Word: musician
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...many cultural figures of the past decade have been simultaneously cutting edge and mainstream? Quentin Tarantino had a moment in 1994, but that's all it was. Moby, however, is three years into his ride as the king of both hip and heartland. He's a dance musician who plays rock songs, a devout Christian who hates religious fervor, a scrawny bald guy who dates Christina Ricci and Natalie Portman, and an operator who sold every track on his last album, Play, for corporate use while often wearing a T shirt for anarchist punk group Minor Threat...
...worthy of comparison with this or that European master." I'll tell you what - rather than troubling yourself plowing through this pompous and dreary academic tome, why don't we both do something more interesting? I'll listen to my Lester Young CDs, while you try and find a musician who'll feel insulted if you compare him to Mozart...
...Htut became a local hero in part because early in his career he resisted singing the propaganda songs that all musicians in Burma are pressured to record. This has earned him a lifetime of official scrutiny. He was once prohibited from performing because his hair was too long and again later?after a spell in a monastery?because he had no hair. (Today, it's shoulder length.) In 1994, a power outage cut short a show and fans rioted. Zaw Win Htut was blamed and forbidden to play publicly for six months. His fellow rockers get similar treatment. They adapt...
...Htut has likewise sterilized more controversial parts of his work?thus avoiding the fate of Par Par Lay, a well-known comedian who in 1996 received a seven-year prison sentence for satirizing the country's ruling generals. Not everyone is willing to bend. Mun Awng, a popular musician in Burma in the 1980s, left the country in 1988 after participating in a wave of antigovernment demonstrations. From Thailand, he released an album titled Battle for Peace, and activists sang his songs while facing down the military in 1996 street protests. He now lives in Norway, performing occasionally for Burmese...
...truism about American directors: you become who you were. Coppola, the former theater director and son of a classical musician, took the arty road, making operatic, actor-centric films that sometimes (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) found large audiences. Lucas, who had written a third-grade theme that began, "Once upon a time in the land of Zoom..." and loved to tinker with cars, replayed his Modesto, Calif., adolescence in American Graffiti. Then he reworked the beloved comic books and B-movie serials of his youth into Star Wars, a film as stylized and sterile as a piece of abstract animation...