...Japanese hip hop has become a significant national, cultural, and business genre since the late twentieth century, and this phenomenon has been applied and has succeeded by using almost the same ideology that was historically used by other Japanese industries like automobile manufacturing. The pioneers in the Japanese hip hop industry like Buddha Brand learned their skills in the U.S. and have successfully been influencing the contemporary Japanese music scene. As a result, the imported hip hop has become a ''Japanized'' products. Many hip hop industries in Japan have modified the American hip hop into Japanese ways, and their businesses, like the hip hop dance schools, have succeeded.
The Japanese Hip Hop Movement: Its Cultural and Economic Impact [more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Jan 19, 2008 -
39 comments
The history of emotions has yielded substantial studies on love, anger, fear, grief, jealousy, and many other discrete emotions. However, there is no particular study of cheerfulness, a rather moderate emotion, which, for reasons that I will discuss further, has remained unnoticeable to the scholarly eye. Based on much of the historical literature on emotions, some primary sources and some other areas of cultural history, I outline here the social use and conceptualization of cheerfulness over the last three centuries. I argue that, in the modern age, cheerfulness rose in value and became the most favored emotion for experience and display; as such, it was individually sought and socially encouraged until it became the main emotional norm of twentieth-century America.
From Good Cheer to "Drive-By Smiling": A Social History of CheerfulnessAnd the
Taxonomy of Emotion Terms there is of interest on its own.
posted by y2karl
on Mar 13, 2006 -
10 comments
While culling my clippings file for the big move, I came across
Ragtime: No Longer a Novelty in Sepia, which led me to the
The Rag-Time Ephemeralist, a labor of love by one
Chris Ware , whose
'The Acme Novelty Library' and
Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Boy In The World I had long admired. The Ragtime Ephemeralist's mention of
Out of Sight - The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895---here's a
review from
Musical Traditions--and, its very own
links page, as a consequence, led to this post about Ragtime, Cakewalks, Coon Songs and Vaudeville, with a slight nod to Barbershop Quartets. There's more, of course...
posted by y2karl
on Jan 21, 2005 -
27 comments
We are because of others. We are born into this world with minds as naked as our bodies and we have to rely on others to feed, clothe us, and to teach us to think of ourselves as selves. The key is language -- grammatical speech and human culture build upon the brain's biological capacities to create a mind that is something different again than that with which we are born. We are conscious because we can speak to others and ourselves, because we can speak of ourselves to others and ourselves. Language gives us as individuals, memory, and as groups, culture, the social memory. Or so
thought Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, among others. Welcome to the
the neuronaut's guide to the science of consciousness.
posted by y2karl
on Jul 11, 2003 -
36 comments
Race/Music: Corrine Corrina, Bo Chatmon, and the Excluded Middle. Bo Carter is not the household name that, say, Robert Johnson is but he first recorded and most likely wrote one of the standards of the 20th Century. The essay linked deals with him, his song and the push me-pull you of race and culture in America. It's a post graduate thesis rife with postmodernist terminology--yet full of ideas and insights, not all of which I necessarily endorse or agree with--but which I've found thought provoking.
(Details Within)
posted by y2karl
on Aug 1, 2002 -
15 comments
