Kleine Scheiße
PeteHam
Sr. Member
Posts: 2,778
Political Matrix E: -9.16, S: -1.74
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« on: April 03, 2018, 10:51:30 PM » |
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I took a course on the Beatles in my freshman year of college and received history credits for it. I noticed many of my colleagues in the class understood the Beatles and Bob Dylan especially as historical figures and not artists people were still organically engaging with.
This reflection made me take pause as I’ve been treating those artists as artists and not cultural symbols for as long as I can remember. I don’t really follow developments in contemporary music, not out of disdain but disinterest. Yet, I’ve noticed that pop culture figures like the Beatles have been sort of run into that role as a symbol of “days past,” or some ancien regime of old.
Will we see JFK as a primarily “pop” figure decades from now? What processes in historiography and “here-and-now” academic treatment create this? Ayn Rand in particular also stands out to me as a pop figure which hasn’t been properly understood — and I wonder why.
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