Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'll be, like, grocery shopping or doing something totally mundane, and once a day, you'll hear a Cyndi Lauper song on the radio. It is astounding what an icon she is, not just in popular music but in popular culture.
Like Christmas, Easter has lost much of its religious meaning in popular culture. Ask your average kid what the holiday is about and they will tell you all about the Easter Bunny, eggs hunts and baskets full of candy.
It's interesting, even in popular culture, in our vernacular now, the whole idea of 'fake news.' You hear it repeated on scripted television shows, on reality shows, you just see it everywhere, even in other countries.
I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's going to be a slow debasement of language, and that's what I think we're fighting.
For all of her influence on popular culture, and the remarkable performances she left behind, perhaps Farrah Fawcett's greatest legacy was her raw, intimate, honest portrait of a woman fighting for her life - against cancer.
There is something deeply disturbing about a popular culture that will not forgive the sins of the Confederacy seven generations past but celebrates the teachings and legacies of Che Guevara, Mao Zhe-Dong, and Jeremy Wright.
Every ethnic group has a mythology... Until 'Roots'... there was nothing in the popular culture to refute the paragraph in elementary school history class that said, 'Slaves picked the cotton, were happy and life wasn't so bad.'
Women in the U.S. are influenced by the same trends - popular culture, runway trends, etc. - and our hypothesis is that she's quite anxious to be able to buy products in her town that perhaps she hasn't been able to in the past.
Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.
I still think there's a big part of the population that has a lot of misinformation about sharks. But I think it's beginning to change a little bit. As good information about sharks permeates popular culture, things may start to change.
When I wrote 'The West Wing,' the juice behind it was that in popular culture, our leaders in government are generally portrayed as Machiavellian, or as idiots. I thought, well, how about writing about a group of hyper-competent people?
One meaningful distinction between high and popular culture, is that there's way more good popular culture - because its standards of quality are more forgiving, because sobriety isn't its default mode, because there's so damn much of it.
American popular culture, like individuals in daily life, tends to either romanticize or demonize mothers. We ricochet between 'Everything I ever accomplished I owe to my mother' and 'Every problem I have in my life is my mother's fault.'
What we're seeing is a backlash against any attempt, whether from the world of scholarship or popular culture, to paint non-white people back into the British past. Those of us who write about this history have long been familiar with this.
And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture.
There's a wide spectrum between a Navy SEAL hero-killer and a traumatized victim, but those are the archetypes - hashed and rehashed in the media, in popular culture, in the minds of people with a lot of preconceived notions but not much else.
I think a reason that a lot of people feel politically paralysed is that it used to be clear how power was organised. But those who have their hands on the levers of popular culture today have great power - and it isn't even clear who they are.
The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
I am saying that while popular culture usually portrays practitioners of magic as separate from ordinary people, often biologically different, many people have habits or customs or superstitions that show magic was once a whole lot more democratic.
The 'low' quality of many American films, and of much American popular culture, induces many art lovers to support cultural protectionism. Few people wish to see the cultural diversity of the world disappear under a wave of American market dominance.
As any successful mad scientist will tell you, energy ain't free. Popular culture tends to forget this, instead focusing on the destructive capabilities of our finely crafted death rays without noting the massive energy expenditures required to use them.
That's how I make work. Along the way, I take notes, I read about history and popular culture. Sometimes I act out things in the studio. I go back to my mother's hair salon so I can hear three voices going all at once. I pull inspiration from everything.
Over the course of my 20-year history as an executive in the music business and as the owner of a firm that specializes in in-culture advertising, I have come to the conclusion that the Grammy Awards have clearly lost touch with contemporary popular culture.
Sinatra slowly found a way to allow tenderness into the performance while remaining manly. He perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy and passed it on to several generations of Americans. Before him, that archetype did not exist in American popular culture.
