Word: blooms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Part of any successful HSPH research is that the public finds out about it. So a larger part of the mission of the HSPH, as defined by Dean Barry R. Bloom, is carried out by the Office of Communications...
...That Bloom was right, at least regarding pop's uncanny ability to transcend nationality and culture, is revealed by recent international adoration for the likes of Michael Jackson and, God help us, the Spice Girls. But reading Bloom is poor preparation for how completely American music has infiltrated Europe...
Maybe pop music's prominence shouldn't have surprised me. At least, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind should have dulled the shock. Bloom wrote that "rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire--not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored." Because sexual desire is universal, pop music "knows neither class nor nation." Consequently, pop music is a sort of teenage Esperanto: Every pubescent youth, regardless of nationality, should be attracted to the "masturbatorial fantasy" it promises...
American pop music is cruel retaliation for measles, small pox and other emigre diseases stowed in the ships of 17th century European explorers. Pop is more easily communicable, needs no ships and seems impossible to quarantine. After all, what self-respecting group of teenage boys could resist what Bloom calls a "nonstop, commercially prepackaged, masturbatorial fantasy?" The trouble is, it's not just German teenagers who are infected. My family's hosts were mature adults, the owner of the store in Fischen was an elderly Christian soldier who did not seem prone in the least to indulgence in nonstop masturbatorial...
...already seems well launched toward stardom, anyone who expects her to take the low road to popular acclaim is in for a surprise. "I am asked so many times," she says, "what do you think, that classical music is dead, dead, dead? Not at all. It's starting to bloom again. That's what I think. And I am one who is fighting...