Word: postmodern
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Peter Case, a wondrous songwriter and singer whose recent album The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar is good enough to carry like a talisman into the uncertainties of the '90s, sees the difficulty in broader terms. "Rock 'n' roll has just become a new form of Disneyland," he says. "The whole thing has got mythologized to the point where it's just a bunch of rubbish." Greil Marcus, who writes formidably on popular and radical culture (the recent Lipstick Traces), talks about the "suicidal nostalgia" surrounding a lot of contemporary music: "People have been sold...
...Pogues are not a postmodern incarnation of the Clancy Brothers, however. Only half of them are Irish (MacGowan, 31, was born in Ireland but moved to ! London when he was six), and it quickly became apparent back in the formative days that working up a repertoire of Irish music exclusively, even punked and pulverized, was a dead end. "It was patronizing," says Stacy simply. So instead of the raw Irish musical tradition itself, the band took the spirit of the tradition, which Stacy compares convincingly with rhythm and blues and reggae...
...Sellars did The Mikado with a character vrooming around on a motorcycle, and he set Handel's Orlando at the Kennedy Space Center. But a question remains: Do the elegant and aristocratic operas of Mozart really need to be jazzed up, gagged up, camped up and wrestled into the postmodern...
...wrong--I'm not saying that I am any less guilty than the next person of getting really sententious about stupidity. And Harvard, thankfully, is the ideal setting to let your mind and vocal cords wander into the postmodern recesses of the human condition, before you get out of here and have to deal with things like does the toaster work and paying the insurance bill and taking the car to the Jiffy Lube...
...Party) for two decades, brings to his work the same anti-Thatcher animus that energizes much of today's British cinema. But unlike Laundrette and the rest, High Hopes derives much of its energy and some of its best comic strokes from a conscious, open acknowledgment that to be postmodern is also to be post-Marxist. In a time when people rise and fall freely, unhindered by traditional class structures, they become, according to Leigh, quite unhinged by their inability to locate themselves morally or emotionally on a sturdy social ladder...