Synopses & Reviews
In this utterly original look at our modern culture of performance,” de Zengotita shows how media are creating self-reflective environments, custom made for each of us. From Princess Dianas funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel,
Mediated takes us on an original and astonishing tour of every department of our media-saturated society. The implications are personal and far-reaching at the same time.
Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. He teaches at the Dalton School, and at the Draper Graduate Program at New York University. Winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology Just when it seemed there was nothing new to say about the media, along comes a book that transcends the conventional wisdom with an original visionone that unites our most intimate personal concerns with far-reaching historical trends in an accessible way. From Princess Diana's funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in different lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from the hip-hop nation to climbing Mt. Everest, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel, Mediated takes on every last department of our media-saturated society. What emerges is a portrait of a populace immersed in options, surrounded by representations, driven to unprecedented levels of self-consciousnessand obligated by these circumstances to transform lives into performances."A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media . . . De Zengotita . . . is an adventurer of the digitized American psyche."The Washington Post Book World "A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media . . . De Zengotita . . . is an adventurer of the digitized American psyche."The Washington Post Book World
"A spectacular widescreen critique of contemporary American culture."The Christian Science Monitor
"Reading Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated is like spending time with a wild, wired friend, the kind who keeps you up late and lures you outside your comfort zone with a speed rap full of brilliant notions."O, The Oprah Magazine
"Mediated has the same liveliness and intense intellectuality as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which is a way of saying there are anywhere from three to ten stimulating ideas on every page. As McLuhan presented us with the realization that modernism was coming to an end, so de Zengotita has a great deal to say about the saturation of postmodernism in our existence today. Let me offer my salute to Thomas de Zengotita."Norman Mailer
"If the world as we perceive it is made by, for, and of the media, Thomas de Zengotita is our Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus. He sets out to discover what we see and how we know and the result is a brilliant book, as entertaining as it is insightful."Lewis Lapham, author of Waiting for the Barbarians
"A conversation with Thomas de Zengotita is about the most engaging and enlightening experience a thinking person can have. This book feels as natural and personal as having Tom in your own living room, drawing you out, considering your responses, and then bringing you to new levels of awareness. Here's a man who understands both the media and his medium so completely that the connections he makes across the vast landscapes of popular culture end up feeling like spontaneous discoveries by the reader. Invite Tom into your head and heart by all means, and try walking around the world really seeing for a while. You may decide to stay that way."Douglas Rushoff, author of Media Virus! and ScreenAgers
"Read Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated for a brilliant reflection on postmodern culture and our peculiar, performing, contemporary selves and the media that make and reflect us. It's a great read, and you'll never feel the same about your kids, your friends, or yourself again."Frances Fox Piven, author of Poor Peoples Movements and The War at Home
"De Zengotita's style is both reflective and sardonic as he delves into the ways the media has shaped our individual reactions to modern culture and events. Influenced by the media-inspired 'culture of performance,' we now live our lives as if we are performers practicing method acting, he maintains. We go through the motions of expected reactions to everything from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to Princess Diana's death to documentaries of the Kennedy assassination and the civil rights movement. The Internet, satellite television, and a host of technological products and services now give us the impression of participating in current and historical events to such an extent that we can barely distinguish the varying levels of what de Zengotita categorizes as ranging from the real-real to the unreal-real. Analyzing car commercials, cell-phone usage, the social art of teenagers, and other aspects of modern culture, with keen detail and wit, de Zengotita offers an amazing look at how media affects our culture, our choices, and our responses to our media-filtered lives. Completely absorbing, amusing, and insightful."Vanessa Bush, Booklist
"In a deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense style, de Zengotita posits that since the 1960s, Americans have belonged to a culture of reflexivity, and the media in all their forms have put us there. We're bombarded from childhood with so many images putting 'us'the individual personat the center of the universe that we cannot help thinking that this is where we belong. We live in a Times Square world, says the Harper's contributing editor, and thus we become the ultimate Descartesians: media think only of us, therefore we think only of ourselves. The result of this self-centeredness is that we become increasingly numbed by the bombardment of images and, in a variation on the 'if a tree falls in the woods' query, we can no longer imagine our premediated lives. Media imagery has given us an omniscient perspectivewe can be on the grassy knoll, by the Twin Towers, on the beach as the tsunami hitswhile never having to incur the horrors of being there. 'Mediation' inevitably closes us off to the unmediated world, home of those victims of the tsunami whose lives are hideously hard and where no media put them front and center. This provocative, extreme, and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe."Publishers Weekly
Review
“One of the best books Ive ever read about the media.” Review
“A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media....”
Review
"One of the best books I've ever read about the media."
Review
“Deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense...This provocative, extreme and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe.”
Review
"Deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense...This provocative, extreme and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe."
Review
"A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media...."
Review
“Reading Thomas de Zengotitas
Mediated is like spending time with a wild, wired friendthe kind who keeps you up late and lures you outside of your comfort zone with a speed rap full of brilliant notions.”
Review
and#8220;Combining a close attention to sound, money, demographics, and the ties that bound them together in an ever-shifting constellation of radio formats since the 1970s, Weisbard brilliantly rewrites pop music as we know it. Weisbard is one of our top pop music scribes, and Top 40 Democracy is the best kind of revisionist history. It takes something familiar and makes it strange again. It enables us to listen with fresh ears and find beauty and meaning in music too often dismissed for lacking both. I wanted to turn it up and sing along at the top of my lungs.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Weisbard was a smart music journalist and is an even smarter music academic. I used to read his reviews and feel compelled to listen to music I didnand#8217;t know. Reading this book compelled me to rethink music I thought I knew only too well. Weisbardand#8217;s history of the mainstreams of American popular music and his analysis of the surprising complexities of American format radio is persuasive and entertainingly detailed. As an account of the cultural and political effects of the kind of commercial pop music that is usually taken for granted, Top 40 Democracy shows eloquently and exuberantly why pop music must be central to our understanding of social history.and#8221;
Review
"Forget the canonical version of pop's past and learn to think like a radio, that surprisingly persistent force in shaping our listening lives. It can tame and it can maim, but it adds a jostling vitality that crackles with the tensions of history. Weisbard is a wide-viewed, big-eared, provocative analyst of how it's all worked via fickle formats, tuned-in stars who've never received such smart critical attention (Dolly! Elton! The Isleys! Herb Alpert!), and#8216;record men,and#8217; meathead rock jocks, and more. There's a fact or insight on every page that will spin your dial. So you better do as you are told: you better read about your radio."
Review
and#8220;This spin around the radio dial is an engrossing, unpredictable tour of the multiplicity of imagined communities inhabiting the pop mainstream, and Weisbardand#8217;s innovative theorizing of format as an alternative to genre logic transforms the idea of a Top 40 democracy from a utopian metaphor into a material political economy. It's a book for everyone who takes music seriously and every auto executive who would consider producing a car without a radio receiver.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;A brilliantly expansive tour of American pop radio, in all its sleaze and conflict, as a fantasy republic that stretches through the nation. Eric Weisbard, a true scholar and a true fan, masterfully follows the yellow brick road through the boomtowns and wastelands of American culture, from Vegas to Dollywood, with revelatory and challenging insights about how these competing musical visions both unite and divide.and#8221;
Review
andldquo;Smart but not inaccessibly so. . . . In Weisbardandrsquo;s view, Top 40 isnandrsquo;t simply the place where Rick Dees and Casey Kasemandrsquo;s voices oozed from transistors, but a vast virtual stage for Elton John to import a brash British pop sensibility to American rock audiences, queering the top of the pop charts long before he was out of the closet.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;[A] sharp, detailed history. . .andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Consistently provocative and engaging. Compared with record producers, broadcasters have been shown limited respect by both scholars and critics, and Weisbardandrsquo;s book deserves much praise simply for taking them seriously. His pointed business narrative gives a fascinating look at how programming decisions actually get made, and unmade.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Top 40 Democracy is not only smart and interesting and fun, but insightful, and done in such a way that makes how much you learn from it feel as surprising as discovering Doritos-flavored broccoli.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Inventively researched and subtly argued.andrdquo;
Synopsis
In this utterly original look at our modern "culture of performance," de Zengotita shows how media are creating self-reflective environments, custom made for each of us. From Princess Diana's funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel,
Mediated takes us on an original and astonishing tour of every department of our media-saturated society. The implications are personal and far-reaching at the same time.
Synopsis
If you drive into any American city with the car stereo blasting, youand#8217;ll undoubtedly find radio stations representing RandB/hip-hop, country, Top 40, adult contemporary, rock, and Latin, each playing hit after hit within that musical format. American music has created an array of rival mainstreams, complete with charts in multiple categories. Love it or hate it, the world that radio made has steered popular music and provided the soundtrack of American life for more than half a century.
Inand#160;Top 40 Democracy, Eric Weisbard studies the evolution of this multicentered pop landscape, along the way telling the stories of the Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, AandM Records, and Elton John, among others. He sheds new light on the upheavals in the music industry over the past fifteen years and their implications for the audiences the industry has shaped. Weisbard focuses in particular on formatsand#151;constructed mainstreams designed to appeal to distinct populationsand#151;showing how taste became intertwined with class, race, gender, and region. While many historians and music critics have criticized the segmentation of pop radio, Weisbard finds that the creation of multiple formats allowed different subgroups to attain a kind of separate majority statusand#151;for example, even in its most mainstream form, the RandB of the Isley Brothers helped to create a sphere where black identity was nourished. and#160;Music formats became the one reliable place where different groups of Americans could listen to modern life unfold from their distinct perspectives. The centers of pop, it turns out, were as complicated, diverse, and surprising as the cultural margins. Weisbardand#8217;s stimulating book is a tour de force, shaking up our ideas about the mainstream music industry in order to tease out the cultural importance ofand#160;alland#160;performers and songs.
Synopsis
A capacious and stimulating tour de force of the mainstream music industry that reveals the cultural import of even the most deliberately banal performers and songs. Weisbard finds depths in our cultureand#8217;s shallows as he investigates and articulates the cultural construction of such phenomena as Dolly Parton, Elton John, the Isley Brothers, AandM Records, and the rise of radio populism. He further sheds new light on the upheavals in the music industry over the last fifteen years and the implications of them for the audiences the industry has shaped. Each chapter brings us to see afresh precisely that music and those musicians that have become the most familiar and overexposed, by delving into the minutiae of how pop stars and their music were made and framed for repeated consumption in the era dominated by radio.
About the Author
Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor at
Harper's Magazine and
holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. He teaches at the Dalton School and at the Draper Graduate Program at New York University.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Itand#8217;s Whose Thing?: The Isley Brothers and Rhythm and Blues
Chapter 2. Duets with Modernity: Dolly Parton and Country
Chapter 3. Contemporary Adults: AandM Records and Middle of the Road
Chapter 4. Madman across the Water: Elton John and Top 40
Chapter 5. The Wrath of the Buzzard: WMMS and Rock
Chapter 6. This Generationand#8217;s Radio: Music Formats in the Early 2000s
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index