Word: popped
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pop music, lyrics about sex and violence are often crystal clear. Talk of God, though plentiful, is usually veiled or mixed up with more worldly matters. Prince and Madonna peddle images of salvation but marinate them with eroticism. In one of his songs, rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg imagines confronting a supernatural being in a near-death experience -- but he doesn't make clear whether it's God or the devil. In an MTV Unplugged appearance, Kurt Cobain of the alternative band Nirvana performs a song called Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam. Is he being serious or ironic? His secular...
Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, an ambitious new series on National Public Radio, brings to listeners the passion and joy of spiritual music unfiltered. Much of the emotionalism of modern pop music -- the call-and-response involvement of the crowd, the sense that music can offer catharsis for both performer and audience -- is taken directly from the sacred-music traditions of African Americans. Listen to the secular love songs of Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston or Toni Braxton; close your eyes, ignore the lyrics, and you might as well be in a black Baptist church in Georgia...
...Modern pop music has borrowed from sacred music but missed its heart. "You can listen to a song and be moved," Reagon says in one episode. "But within the African-American tradition there is a high value put on being caught up in the singing." Listening to Aretha Franklin's graceful flight through the softly powerful hymn Never Grow Old, or the Barrett Sisters' vocal exodus through the redemptive gospel song I Don't Feel Noways Tired, one cannot help being caught up, regardless of one's personal faith. Wade in the Water is a deluge of joy that sweeps...
...never guess it from watching kids pogo-stick at a Pearl Jam concert, or vibrate to the street beat that pours out of their Walkmans, but listening to music is an essentially passive experience. Performers make the sound, consumers devour it. For every pop generation from A to X, the big creative decision has been which record (cassette, CD) to put in the music machine. For radio listeners, even that decision is denied. Music is too easy: a hot soak in somebody else's bathtub...
...stand-up comedians, the trash rococo of Liberace, both flaunting and denying his gayness; hot-ticket singer-dancers like Ann-Margret; and shows with whiffy themes that existed as mere pretexts for bringing out brigades of suggestively costumed young women jiggling through clouds of pastel-colored smoke as overamped pop tunes blared. It was cheesy glamour, to be sure, but it was rare and one of a kind...