If you don’t pay too much attention to pop culture, you may be forgiven for thinking that the story of the past fifty years in American entertainment goes something like this: Once upon a time, our arts were a verdant and unspoiled Eden. On TV, father knew best. On the radio, Gene Autry rested . . . . Continue Reading »
Jesus is King, Kanye West’s latest album, channels the theology of Martin Luther.
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“I am a sinner, who’s probably gonna sin again”Kendrick Lamar’s breakthrough album, good kid m.A.A.d. city, is a conversion narrative, tracing the moral journey of a young Kendrick through vice, violence, and grace. I don’t mean that the album is just redemptive or that one can interpret . . . . Continue Reading »
In Bayles’ telling, rap’s old school period was not just prior to the advent of rich sampling, but also prior to what we might call the gangsta-rap scam . Old-school rapping did the dozens, did f-bomb-dropping comedy, did “battle rap” exhibitions of verbal prowess, and was . . . . Continue Reading »
So in my series of posts on rap, I’ve tried be somewhat complimentary before laying out the critiques, fair and balanced, appreciative of a few of the classics , etc . . . . . . and then here comes Shay Riley of the black center-right site Booker Rising, who answers the above question as . . . . Continue Reading »
Again, apologies for this getting put on hold a while . . . Martha Bayles wrote Hole in our Soul in 1994, but most of the key elements of the rap story were in place by that point. That is, as we saw in the previous post , critics admit that rap’s “golden age” was over by then, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Well, he thinks so . And far more importantly, in my sincere judgment, Mark Judge does too . Judge writes for Acculturated, the conservative website that seeks to explain Why Pop Culture Matters. So this post is a continuation of some observations about rap , but also, about the paradoxes of . . . . Continue Reading »
A slight change of plans here—I had wanted to talk about this recent Conor Friedersdorf piece about the lack of conservative rap critics as part of a three-part essay called “Paradoxes of Conservative Pop-Culture Studies,” but I realized that to really to do that, I would have to . . . . Continue Reading »
On one hand, boomer-age cultured (i.e., liberally-educated) conservatives who don’t know contemporary pop culture and are too lazy about learning anything about it; on the other, young liberals who know it but are unashamedly un-cultured (i.e., rejecting the canonical distinctions that genuine . . . . Continue Reading »
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