, which had finally abolished the national origin quotas introduced in the 1920s and opened the way for increased immigration from Asia and Latin America. Turning their attention to what they dubbed as “America’s Immigrant Challenge,” the contributors to the issue responded to the visible changes in “the very complexion of the country, the endless and fascinating profusion of peoples, cultures, languages and attitudes that make up the great national pool … constantly fed by new streams of immigrants.”...

Creating a Regional American Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Hayes-Bautista
Keyword(s):  
Regional Identity ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Way

For over 150 years, Latinos have not assimilated and disappeared the way European immigrant groups have, but they have not remained isolated and untouched by Atlantic-American society around them. Instead, Latinos have been quietly creating a regional variant of American society and identity, one that is in the process of becoming as distinctive a way of being American as is the Texan regional identity.

2. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll

2019 ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Bence Nanay
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Way

The experiences that would count as aesthetic in some sense are very diverse, and it is challenging to find something they have in common. ‘Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’ considers four influential accounts of aesthetics—focusing on beauty, pleasure, emotion, and ‘valuing for its own sake’—to see just how difficult it is to keep the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic apart. These accounts contain some really important pointers to how we should and how we should not think about the domain of aesthetics. It is then argued that these accounts all point in the same direction, namely, that what is special about aesthetics is the way we exercise our attention in aesthetic experiences.

The Blues

2019 ◽  
pp. 151-160
Author(s):  
Con Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
Blues Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
Over Time

The chapter discusses the nature of the blues and Johnny Hodges’s place within the genre. Recognized as a master of the blues in his time, he would not be thought of as a blues musician by most listeners today because what is meant by that term has been narrowed over time. Guitar-based blues music has crowded the horn-based variety out of the marketplace since rock ‘n’ roll displaced jazz as the most popular music among America’s youth. A brief history of the evolution of the term blues in American music is provided, along with an explication of the role played by W. C. Handy in popularizing the genre before electric amplifiers gave rise to the current ascendancy of guitars over horns. Hodges’s blues-based collaborations with organist Wild Bill Davis are then described as largely responsible for creating a new subgenre of jazz, the organ-sax combo, which endures to this day.

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