Word: raunch
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Still, they speak affectionately of "raunch songs" that, according to Hwang, have lyrics that "aren't meant to be printed in papers...
...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...
SHOW BUSINESS: Raunch is all the rage in pop culture, and outrage is the reaction of many Americans...