The modern music industry is precarious business. Though there have been changes in market performance similar to the “disco bust”, current trends are so multi-faceted that it is difficult to pin down how things developed or speculate about where they are headed. Several reasons for the current economic situation of the music industry are posed in […]

I am disheartened by the trend amongst academics and artists stating that art cannot change the world. It changes the world every day. What do we mean by change, then? A complete upheaval of everything we know of in the physical world? If that is the case, then perhaps art cannot change the world. But it […]

The readings on auteurs Ousmane Sembene and Tomas Guitterez Alea illustrate that art validates culture in global society, and film becomes a way to express sovereignty. Perhaps, because of this, Sembene is able to claim his movies have “more followers than the political parties and the Catholic and Moslem religions combined.”  To a population who can’t […]

Click Here to see Video Tribute to New Wave Featuring Me and My Friends 

Track: New Order “Bizarre Love Triangle”

Deviant sexuality is featured prominently throughout Hitchcock’s films, whether it be cross-dressing in Psycho, voyeurism in Rear Window , or necrophilia in Vertigo. In typical sadomasochistic fashion, the impotent Scottie in Vertigo is rendered powerless due to his vertigo and attempts to exercise control over his life through Judy’s sexuality. He attempts to recreate the version od Madeleine he fetishized about. By controlling […]

Note: I have decided to address hip-hop in a series of posts. This one focuses on graffiti, I will also do some artist spotlights, discuss the article on Jay Z, and write a post about the sexism I experienced in the studio environment. For the art community in New York, grafiiti on the subways stood for a […]

After screening the Invasion of the Body Snatchers , I walked away with a sense of ambivalence about the debate that has centered around this film- was it a paranoid film about communist infiltration or a critique of American paranoia and conformity? As Professor Herzog aptly pointed out, a strong case could be made for either argument. The […]

Picture this: feathers, whistle blowing, sex on the dance floor, a group called Two Tons of Fun, lots of blinking lights, and drugs. That is a description I once received about the gay disco scene in New York in the seventies. Doyle is spot on with his assessment that disco provided leisure time that was spent […]

Disclaimer: Sorry it took me so long to post this, but my love for the Beatles runs so deep that I had to treat this properly and write about it when I really had time to make a case in support of them. In Coyle’s article, he makes the claim that the Beatles were less authentic than […]

“Outsider” culture has been emulated and/or proliferated throughout the history of the music industry, sometimes blatantly and sometimes subtlety. Madonna was one of the first celebrities to openly embrace her gay following while simultaneously proliferating their culture to help her achieve pop-icon status, setting in motion a trail of pop-stars who would do the same, such […]