Singing pop music's praises

Rousseau did not romanticize the "noble savage" though white supremacist "scientific racists" in the 1850s and 80s claimed he did, as a way to disparage "dreamers" who believed in human rights.

John and Alan Lomax did not send Lead Belly out to perform in prison stripes, nor take an outrageous cut in his salary.

and there is indeed authenticity in opera.

The authors and reviewer of this book seem much given over to folk lore.

...In a world of poverty and war, do these songs matter? Does art matter? The Epic of Gilgamesh. Aristophanes's Lysistrata. The Arabian Nights. DaVinci's Mona Lisa. Michelangelo's David. Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Henry James's The Golden Bowl. Jazz. Stravinsky and Nijinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. Picasso's Guernica. T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. James Baldwin's Another Country. Alvin Ailey's Revelations. The Beatles' White Album Aretha Franklin's Young, Gifted and Black. Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line. Patrice Chereau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train. Lasting forms of art, but has art changed the world, or has art merely changed perceptions and thoughts? In changing an individual life, does art change the world? In modifying the trajectory of art forms -- and art industries, then -- does art change the world? Is it only art commerce that changes the world, or is it also art content?...

On James Baldwin:
http://www.identitytheory.com/books/garrett6....

On Charlie Chaplin:
http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/phile/essays/...

On Annie Lennox:
http://www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/l/len...

On music,
including the World Saxophone Quartet, Joni Mitchell, the Dears, John Legend, the Killers, Beyonce, Bright Eyes, Devendra Banhart, John Mayer, Wynton Marsalis, and more:
http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.ph...

On film,
including The New World, L'Enfant, Three Times, Friends with Money, Inside Man, The Passion of Joan of Arc and more:
http://cinetext.philo.at/