New Books in Popular Culture

The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic (Grove Atlantic, 2024) tells the story of the epic friendship between John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the golden era of improv, and the making of a comedic film classic that helped shape our popular culture.“They’re not going to catch us,” Dan Aykroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. “We’re on a mission from God.” So opens the musical action comedy The Blues Brothers, which hit theaters on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local Chicago orphanage. But Aykroyd, who conceived and wrote much of the film, had a greater mission: to honor the then-seemingly forgotten tradition of rhythm and blues, some of whose greatest artists—Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles—made the film as unforgettable as its wild car chases. Much delayed and vastly over budget, beset by mercurial and oft drugged-out stars, The Blues Brothers opened to outraged reviews. However, in the 44 years since, it has been acknowledged a classic: it has been inducted into the National Film Registry for its cultural significance, even declared a “Catholic classic” by the Church itself, and re-aired thousands of times on television to huge worldwide audiences. It is, undeniably, one of the most significant films of the twentieth century.The story behind any classic is rich; the saga behind The Blues Brothers, as Daniel de Visé reveals, is epic, encompassing the colorful childhoods of Belushi and Aykroyd; the comedic revolution sparked by Harvard’s Lampoon and Chicago’s Second City; the birth and anecdote-rich, drug-filled early years of Saturday Night Live, where the Blues Brothers were born as an act amidst turmoil and rivalry; and, of course, the indelible behind-the-scenes narrative of how the film was made, scene by memorable scene. Based on original research and dozens of interviews probing the memories of principals from director John Landis and producer Bob Weiss to Aykroyd himself, The Blues Brothers illuminates an American masterpiece while vividly portraying the creative geniuses behind modern comedy.Daniel de Visé is an author and journalist. A graduate of Wesleyan and Northwestern universities, he worked at the The Washington Post, the Miami Herald and three other newspapers in a 23-year career. He shared a 2001 team Pulitzer Prize and garnered more than two dozen other national and regional journalism awards. His investigative reporting twice led to the release of wrongly convicted men from life terms in prison. His first book, I Forgot To Remember (with Su Meck, Simon & Schuster, 2014), began as a front-page article de Visé wrote for the Washington Post in 2011. His second book, Andy & Don (Simon & Schuster, 2015), began as a journalistic exploration into the storied career of his late brother-in-law, famed actor Don Knotts. His third book, The Comeback (Grove Atlantic, 2018), rekindles a childhood obsession with professional cycling. Daniel is married to Sophie Yarborough, a senior editor at The Washington Post​. They and their children live outside Washington D.C.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities.High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (UNC Press, 2023) charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers. Scorned by the record industry for "killing music," the cassette tape rippled through scenes corporations couldn't control. For so many, tapes meant freedom--to create, to invent, to connect.Marc Masters introduces readers to the tape artists who thrive underground; concert tapers who trade bootlegs; mixtape makers who send messages with cassettes; tape hunters who rescue forgotten sounds; and today's labels, which reject streaming and sell music on cassette. Their stories celebrate the cassette tape as dangerous, vital, and radical.Marc Masters is a music journalist whose work has appeared on NPR and in the Washington Post, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Bandcamp Daily. He is also the author of No Wave. Marc Masters on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Netflix’s new screen adaptation of Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy. We discuss the battle between the eye and the idea in film and television science fiction, and whether the new show strikes a successful balance. We consider some of the challenges involved in adapting this distinctively Chinese literary work for a non-Chinese audience, and what might have been lost in doing so. And we think more broadly about the genre of hard science fiction: to whom does it appeal and what is it trying to accomplish? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In postwar Britain, journalists and politicians predicted that the class system would not survive a consumer culture where everyone had TVs and washing machines, and where more and more people owned their own homes. They were to be proved hopelessly wrong.Ben Highmore's Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain (Manchester UP, 2023) charts how class culture, rather than being destroyed by mass consumption, was remade from flat-pack furniture, Mediterranean cuisine and lifestyle magazines. Novelists, cartoonists and playwrights satirised the tastes of the emerging middle classes, while sociologists claimed that an entire population was suffering from 'status anxiety', but underneath it all, a new order was being constructed out of duvets, quiches and mayonnaise, easy chairs from Habitat, white emulsion paint and ubiquitous pine kitchen tables. More than just a world of symbolic goods, this was an intimate environment alive with new feelings and attitudes.Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. His books include The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (2017) and The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House (2014).Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Rachel S. Gross's Shopping All the Ways to the Woods (Yale University Press, 2024) tells the fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shoppingNo escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild spaces supposedly untouched by capitalism first requires shopping. With consumers spending billions of dollars on clothing and equipment each year as they seek out nature, the American outdoor sector grew over the past 150 years from a small collection of outfitters to an industry contributing more than 2 percent of the nation’s economic output.Gross argues that this success was predicated not just on creating functional equipment but also on selling an authentic, anticommercial outdoor identity. In other words, shopping for the woods was also about being—or becoming—the right kind of person. Demonstrating that outdoor culture is commercial culture, Gross examines Americans’ journey toward outdoor expertise by tracing the development of the nascent outdoor goods industry, the influence of World War II on its growth, and the boom years of outdoor businesses.Rachel S. Gross is a historian of the outdoor gear and apparel industry and an outdoor enthusiast. She is assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver, a history tour guide, and a curator of museum exhibits. She lives in Denver, CO. