Culture Watch
Every New Year's Eve people use the calendar change as an opportunity to reflect on their life and to consider their prospects. The upcoming change of decade and century, and even millennium, is giving society a common milestone to evaluate the past and to take stock of the future.
More Than Just "Christian Megatrends"
Tom Sine, author of the 1981 Mustard Seed Conspiracy, continues his observation of social, scientific, and spiritual trends in his recently released Wild Hope (Word Publishing, 1991, $12.99, paper). Sine issues a wake-up call to the Christian community, notifying us of the alarming technological changes society is in store for.
Sine surveys a number of topics—the environment, robotics and artificial intelligence, biological adaptation, changing economic power centers—charting both nearly realizable technologies and seemingly unimaginable innovations.
Idolatry in the form of technological, scientific, or economic progress is central to the future dangers. And while Sine notes the "captivity of the Christian mind," he often gives the activities of Christian institutions much credence as signs of hope. He calls for a renewed sense of Christian responsibility, so that the church becomes "captured by the Wild Hope of God's vision for the future."
Jamaican-Canadian Lillian Allen's dub poetry album Revolutionary Tea Party is dedicated to her daughter Anta and her "little friend"—"the future who stand up!" This album and her Conditions Critical are both about standing up to oppressive principalities and powers with laughter and dignity, with love and anger. Together they are a double whammy of resistance and affirmation. Both recordings won Canadian Juno Awards for best reggae/calypso albums of their respective years.
While they are not hot off the press, they continue to fire up new possibilities for cultural resistance through the innovative collaboration of voice, music, and technology. Those who draw strength and hope from popular culture with a justice vision will find much to celebrate here.
Lillian Allen said in an interview, "Anything that victimizes humanity would be fair game for my poetry." Inviting others to join in struggle, her poems and music confront an array of intersecting justice issues. "Dis Ya Mumma Earth" follows in the black church tradition of preaching oratory. Allen calls her congregation to "Get up! Stand up!/Shout en masse/Wail in the wilderness/Our will...will be/Peace, justice, equality/Join hands in liberation dance/Freedom chants/We are our only weapon for peace."
Dub poetry is kin to a variety of African and Caribbean-influenced oral and musical forms including spirituals, gospel hymns, slave work songs, call and response preacher-congregation exchanges, freedom speeches, dialect poetry, story-telling, reggae, and rap, to name a few. It derives specifically from the Jamaican DJ practice of dubbing improvised lyrics over a prerecorded reggae track on which the vocals have been dubbed out and the instrumental tracks altered for emphasis.
As the debate on political correctness rages, we will examine the literature that fuels this discussion.
One of my buddies from college is a poet. He also writes advertising copy.
As the folks at Mazda are always reminding us, the 1980s-going-on-'90s are really the 1950s.
There's something reassuring about the fact that the flag, the old Stars and Stripes, can still kick up so much popular controversy.
The usual rap on TV cop shows is that they trivialize real life-and-death matters into a glossy package of sanitized violence designed to sell soap and soda pop.
For this future cultural analyst, the legendary '60s were an after-school special.
Political philosophers tell us that one of the great driving forces of human history is the tension between individualism (or liberty) and community (or equality).
Someday in the far-distant future, some 23rd-century Mel Brooks may make a satirical film called The History of the World: Part MCXXXXVII.
The ad line for the new Oliver Stone-Eric Bogosian film, Talk Radio, gets my first nomination for The 1989 William Jennings Bryan "Cross of Gold" Award.
As this is written on November 22, 1988, the pop-cultural atmosphere is a-swamp with remembrance of things Kennedy.
The 1987-88 pop culture season was definitely a red-letter year. And the letter was Hawthorne's scarlet "A." That's for adultery, in case your high school lit is rusty.
Ronald Reagan, it is said, has run America's first cinematic presidency, often taking his ideological cues and policy prescriptions from his familiar world of the silver screen.
Perhaps the last thing anyone would have expected to happen during the Reagan era was a renewal of interest in the idea of legalizing drugs.