“Just 2,000 copies are enough to crack the Top 40. The figure is less than a third of what it would have taken to make it into the chart as recently as six years ago, and is a clear sign of the decline of the singles industry. The number one, long viewed as the ultimate prize in the music business, reached a new low last week when Swedish DJ Eric Prydz had the worst sales ever recorded for a chart-topper.”
Tag: 10.24.04
Is American History-Writing Broken?
Charles Hoffer writes that the field of American history is “two-faced – split between celebratory popularizers who often value rousing narrative over scholarly rigor and academic specialists whose jargon-riddled, often dour monographs ignore the ordinary reader. Meanwhile, Hoffer accuses the American Historical Association (AHA), where he has served as an adviser on plagiarism and a member of its professional standards division, of abdicating its responsibility to enforce basic scholarly principles in both realms.”
Looking For Canada’s New Film Czar
Who’s in line to run Canada’s Telefilm? Someone a little more Toronto-friendly? “Telefilm also needs someone who can make peace with key English-language producers in Toronto. They have become increasingly critical in public of Telefilm’s recent emphasis on movies it deems commercial rather than artistic (though many of these have tanked at the box office).”
Pod People And The PodCast
What is a podcast? It’s the latest in shared music. “A sort of TiVo for amateur online audio, podcasts are radio-style audio files posted inside blogs as MP3s that can be downloaded to an iPod or other portable player. And they represent the next wave of peer-to-peer content sharing – unlimited by available FM/AM spectrum, untouched by FCC regulation, portable and full of possibility.”
A Suffi Shakespeare?
Was Shakespeare a member of a mystic Muslim sect? “While it has been suggested that Shakespeare dabbled with espionage and Catholic political activism, the new theory will attempt to persuade Shakespeare scholars that the playwright was a member of a religious or spiritual order which can best be compared to the philosophy of Sufism.”
It’s All Politics…But Is It Good Theatre?
This is the year of political theatre; it’s everywhere. But is it effective as theatre? “Much recent political theatre is informed by the desire to be either a report or an essay. Getting the facts out there is good – putting them on stage gives them electricity they would otherwise lack – but it is not the same as a play.”
The Most Loved/Hated Man In Public Radio
Bill Kling is the man behind Minnesota Public Radio, the broadcasting juggernaut that is, by its own admission, hoping to change the landscape of public broadcasting across the country. Once a mild-mannered regional network best known for producing A Prairie Home Companion, Kling’s MPR has become the 800-lb. gorilla of the industry, acquiring competing stations like a for-profit company would, and expanding its reach well outside the Upper Midwest. Whether these are positive or negative developments in the genteel world of pubic radio depends entirely on whom you ask.
Are Young Adults Exiting Stage Left?
“Is theater failing to attract a new generation of enthusiasts to replace those who, on the opposite end of the chronological scale, die off or become too frail to go out at night?” There’s certainly no question that the predominant audience at your average mainstream theater is decidedly, um, mature, but some in the industry insist that the overall audience has expanded, regardless of demographic shifts. Still, “in the decade between 1992 and 2002, the percentage of young people in the overall theater audience shrank significantly.”
The Rise of The Right-Wing Film Festival
“Conservatives do not have a reputation for making good documentaries, mainly because they do not have a reputation for making them at all.” But a fledgling movement is aiming to change that, as intensely conservative film festivals have begun to spring up around the country in response to the commercial success of left-wing films like Fahrenheit 9/11. Screenings frequently begin with group prayers and recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, and the only thing the crowds seem to enjoy more than a good sympathetic portrait of President Bush is a film that carves up Michael Moore like a Thanksgiving turkey.
How To Sound Gay
It’s somewhat appropriate that, in a year when being gay became unavoidably, irritatingly “cool” in the pop culture sphere, the classical music world appears to be obsessing over the phenomenon of the gay composer. But some scholars are going well beyond traditional views of homosexuality, and are suggesting that the “American sound” created by composers like Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein is, in fact, the sound of a “queer sensibility” which is unique to gay composers. But can you really hear gayness in a piece of music?