Robert Chapman: Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio (1992)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, music, piracy, pirate radio, popular culture, public broadcasting, radio, united kingdom
Was it a non-stop psychedelic party or was there more to pirate radio in the sixties than hedonism and hip radicalism? From Kenny Everett’s sacking to John Peel’s legendary `Perfumed Garden’ show, to the influence of the multi-national ad agencies, and the eventual assimilationof aspects of unofficial pop radio into Radio One, Selling the Sixties examines the boom of private broadcasting in Britain.
Using two contrasting models of pop piracy, Radios Caroline and London, Robert Chapman sets pirate radio in its social and cultural context. In doing so he challenges the myths surrounding its maverick `Kings Road’ image, separating populist consumerism from the economic and political machinations which were the flipside of the pirate phenomenon.
Selling the Sixties includes previously unseen evidence from the pirates’ archives, revealing interviews and an unrivalled selection of rare audio materials.
Publisher Routledge, 1992
ISBN 0415079705, 9780415079709
295 pages
Gary Indiana: Utopia’s Debris: Selected Essays (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, cinema, film, literature, popular culture
Gary Indiana is one of America’s leading cultural critics—a public intellectual who has written key essays on every aspect of American culture. Utopia’s Debris comprises selections of his very best work, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of the best and worst America has to offer. His writings range from popular culture—trash novels, architectural wonders and horrors—to appreciations of the best of modern literature, art, and cinema. They include his convincing (and highly entertaining) debunking of fashionable conspiracy theories, a spirited and contrarian defense of Bill Clinton’s autobiography, a Mencken-like examination of the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the politics of celebrity in what Indiana calls the Age of Contempt. A postmodern Emerson, Indiana wields scalpel-sharp wit and a fealty to logic on issues in which, all too often, irrationalism and emotionalism hold sway. At times rigorously serious, at other times whimsical, Indiana’s most conspicuous feature is skepticism—his wildly satirical contempt for conventional wisdom.
Publisher Basic Books, 2008
ISBN 046500248X, 9780465002481
315 pages
John Berger: Ways of Seeing (1972)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, art criticism, art history, popular culture, visual culture
Ways of Seeing is a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger’s scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series is partially a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series, which represents a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon.
The book Ways of Seeing was made by Berger and Dibb, along with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, and Richard Hollis. The book consists of seven numbered essays: four using words and images; and three essays using only images. The book has contributed to feminist readings of popular culture, through essays that focus particularly on depictions of women in advertisements and oil paintings. Ways of Seeing is considered a seminal text for current studies of visual culture and art history.
First published in the UK by the BBC and Penguin Books, 1972
Publisher Penguin Books, 1977
165 pages