Essays

MARTHA BAYLES
It still makes millions of dollars, but rock has lost its soul.

While the blame is often placed on crude commerce, Martha Bayles finds that American music went astray when if misunderstood, and then lost touch with, the rich blues tradition.

, eople used to tap their feet and smile
when they listened to American
popular music. Now they sit open-

mouthed and stare: at "speed metal" rockers with roadkill hair who, despite a certain virtuosity on guitar, treat music as...

Selected and Introduced by Joseph Brodsky

It still makes millions of dollars, but rock has lost its soul.

While the blame is often placed on crude commerce, Martha Bayles finds that American music went astray when if misunderstood, and then lost touch with, the rich blues tradition.

, eople used to tap their feet and smile
when they listened to American
popular music. Now they sit open-

mouthed and stare: at "speed metal" rockers with roadkill hair who, despite a certain virtuosity on guitar, treat music as a form of...

AFRO-AMERICAN AND THE MAINSTREAM
MUSIC

LAWRENCE M. MEAD
W hen the problem of en-equality,on conduct and not class. This repre- trenched poverty suddenly sents a sharp break from American politicsas it appeared on the public was practiced during most of the 20th century, agenda during the mid- and it helps explain two of our current per- 1960s,it transformed the character of political plexities:the rise of divided government with debate in America. Since then we have seen DemocratsdominatingCongressand Repub- nothing less than a sea...

<p>When the problem of entrenched poverty suddenly appeared on the public agenda during the mid-1960s, it transformed the character of political debate in America. Since then we have seen nothing less than a sea change in our national...</p>

America was born the world's first bourgeois republic and has proudly defined itself ever since as, above all, a middle-class nationa. Yet the 1992 was the first in recent memory in which both parties wrapped themselves unambiguously in midde class symbols...

Easily the most conspicuous building in the flossy New York neighborhood of Madison Avenue and 72nd Street is the blown-up replica of a High Gothic reliquary whose original, one suspects, is to be found in some unvisited room of the Metropolitan Museum...

per- sonal ties of one sort or another." In place of this rigid society, the Founding Fathers proposed to create what Thomas Jefferson called a "natural aristocracy" of talented men like themselves- liberally educated gentlemen of the Enlighten- ment who had risen from modest circumstances yet had been excluded under the old order. "For many of the revolutionary leaders," Wood ob- serves, "this was the emotional significance of republicanism-a vindication of frustrated...

Many great minds of the modern world, from Karl Marx to James Joyce,
have claimed Giambattista Vico as an intellectual forefather.
But Mark Lilla finds that these admirers usually misread the arguments
of the West's first antimodernist.

iambattista Vico was born in Naples in 1668and died there in 1744.The son of a modest book- seller, he received an unconven- tional education, tutoring himself in his father's shop between short and difficult pe- riods in Jesuit schools. At the age...

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