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Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit
Dispatches from the Culture Wars How the Left Lost Teen Spirit Author:Danny Goldberg When did American government become the enemy of American pop culture? Music insider and progressive activist Danny Goldberg has spent decades tuning in to the rhythms and voices that speak straight to the hearts and desires of America's youth. In that time, one fact has become increasingly clear: our venerable political leaders are tone deaf. I... more »n this startling, provocative book, Goldberg shows how today's professional public servants have managed to achieve nothing less than the indefensible, wholesale alienation of an entire generation. Elvis has left the buildingand he's taken just about everybody under thirty with him. To anyone born after 1960, it's hard to imagine that there was a time in the United States when mass, popular culture actually helped to shape and advance the social agenda. When contemporary music and film were not greeted with arrogant disdain or willful incomprehension. When new forms of self-expression inspired our leaders to take action, not to demand censorship and warning labels. Danny Goldberg takes us into the trenches of the so-called culture wars to find out what caused this radical change in our national psyche. He shines a spotlight on the conservative pundits and party leaders who are orchestrating dangerous attacks on civil liberties and youth culture. Granted, Goldberg doesn't expect and Ashcroft to Cheney to suddenly confess an appreciation for Nelly's lyrics or Pink's feminist ethos. But what about the people who should be making every effort to bridge this cultural chasmliberal democrats? With intelligence and wit, Goldberg blasts the hypocrisy of all those who claim to speak for the very citizensmainly young Americans and black Americanswhose culture they would prefer to sanitize and shrink-wrap. As a baby boomer, Goldberg is particularly disappointed in the failure of his own generation to reach out to younger people. Goldberg has unique insight into the way business gets done in both Hollywood and Washington, D.C. For over four decades, he has worked closely with a vast number of great performerseveryone from Led Zeppelin to Bruce Springsteen, from Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne to Kurt Cobain and rap impresario Russell Simmons. As an activist, he's gone to head-to-head with countless political figures, including Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Ronald Reagan, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Joseph Lieberman, and Al and Tipper Gore. From the intersection point of popular and political culture, Danny Goldberg now issues a rousing call to reclaim our democracy, so that we might once again see ourselvesand our childrenreflected in our leaders' words and deeds.« less