In case you are looking for a straightforward biography of a pop music giant, you may not immediately like Lee, Myself and I. One reason may be the large room the „Myself“ and the „I“ take up on those pages; and they refer to biographer Wallace, not to Lee Hazlewood. However, if one considers the […]
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Category: B. R. PopCulture
Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution by Michael Denning (2015)
The history of modern music was forever altered when in a few years after 1925 talent scouts and engineers were busy recording regional musicians and their styles, like hula, fado, beguine, calypso, marabi and many other musics. What decades later was repacked, remastered and resold as “folk,” and “roots” music, actually was local popular music; […]
Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology by Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (eds.) (2012)
There are probably many millions of people worldwide awaiting the new Star Wars episode to be presented in December 2015, including your reviewer here. So even if the book at hand came out some months ago, now is the time to devote some lines to it. The topics of this volume are subsumed under the […]
American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz (2014)
What actually was the idea of Englishman Allen Lane during WWII found its way to the United States: the invention of a small, affordable book format, available almost anywhere where you could buy chewing gum and cigarettes. Lane, after unsuccessfully searching for small-sized books to read on his daily train rides, in 1935 founded Penguin […]
The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic by Jürgen Holstein (ed.) (2015)
Berlin between the wars was a prospering and innovative capital unlike any other in the world. In 1927 alone Berlin was home to 929 publishing houses and put out a fourth of Germany’s entire book production. Book printing was also promoted by the many local newspapers and their respective hardware; to tap the full potential […]
From Radio to the Big Screen. Hollywood Films Featuring … by Hal Erickson (2014)
When stars like Bob Hope or Bing Crosby started their careers in the movies, they actually started over, since they already were highly successful through their earlier work for radio shows, drama, mystery and comedy. These old shows, home of many superior actors and great voices, today are mostly forgotten, and the programs will only […]
Steaming Into a Victorian Future by Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller (eds.) (2014)
After all, Steampunk as a genre of literature, fashion, film or even music is a truly young being, hardly older than 30 years, if we consider William Gibson’s and Bruce Sterling’s novel The Difference Engine (1990) as one of the very earliest works of fiction now considered part of the movement and probably its kick […]
Dream West. Politics and Religion in Cowboy Movies by Douglas Brode (2013)
The myth and cultural legacy of one of the most powerful American symbols, the cowboy, is at the center of Douglas Brode’s volume Dream West. While it is not so much the cowboy itself that is analyzed and put in relation to other national icons, it is the set of values and the way the […]
Winsor McCay. The Complete Little Nemo by Alexander Braun (ed.) (2014)
Not just comic art fans but any student of popular culture or architecture will be delighted by this edition. Winsor McCay’s inventions of perspective, his psychedelic and fantastic renderings of breath-taking strange environments are presented here for the first time ever in the complete edition containing all (really every one!) 549 episodes of Little Nemo, […]