Word: raunch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...size and ardor would thrill a rock star. In sold-out Madison Square Garden, he looks like a samurai biker, with Brando's pout, Elvis' sideburns and a sequined jacket, its back stitched with the phrase DICE RULES. And he does too. He is America's rajah of comic raunch, ready to beguile fans who dress like him and talk like him and who have memorized his earlier routines from hit records and HBO specials. "I know you know the old s," he slurs between drags on a cigarette. "But it's a new decade, and I got new filth...
...ignore the whole thing. But ignorance is not an option. The clash, however angry and ominous, is not just the usual dustup between raucous young stars and the professional squares who oppose them. It's not just about dirty words and bad attitude. The battle over pop raunch reflects a crucial fissure in American social and political culture that was born a long generation ago and came of age in the Reagan-Bush...
...same genteel jokes. That changed in the '50s with rock 'n' roll. The new music took rhythm, danger and sexuality from the underground black culture, cranked the volume up, electrified it and handed it to a brand new consumer group: white teenagers. The young connoisseurs of metal and raunch are similarly adrift from the entertainment that amuses or moves today's adults...
Lenny Bruce's triumph was posthumous, and maybe Pyrrhic: because of him, Andrew Dice Clay can make millions reciting dirty nursery rhymes in public. Clay and the other new raunch artists, most of them, are only incidentally subversive. They don't believe for a moment, most of them, what they're saying. Metal musicians are no serious Satanists; their concerts are just theater pieces -- Cats with a nasty yowl. Clay is not the pathetic strutting stud he seems onstage; that's just a character. (Was Jack Benny really stingy? Is Pee-wee Herman really a goony child?) Bruce said what...
...Irish, Italian, Polish and Jewish newcomers was a music-hall staple -- and continued unabated in Hollywood's racially derisive treatment of blacks. The reason then was the same as it is today: people felt threatened by the outsiders and so made fun of them. In the new version, a raunch artist taps into the grudge a white working-class male may hold against the beneficiaries of affirmative action and liberal sympathy: minorities, the handicapped, gays. They get all the breaks, he figures; now what about me? His counterattack is to bad-mouth them with paranoid intensity. And that's where...