I often teach graduate student who are in our Global Masters Program, which means they have spent a year at the London School of Economics before coming to USC. In general they leave London convinced that U.S. Cultural Imperialism is a reality. The notion is that Hollywood or the U.S. music business overwhelms local cultural product and it often bleeds into McLuhan’s prediction that we would all become part of a “global village”, ostensibly listening to the same tunes. I’ve said this was nonsense and now some economists have come forward with fairly compelling proof on my side of the argument.
Waldfogel and Ferreira analyzed every song on the hit lists of 22 countries between 1960 and 2007. They then compared each country’s share of the pop-music market with the size of its economy.
Not surprisingly, American hits dominated, accounting for 51 percent of music sold over the period. Adjusted for GDP, however, Sweden takes the top spot — followed closely by Britain. Despite fears of pernicious cultural Americanization, more people around the world are listening locally: Foreign artists now account for just 30 percent of each country’s pop hits, down from about 50 percent in the 1980s.
Trade in music bears some similarities to the trade of physical goods: shorter distances and sharing a common language promote higher trade volumes between countries, and those relationships have been relatively stable over the last 50 years. We also find a large bias toward domestic consumption of music which has, perhaps surprisingly, increased in the past two decades: the share of consumption worldwide that originates from domestic artists increased from less than 50% during the 1980’s to almost 70% in 2007.
McLuhan was totally wrong. We have not become a global village. Maybe a global megacity, with hundreds of different neighborhoods we could visit in a single day, each with their own distinctive sound blaring from the boom box.
I woke up this morning and opened the New York Times to read the review of my daughter Daniela’s latest movie, The Kids Are All Right. Here’s what A.O. Scott had to say.
I’m tempted to start this review by falling back on a tried-and-true movie critic formulation and saying something like “Lisa Cholodenko’s ‘Kids Are All Right’ is the best comedy about an American family since …” Since what? Precedents and grounds for comparison seem to be lacking, so I may have to let the superlative stand unqualified for now.
Which is fine: Ms. Cholodenko’s film, which she wrote with Stuart Blumberg, is so canny in its insights and so agile in its negotiation of complex emotions that it deserves to stand on its own. It is outrageously funny without ever exaggerating for comic effect, and heartbreaking with only minimal melodramatic embellishment. Continue reading ‘Proud Father’
I first met Dennis Hopper in the late fall of 1968 when he wanted The Band to do the music for Easy Rider. After the screening of the rough cut, Levon Helm, an Arkansas native objected to the portrayal of Southern “crackers” in the film and didn’t want to do any new music for the film. Dennis ultimately prevailed upon Robbie Robertson to license “The Weight” for the film.
Dennis pretty much opened the door in Hollywood for my generation. At a time when Hollywood was going bankrupt on the back of overblown musicals like Hello Dolly and Paint Your Wagon, Dennis made Easy Rider for $500,000 and it made millions. All of a sudden, every studio was open to young filmmakers who could make films for under $1 million. The American New Wave–Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Malick, Bogdanovich, Rafelson, Friedkin and a few others–owes Hopper a debt of gratitude.
But Dennis also was a case study in the Nietzchean dynamic of the Apollonian spirit. Nietzche wrote, “The genius in work and deed is necessarily a squanderer: that he squanders himself, that is his greatness. The instinct of self preservation is suspended as it were; the overpowering pressure of outgoing forces forbids him any such care or caution.”
Dennis had a much longer career than he thought he would in 1972. He gave it his all and for that I am thankful.
Our correspondent, T-Bone Burnett, added that comment to the New Yorker cartoon I posted which has generated so much traffic in the last couple of days. This comment is echoed in a magnificent essay in this morning’s New York Times by Michiko Kakutani, entitled Texts Without Context.
Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups…As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”
From the day I started this blog, I have tried to resist this urge to write what the search engines tell me would be popular. For reasons that are lost on me, posts with the word “Torture” in them are very popular on Google. This 19 month old post is still regularly on of the most searched out ones on this site. And of course there is always this favorite, which must be an immense disappointment to the thousands of web surfers who have landed there searching for porn. If I wanted to really get a lot of hits, I’d combine these two “focus group” hints and just call the site “Torture Porn”. I’m sure it would be very popular. Continue reading ‘The Internet is a Focus Group’
When I started promulgating this notion of The Interregnum–”The old is dying and the new cannot be born;in this interregnum morbid symptoms abound”(Gramsci)–two years ago, I had no idea how morbid the symptoms would get.
The last week has been as depressing culturally and politically as any in my recent memory. On the political front, the whole Washington edifice seems so terminally broken that I can neither summon the energy to believe that passing this health care legislation which will force every American to pay 15% of their earnings to a private health insurer is worth the kind of energy I and my friends brought to the 2008 election campaign. Nor can I summon the vitriol to denounce the charlatans like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck–the Private Jet Populists–the new Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd–for their cynical manipulation of the paranoid conspiracy theorists that we call Teabaggers. The whole scene seems like some ancient Roman tragedy where King Pyrrhus upon defeating the Romans at such cost to his own followers turns to his general and says, “Another such victory and I am undone.”
