Word: poppings
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...years, Beirut has been home to a small but artistically significant rock scene, where a handful of bands with names like Soap Kills, the New Government and, of course, Scrambled Eggs, have tried to put this tiny country on the musical map for something other than sexy Arab pop divas. As such, they've been part of a creative subculture of artists, architects, and designers who've tried to reconcile Eastern and Western cultural forms, as well as tradition with modernity...
...audiences for The Daily Show and Colbert, are part of the shows' (basically left-wing) Us, laughing at the (basically right-wing) Them who are the butts of the jokes. WWN recognized no such niceties. It tore down that wall. It ripped not just at the goofiness of pop culture but at its own readers' prurience and gullibility. ("Redneck Vampire Attacks Trailer Park.") The main audience for this satire was not those who might laugh at it but those who might take it as true. "It is my belief," Derek Clontz told the Post, "that in the '80s and into...
...this part of Texas, "People here are inventing their own system of beliefs. They're creating it, doing it, selling it, making it up as they go along" - an apt description of the WWN ethic. True Stories (which landed Byrne on the cover of TIME) also has a wonderful pop score, including the all-time great group lip-synch, "Wild Wild Life...
...karaoke shows painful? Because they make you cringe. Why are they fun? Because they make you laugh. Cringe humor--the humor of awkwardness and faux pas--may be the defining element of early 21st century pop culture, dominating entertainment from Borat to Knocked Up to The Office. It boils down to encountering a social problem or taboo, facing up to it and getting past it by laughing. Likewise the singalong shows: their cathartic message is that none of us are above it all. No, you don't have to sing it well, America. In fact, we'd prefer...
...Geldof's absence is also about pride. The Irish singer raised $100 million through Band Aid, a supergroup of British pop stars that set the mold for charity records to come, and Live Aid, which did the same for worldwide charity concerts. The money was to help alleviate the devastating Ethiopian famine of 1984-5, in which more than a million people are thought to have died. But Ethiopia, a nation of nearly 80 million people, now boasts consistent economic growth of 10%, and in that context the famine, and Geldof, are remembered with more than a tinge of humiliation...