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Things that keep me up at night
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RSS Feed for this categoryGenre trends in music - synth pop in the 80s, guitar rock and dance in the 90s - are as much about what the record companies promote as what people want to play. If the internet breaks their control, will the wave of fad after fad - already going at absurd speed, with genres lasting a year or two at most - break down completely?
September 29, 2008 in Culture & Media, Rav Idly Wonders | 0 comments
American cinema's creative zenith was reached in the 1970s, just as movies were being displaced by TV. Now we have a golden age of American TV drama, just as TV is under threat of being completely displaced by the internet. Was it always thus? Are we doomed to see the economic models of great art forms disrupted, just as they have reconciled their artistic and commercial imperatives?
April 20, 2008 in Culture & Media, Rav Idly Wonders, Technology | 1 comments
Is the fact that Britain still enthusiastically labels its greatest cultural export of the 20th Century with the dismissive name "the Fab Four" (a) a sign of our refreshing unpretentiousness or (b) a depressing relic of the shallowly commercial working-class-showbiz culture from which the Beatles miraculously sprang?
December 7, 2007 in Culture & Media, Rav Idly Wonders | 0 comments
What, in the end, will be history's verdict on The Pretenders?
Is the decline in the quality of our public debate intrinsically tied in with the decline of public interest in science?
Is comedy the only written art form which can be effectively written by a group?
Does the rise of blogging and the decline of newspapers mean that Thomas Wolfe's "new journalism," originally expected to displace the novel, will soon be the only journalism left?