And then I venture out in to the culture– the Hollywood Oscar parties–the reality TV–the Facebook posts–the TMZ front page–and I think that so little of it passes the “who cares” test. I met Guy Trebay a couple of years ago when we did a conference called Ready to Share. He writes about fashion with the acid vision of a 21st Century Trollope. This rung true.
And that was when someone else mentioned that fame is so cheap these days, that paparazzi fodder is so interchangeable, that celebrities are so dime-a-dozen, that often one has no idea whom the photographers are making a fuss about.
Perhaps, this person added, someone ought to invent celebrity Shazam, a fame app based on the music identification service available on cellphones.
That way, in a landscape prophesied with cold accuracy by Andy Warhol, one could point a camera phone at a given person and immediately learn which minor Italian soccer player or which trophy wife of which French intellectual or which former actor on a Jerry Bruckheimer crime-scene juggernaut one was gawping at.
It all seems so fucking inconsequential. Here we are stuck in two wars where our boys and girls, as young as the kids I teach at USC, are dying every day and it is as if they aren’t even real. What if the 26 year old coke sniffing Wall Street trader was in danger of being drafted? Would he then pay a bit more attention? A filmmaker like Paul Greengrass in Green Zone, puts evidence of the most treacherous deceptions by your government before you in the most wonderful style and panache and you ignore him. Continue reading ‘What is to be done?’
Tim Burton’s re fashioning of Alice in Wonderland continues a fabulous string of delightfully subversive “children’s films”. Like Wall-E and Where the Wild Things Are, the directors of these entertainments are tackling the philosophical issues of our current age. First let me state that many of the reviewers who have taken Burton to task for making “a Disney movie, not a Burton movie” don’t know what they are talking about. Didn’t they ever go to see Fantasiain the 60′s or 70′s in a slightly altered consciousness? Alice is far more psychedelic (thanks to the 3D) than Fantasia and much more fun.
Burton’s trope is Shakespearean–In a world gone mad, only the fool speaks truth to power. Like the Bard’s wonderful fools, Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is part Lord Buckley and part Hunter Thompson. He both flatters and then confronts the Red Queen, brilliantly played by Helena Bonham Carter as if she were Karl Rove in drag. Burton has also been criticized for making Alice (played by the Australian Mia Wasikowska) 19 and on her second trip down the Rabbit Hole. But this is really quite a brilliant shift because, as any parent knows it is at that point that a young woman can evolve from a shrinking violet to the Joan of Arc in armor character ready to slay the Jabberwocky that Alice becomes.
I usually teach for about five hours on Mondays (an undergraduate lecture and a graduate seminar), so today is a true holiday for me. Some here are some random thoughts over morning coffee.
This community rocks! As both rhbee and Amber commented, the discussion on copyright over the last three days was one of the most enlightened and civil dialogues on the subject I have seen anywhere. A new poster GB, started off worrying that all the “heavyweights” would tear him a new one and soon discovered that is not our way. Somehow the talk here is too smart for trolls. I’m humble enough to know it’s got more to do with the community than the organizer.
We’ve been through this movie before.E.J.Dionne makes the trenchant point this morning that a Republican party out of power has only one response. 2010 is just a replay of the 1994 Republican playbook.
Consider, first, that Clinton, like Obama, started out as a unifier who disdained ideological quarrels and saw himself as a problem-solver. There is not a dime’s worth of difference between Clinton’s war on “the brain-dead politics of both parties” and Obama’s insistence that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America.” Both sought to occupy the middle ground of American politics. Both believed that they could win over Republicans. Both were sure they could govern differently… Continue reading ‘President's Day Musings’
Our erstwhile correspondent, T Bone Burnett and his colleagues Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal continue their award season hot streak with three Oscar Nominations for Crazy Heart.
This is one of those stories that reaffirms our faith in creativity and learning to make good stories for a price.
I often teach graduate student who are in our Global Masters Program, which means they have spent a year at the London School of Economics before coming to USC. In general they leave London convinced that U.S. Cultural Imperialism is a reality. The notion is that Hollywood or the U.S. music business overwhelms local cultural product and it often bleeds into McLuhan’s prediction that we would all become part of a “global village”, ostensibly listening to the same tunes. I’ve said this was nonsense and now some economists have come forward with fairly compelling proof on my side of the argument.
. After the screening of the rough cut, Levon Helm, an Arkansas native objected to the portrayal of Southern “crackers” in the film and didn’t want to do any new music for the film. Dennis ultimately prevailed upon Robbie Robertson to license “The Weight” for the film.
–for their 
and 
, the directors of these entertainments are tackling the philosophical issues of our current age. First let me state that many of the reviewers who have taken Burton to task for making “a Disney movie, not a Burton movie” don’t know what they are talking about. Didn’t they ever go to see 
in the 60′s or 70′s in a slightly altered consciousness? Alice is far more psychedelic (thanks to the 3D) than Fantasia and much more fun.
and part 
. He both flatters and then confronts the Red Queen, brilliantly played by Helena Bonham Carter as if she were Karl Rove in drag. Burton has also been criticized for making Alice (played by the Australian Mia Wasikowska) 19 and on her second trip down the Rabbit Hole. But this is really quite a brilliant shift because, as any parent knows it is at that point that a young woman can evolve from a shrinking violet to the Joan of Arc in armor character ready to slay the Jabberwocky that Alice becomes.