Word: popped
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bought for a girlfriend as an ironic courtship gesture--I was young, it was the '80s--the song Strangers in the Night caught my ear. It's an admittedly queer place to start amid the glories of the Sinatra canon, a chintzy little hit from 1966 with a dopey pop-rock arrangement; the singer himself gives it the brush-off with his famous dooby-dooby-doo coda during the fade-out. But not everyone can start with What Is This Thing Called Love?, and even here Sinatra manages to invest the ticky-tacky lyrics--"Strangers in the night/ Exchanging glances...
...were justly celebrated. But she was far more than a clown. Her mobile face could register a whole dictionary of emotions; her comic timing was unmatched; her devotion to the truth of her character never flagged. She was a tireless perfectionist. For one scene in which she needed to pop a paper bag, she spent three hours testing bags to make sure she got the right size and sound...
Lisa, when not condemning Bart and all his works (she once called him "the devil's cabana boy"), tries to explain him. "That little hell-raiser," she recently ranted, "is the spawn of every shrieking commercial, every brain-rotting soda pop, every teacher who cares less about young minds than about cashing their big, fat paychecks. No, Bart is not to blame. You can't create a monster and then whine when he stomps on a few buildings." Nice try, Lisa, but not quite. He's not Bartzilla. The kid knows right from wrong; he just likes wrong better...
These terrific artists also illustrate a pretty little truism about modern culture. In the first half of the century, pop culture imitated the upper class, and in the second half it aped the underclass. Once we gazed on high; now we play limbo with cultural norms...
...Kern invented the popular song and dominated the field for a swank half-century. And as they had borrowed from Scott Joplin and W.C. Handy, so did they help bring black artists into the mainstream. Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker ran their astounding riffs on the backs of sturdy pop tunes by Jewish immigrants. This fruitful collaboration continued throughout rock's first decade, as Jewish kids in the Brill Building wrote teen anthems for the Shirelles and the Ronettes--pop's twilight of multiracial synergy...