Radios Legacy In Popular Culture

Examining work by novelists, filmmakers, TV producers and songwriters, this book uncovers the manner in which the radio – and the act of listening – has been written about for the past 100 years. Ever since the first public wireless broadcasts, people have been writing about the radio: often negatively, sometimes full of praise, but always with an eye and an ear to explain and offer an opinion about what they think they have heard. Novelists including Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh, and James Joyce wrote about characters listening to this new medium with mixtures of delight, frustration, and despair. Clint Eastwood frightened moviegoers half to death in Play Misty for Me, but Lou Reed's 'Rock & Roll' said listening to a New York station had saved Jenny's life. Frasier showed the urbane side of broadcasting, whilst Good Morning, Vietnam exploded from the cinema screen with a raw energy all of its own. Queen thought that all the audience heard was 'ga ga', even as The Buggles said video had killed the radio star and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers lamented 'The Last DJ'. This book explores the cultural fascination with radio; the act of listening as a cultural expression – focusing on fiction, films and songs about radio. Martin Cooper, a broadcaster and academic, uses these movies, TV shows, songs, novels and more to tell a story of listening to the radio – as created by these contemporary writers, filmmakers, and musicians.

Explores the enduring cultural fascination with radio by looking at 100 years of the representation of radio in fiction, film, TV and pop music

Publisher description

This unique, abundantly illustrated set features essay-length chapters on the many forms, genres, and themes of popular culture.

This three-volume work tells the story of how Jewish Americans overcame anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant biases, and poverty to shape American film, television, music, sports, literature, food, and humor.

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.

Orson Welles’s greatest breakthrough into the popular consciousness occurred in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast succeeded so spectacularly that terrified listeners believed they were hearing a genuine report of an alien invasion—a landmark in the history of radio’s powerful relationship with its audience. In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall documents the enormous impact radio had on the lives of Depression-era Americans and charts the formative years of our modern mass culture. Many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the twentieth century, and Lenthall explains that radio’s appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radio’s use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthall’s book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives. Television inherited radio’s cultural role, and as the voting tallies for American Idol attest, broadcasting continues to occupy a powerfully intimate place in American life. Radio’s America reveals how the connections between power and mass media began.

Popular culture tends to simultaneously lose and gain in the era of globalization. The singularity and internal self-reproduction of popular cultures have dwindled, but at the same time their vibrancy and dynamics have thrived and multiplied. This volume covers subjects ranging from the relations between Indians and Spaniards in Colonial Mexico, through the contemporary statures of popular cultures of the Chilean urban poor, the Brazilian traditionalists, and the Bahian black youth, to the fate of commercialized Mexican handicraft.