Word: 20th
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Like all families, 20th century popular music is a product of its own past, complete with eccentric uncles, country cousins and prodigal sons and daughters--different from one another, but still kin. Somewhere in the noisy postmodern collages of Beck one can find echoes of Irving Berlin. Though Chuck Berry may roll over when he hears it, devil-rocker Marilyn Manson counts among his musical offspring. Whether he likes it or not, Puff Daddy's pop hip-hop is a direct descendant of Hammer's Las Vegas-style rap. The Spice Girls may not be the apex of musical evolution...
...easy to sum up 100 years of fashion, but if we dared to, we might say that 20th century women's wear amounted to a war over the waist. It was constrained in the late 19th century, but designers loosened it in the teens and '20s; cinched it again in the '30s, '40s and '50s; and symbolically set it free once more in the '60s. From that point on, formality disappeared from daily dress. In the end, freedom conquered constriction...
...pell-mell 20th century wasted no time in sounding its characteristic theme in the arts. That theme was--what else?--change. Radical, rapid, sweeping change. And more of it than had ever been seen before...
Here's another first for the 20th century: it's the first in which performing artists at the end of the century have been able to see and hear their predecessors from the century's beginning. It used to be that only the plastic arts could be preserved--in print, paint or objects. The performing arts were evanescent. A dancer's line, a comedian's schtick, a singer's coloratura vanished as soon as the performer walked into the wings, and could only be remembered, described, perhaps glimpsed in a third- or fourth-hand imitation. Now recordings, film and videotape...
...that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people--though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and intelligentsia of Europe. Picasso's audience--meaning people who had heard of him and seen his work...