The following is the second part in a two-part installment. The first part can be found here. Popular music artists as intertextual commodities Indeed, when fans support an artist with such ferocity, and both consume and contribute to the artist’s empire, the studio album can remain an important and lucrative…
“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” the ancient Christian thinker Tertullian pointedly asked in highlighting the apparent incommensurability between the two dominant discourses of his day – philosophy and religious revelation. Daniel Y. Harris Today, considering the disconsolation of the arts and humanities amidst the digitization of all life…
The following if the first part in a two-part installment. Author Note: The following was written in 2015 and details how critical discussion of popular music is largely missing from the field of media studies. This essay discusses how popular music fits into a media studies theoretical framework, and more…
The following interview originally appeared in the Portuguese American Journal. One of today’s most admired Portuguese-language poets, Rosa Alice Branco, with ten collections of poetry published around the world, has recently been introduced to readers in the United States. Branco’s first bilingual collection, Cattle of the Lord in English and Portuguese,…
Urbanization is a phenomenon of physical growth of urban areas, which is closely linked with modernization and the industrialization process of expansion. Like any other evolution process, it’s more like shifting of humanity and nature into a chaotic world of concretes, steel and artificial things. Cities are growing and so…
Note: The works of Krzysztof Gliszczyński depicted in the text of the article below are reproduced through permission obtained by the author. From the late 19th century and early 20th century in western Europe, the modernist avant-garde was developing a new concept of its political, social and cultural role. In…
Note: This essay was inspired by the author’s visit to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and its exhibition of Al WeiWei’s Sunflower Seeds as part of the Unilever Series. It deals with questions raised during the author’s frustrating experience with this particular installation of the Unilever series commission. It is published here…
“IT’S A SICKENING OUTRAGE! Sadistic! Obscene! Evil! ……. These people are the wreckers of civilization!” (Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn) The ‘Prostitution’ Exhibition at the ICA, London caused an outcry in the national press and parliament. Debate raged against the ‘degenerate’ nature of the show. Yet again art was testing the…
According to the Office for National Statistics, Heavy Metal has recently become an official religion, with 6200 followers in 2011. Music as a cultural artefact clearly exemplifies the intersection of religion and popular culture. Andy Bennett states, in Cultures of Popular Music, that the heavy metal genre, which originated in…
The following is the third of a three-part series. The first installment can be found here, the second one here. Storylines and Narrative Forms of Disney and Miyazaki Finally, I examine the three animated films from the perspective of narratology. When watching these three animated films, it is simple to…