Word: crass
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Disco was an interesting development, for it encompassed in one phenomenon the fragmentation, lack of quality and mass, crass commercialization that seemed so commonplace in the '70s. Disco blared over too many air waves and became too much a national lifestyle to be considered a passing fad. Hardly anyone enjoyed listening to disco, although everyone enjoyed dancing to it; discos sprung up like weeds, the most exclusive of which, like New York's Studio 54, were able to turn away hundreds of potential customers, even at stiff entrance fees of $15-$20 a head. Here at last was an adolescent...
...always inspired. Sometimes at the beginning, a pretty girl comes out with an invitation to milk and cookies, a promise made good at show's end, when the entire audience is conveyed by bus to a snack with the star. But it is in Tony Clifton, with his crass, abusive desperation, that Kaufman may have found his strongest comic voice. A distant cousin to Lenny Bruce's abrasive small-timer bombing at the London Palladium, Tony is the dark side of every comic. He is also, to Andy Kaufman, very real. Tony Clifton has a separate agent, gets...
...American Gas Company for demanding that all references to "gas ovens" be removed from a program it sponsored about the Nuremberg war trials. At the end of the book, Cowan tells us "some may argue that television is too powerful a tool to be left to a process so crass and mindlessly competitive." But he concludes, "that is the commercial television system, and it isn't likely to change...
...subject Zappa has always handled most masterfully is mass America: crass commercialism, media hype, and the other things that numb our minds. From his songs of 1965 "Who Are the Brain Police?", to his more recent commemoration of television "I Am the Slime," Zappa has to his credit rock's choicest statements on mass euthanasia (though admittedly, because their babies are treatin' them bad, other songwriters rarely address such topics). Zappa's critical eye looked beyond the government and Vietnam to the covert "moral faseism" of American society. While others lambast politicians and corporate honchos, he criticizes everything and everyone...
...Jazz Coalition, has coordinated a rich and varied program of events to help fulfill this year's theme of "Celebrating the Duke" (they don't mean John Wayne). Boston Jazz Week lacks the financial and promotional resources of the Boston Globe Jazz Festival, but it also lacks the crass commercialism that characterized that event; the committment is to real jazz, music that deserves to be heard, not to artistically bereft beg-money drawing cards. Many of the Boston Jazz Week activities are free...