1930s American popular culture
A01=Joel Dinerstein
aesthetic responses to technology
African American innovation in music
African diasporic aesthetics
African roots of American rhythm
American social transformation
and machines
artistic response to automation
Author_Joel Dinerstein
big band era innovation
Black modernism and music
blues and industrial life
Busby Berkeley choreography analysis
Category=GTM
Category=JBCC1
Category=JBSL
Category=NHTB
creative adaptation to change
creativity in the industrial era
cultural adaptation to technology
cultural history of dance
cultural history of modern America
cultural modernism and rhythm
cultural resilience and transformation
cultural responses to modern industry
dance and modern machines
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Harlem Renaissance influences
history of mechanized performance
industrial metaphors in African American art
industrial soundscape in popular music
interwar American society
jazz and industrialization
machine age culture
machine imagery in jazz
mass production and entertainment
mechanical metaphors in art
mechanical rhythm and human creativity
mechanized modernism
modern American ethos
modernism and performance
modernity and mechanization
motion
music
music as social adaptation
performance and industrial identity
rhythm and mechanization
rhythm as social commentary
symbolic power of the train
technological anxiety in art
technology in everyday life
the body as machine metaphor
train symbolism in jazz
urban sound and dance evolution
urbanization and art forms
Ziegfeld Follies cultural impact
Product details
- ISBN 9781558493834
- Weight: 630g
- Dimensions: 162 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 04 Apr 2003
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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An innovative study of the influence of black popular culture on modern American life; In any age and any given society, cultural practices reflect the material circumstances of people's everyday lives. According to Joel Dinerstein, it was no different in America between the two World Wars - an era sometimes known as the ""machine age"" - when innovative forms of music and dance helped a newly urbanized population cope with the increased mechanization of modern life. Grand spectacles such as the Ziegfield Follies and the movies of Busby Berkeley captured the American ethos of mass production, with chorus girls as the cogs of these fast, flowing pleasure vehicles. Yet it was African American culture, Dinerstein argues, that ultimately provided the means of aesthetic adaptation to the accelerated tempo of modernity. Drawing on a legacy of engagement with and resistance to technological change, with deep roots in West African dance and music, black artists developed new cultural forms that sought to humanize machines. In ""The Ballad of John Henry,"" the epic toast ""Shine,"" and countless blues songs, African Americans first addressed the challenge of industrialization. Jazz musicians drew on the symbol of the train within this tradition to create a set of train-derived aural motifs and rhythms, harnessing mechanical power to cultural forms. Tap dance and the lindy hop brought machine aesthetics to the human body, while the new rhythm section of big band swing mimicked the industrial soundscape of northern cities. In Dinerstein's view, the capacity of these artistic innovations to replicate the inherent qualities of the machine - speed, power, repetition, flow, precision - helps explain both their enormous popularity and social function in American life.
