Search results for ""Author Martha Bayles""
Yale University Press Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America's Image Abroad
Why it is a mistake to let commercial entertainment serve as America's de facto ambassador to the world What does the world admire most about America? Science, technology, higher education, consumer goods—but not, it seems, freedom and democracy. Indeed, these ideals are in global retreat, for reasons ranging from ill-conceived foreign policy to the financial crisis and the sophisticated propaganda of modern authoritarians. Another reason, explored for the first time in this pathbreaking book, is the distorted picture of freedom and democracy found in America's cultural exports. In interviews with thoughtful observers in eleven countries, Martha Bayles heard many objections to the violence and vulgarity pervading today's popular culture. But she also heard a deeper complaint: namely, that America no longer shares the best of itself. Tracing this change to the end of the Cold War, Bayles shows how public diplomacy was scaled back, and in-your-face entertainment became America's de facto ambassador. This book focuses on the present and recent past, but its perspective is deeply rooted in American history, culture, religion, and political thought. At its heart is an affirmation of a certain ethos—of hope for human freedom tempered with prudence about human nature—that is truly the aspect of America most admired by others. And its author’s purpose is less to find fault than to help chart a positive path for the future.
£30.59
The University of Chicago Press Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music
From Queen Latifah to Count Basie, Madonna to Monk, "Hole in our soul: the loss of beauty and meaning in American popular music" traces popular music back to its roots in jazz, blues, country, and gospel through the rise in rock'n'roll and the emergence of heavy metal, punk, and rap. Yet despite the vigour and balance of these musical origins, Martha Bayles argues, something has gone seriously wrong, both with the sound of popular music and the sensibility it expresses. Bayles defended the tough, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the strain of artistic modernism she calls"perverse". She describes how perverse modernism was grafted onto popular music in the late 1960s, and argues that the result has been a cult of brutality and obscenity that is profoundly anti-musical. Unlike other recent critics of popular music, Bayles does not blame the problem on commerce. She argues that culture shapes the market and not the other way around. Finding censorship of popular music "both a practical and a constitutional impossibility", Bayles insists that "an informed shift in public tastes may be our only hope of reversing the current malignant moods".
£28.78