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Through a variety of archival documents, artefacts, illustrations, and references to primary and secondary literature, On the Job: A History of American Work Uniforms (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Heather Akou explores the changing styles, business practices, and lived experiences of the people who make, sell, and wear service-industry uniforms in the United States.It highlights how the uniform business is distinct from the fashion business, including how manufacturing developed outside of the typical fashion hubs such as New York City; and gives attention to the ways that various types of employers (small business, corporate, government and others) differ in their ambitions and regulations surrounding uniforms.On the Job sheds new light on an understudied yet important field of dress and clothing within everyday life, and is an essential addition to any fashion historian's library, appealing to all those interested in material culture, the service industry, heritage and history.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In Music and Sound in the Films of Dennis Hopper (Routledge,2024), Stephen Lee Naish explores how as a director Dennis Hopper used music and sound to propel the narrative of his work and to signpost the era in which the films were made and the characters' place within American culture. Naish examines five of Hopper's films to show how this deep engagement with music to build character and setting continued throughout his career, as Hopper used folk, punk, hip-hop, and jazz to shape the worlds of his films in ways that influenced other filmmakers and foreshadowed the advent of the music video format. As Naish demonstrates, throughout his career Hopper relied on music to propel his films and tell his stories. In Easy Rider, Hopper was one of the first filmmakers to include popular rock, pop, and folk music on a soundtrack. In his sophomore film The Last Movie, Hopper blended diegetic performances of folk and traditional Peruvian indigenous music to create a textured piece of sound art. In Out of the Blue, Hopper used punk rock as a vibrant shock, but also as a reaction to the failed ethos of the past. In 1988's Colors he incorporated hip-hop and rap music to soundtrack the lives of the gang members who rule the streets of Los Angeles. Finally, in his 1990 film The Hot Spot, Hopper commissioned a hybrid soundtrack of jazz/blues by Miles Davis and John Lee Hooker to accompany his steamy neo-noir. Using case studies of five of Hopper's directorial films, Naish aims to uncover the film soundtrack as a vital piece of the narrative, not only in Dennis Hopper's films but in film as a whole.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Bigfoot is an instantly recognizable figure. Through the decades, this elusive primate has been featured in movies and books, on coffee mugs, beer koozies, car polish, and CBD oil. Which begs the question: what is it about Bigfoot that's caught hold of our imaginations?Journalist and self-diagnosed skeptic John O'Connor is fascinated by Sasquatch. In The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster (Sourcebooks, 2024), he embarks on a quest through the North American wilds in search of Bigfoot, its myth and meaning. Alongside an eccentric cast of characters, he explores the zany and secretive world of "cryptozoology," tracking Bigfoot through ancient folklore to Harry and the Hendersons, while examining the forces behind our ever-widening belief in the supernatural. As O'Connor treks through the shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest, listens to firsthand accounts, and attends Bigfoot conventions, he's left wondering―what happens when the lines between myth and reality blur?Perfect for fans of Bill Bryson and Douglas Preston, and with sharp wit and an adventurous spirit, this heartfelt exploration of a cornerstone of American folklore unpacks why we believe in the things that we do, what that says about us, and how it shapes our world.John O’Connor was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and attended the creative writing program at Columbia University, where he wrote his thesis on competitive eating. His writing has appeared in The Believer, Quarterly West and Gastronomica, among other publications.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players.Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer (MIT Press, 2024), Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games and examines how abstract and formal design choices have kept players playing. McDonald argues that there is a rich layer of meaning underneath, say, the quality of an avatar’s movement, the pacing and rhythm of level design, the personalities expressed by different enemies, and the emotion elicited by collecting a coin.To understand these games, McDonald draws on technical discussions by game designers as well as theoretical work about the nature of signs from structuralist semiotics. Interspersed throughout are design exercises that show how critical interpretation can become a tool for game designers to communicate with their players. With examples drawn from over forty years of game history, and from games made by artists, hobbyists, iconic designers, and industry studios, Run and Jump presents a comprehensive—and engaging—vision of this slice of game history. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Following the success of their instantly iconic double LP, London Calling, The Clash set out to do something "triply outrageous." Named after the Nicaraguan rebels who successfully overthrew an authoritarian dictator, Sandinista! consists of 36 songs across six sides of vinyl. Produced by the band, it showcases their politics as well as their ability to adopt a multitude of genres ranging from punk, reggae, jazz, gospel, calypso, and hip hop. Free from the influence of their Machiavellian manager, Bernie Rhodes, The Clash still battled their record label to release the triple LP on their terms: three for the price of one.Despite its polarizing reception from critics at the time of its release, Sandinista! is often considered one of the greatest albums of all time. Nevertheless, critics and fans have spent over 40 years debating whether the album would be better as a 12-track LP. In The Clash’s Sandinista! (Bloomsbury, 2024), Henley entertains that idea and considers what is lost or gained in the process. To do so, the book delves into the politics of The Clash, the spliff bunkers constructed for the production of the album, and the sacrifices made upon its release. It examines the album's 36 tracks and considers the significance of the record's dissection on behalf of fans who curate their own versions of the album in the mixtape, CD, and playlist eras.Micajah Henely is an adjunct professor at Bluegrass Community and Technical College in Lexington, Kentucky, USA. He is the creator of the music podcast You Forgot One. Micajah Henely on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture