Word: america
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...SLOC and the IOC members targeted--many from Africa and South America--are mere scapegoats. In fact, there was nothing particularly extraordinary about the lavish treatment the IOC members received from Salt Lake City. In recent weeks, reports have surfaced detailing hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from other host cities. Sydney officials have acknowledged paying two African members $70,000 the night before the IOC voted to award the 2000 Summer Games to Sydney--a bid it won over Beijing by a mere two votes. (Sydney officials have remained defiantly unapologetic in the wake of the revelations...
...represents a realignment of America's cultural aesthetics. Rap songs deliver the message, again and again, to keep it real. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that "a work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity." Rap is the music of necessity, of finding poetry in the colloquial, beauty in anger, and lyricism even in violence. Hip-hop, much as the blues and jazz did in past eras, has compelled young people of all races to search for excitement, artistic fulfillment and even a sense of identity by exploring the black underclass. "And I know because...
Corporate America's infatuation with rap has increased as the genre's political content has withered. Ice Cube's early songs attacked white racism; Ice-T sang about a Cop Killer; Public Enemy challenged listeners to "fight the power." But many newer acts such as DMX and Master P are focused almost entirely on pathologies within the black community. They rap about shooting other blacks but almost never about challenging governmental authority or encouraging social activism. "The stuff today is not revolutionary," says Bob Law, vice president of programming at WWRL, a black talk-radio station in New York City...
...Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (Basic Books; 707 pages; $32.50) Kevin Phillips fetches back 3 1/2 centuries for a complex, ingeniously woven explanation. His thesis, mostly persuasive, is that the English-speaking world prospered as it has because in three internecine conflicts (the English Civil Wars of the 17th century, the 18th century's American Revolution, and the 19th century's American Civil War) it hammered itself into new political, cultural and religious shapes that gave the Anglo cousinhood both energy and stability: "Broadly, the result was to uphold political liberties, commercial progress, technological inventiveness...
Polarizations formed on either side of the grand duality of England vs. America, Old World vs. New. Thus on either side of the Atlantic, political, cultural and religious opposites were, in each of the three wars, slugging it out: "From the seventeenth century, the English-speaking peoples on both continents defined themselves by wars that upheld, at least for a while, a guiding political culture of a Low Church, Calvinistic Protestantism, commercially adept, militantly expansionist, and highly convinced, in Old World, New World, or both, that it represented a chosen people and a manifest destiny. In the full, three-century...