Most of my ukulele heroes were traditional players from Hawaii, like Eddie Kamae and Ohta-san. There may not be uke stars in popular culture, but there are certainly pop stars that play uke - George Harrison, Eddie Vedder, Taylor Swift, Train, and Paul McCartney.
There was a time when I kept track of it all; when my mind worked like a giant lint brush being swept over the fuzzy surface of popular culture. But these days, pop culture seems to have gotten fuzzier and fuzzier; notoriety comes and goes in the snap of a finger.
I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.
I grew up in the '70s and '80s, at a time that I'd argue was the absolute golden age of American popular culture. Because not only did we have all of the fantastic new stuff in print and on screens, but we had a constant supply of everything that came before, as well.
For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 'truthers' who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot.
With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.
In popular culture, there isn't any other conception of Islam and Muslims other than what you see on the news... When you go to a theme park, you see Muslims riding roller coasters and eating ice cream. Why doesn't anybody think of those Muslims when they think of Muslims?
Read, listen to and watch everything you can. Explore the corners of popular culture and the arts. And, of course, these days you have to stay maniacally plugged in to the cutting edge of whatever technology is taking your profession into the future - otherwise you're toast.
On the whole, asteroids tend to leave Earth alone. And day to day, there really isn't cause for most people to give them any thought. But despite being remote objects that most people have never seen, asteroids, and the threat they pose, come up an awful lot in popular culture.
In popular culture, there is this notion that African-American men and women can't get together, and we're having these issues. I think it's an American problem because I know a lot of white women and men who are having just as many issues trying to find 'that person' as anyone.
Too often, it is presumed that young people will only like art that they can immediately relate to. Working-class students may be steered towards popular culture like hip-hop, new media and film on the basis that they will find older art forms such as opera or ballet irrelevant.
I've often used the extremes in my work to comment on the mainstream. I think that sometimes a subject that I'm working on, like popular culture, is so present all around us that they're hard to see. It's like: How do you see the air you breathe? How do you see how it affects you?
There remains a degree of anti-black intellectualism in entertainment. Middle and upper-middle class blacks have often been portrayed as buffoons in popular culture; witness the characters of Carlton Banks on 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' and Braxton P. Hartnabrig on 'The Jamie Foxx Show.'
The Madden NFL franchise holds a special place in popular culture and the cover is a coveted position for players all over the league. I'm honored to be the first cover athlete chosen by Madden NFL fans and it's a great way to cap off an amazing year for the Saints and the city of New Orleans.
Coming up, the music of my era was very conscious. I grew up on Public Enemy, and it was popular culture to be aware. People were wearing Malcolm X T-shirts and Malcolm X hats. It was a very cool thing to know who Malcolm X was. It was all in the lyrics. It was trendy to be conscious and aware.
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
Long before social media existed, the proto-tweets of advertising had penetrated American popular culture: 'A mind is a terrible thing to waste.' 'Where's the beef?' 'A diamond is forever.' 'Think different.' You'd be hard pressed to find a writer's craft that has more directly influenced the vernacular.
If there is a person behaving more destructively in popular culture than Mario Lavandeira, I cannot think of one. He has used cruelty as a crass mechanism to build up his own celebrity and has utilized political correctness to protect himself while using it as a weapon to dehumanize those he doesn't agree with.
You don't really see sleepwalking in films that often. It's weird; I feel like in popular culture we have the perception of sitcom, arms-in-front-of-your-body sleepwalking, and then maybe Olive Oil and Popeye when she sleepwalks through the construction site. But it's all very cartoonish, in some cases literally.
We tell girls to be themselves, but then they have role models - sometimes too many role models - in popular culture who incarnate that kind of disconnectedness from oneself. We are taught to self-hate; we are taught to doubt. Our culture doesn't help us recognize ourselves as amazing beings without changing ourselves.
Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock.
EDM has trained a new generation of listeners' ears to accept a much broader range of what equals a song. EDM has become top 40 stuff: those sounds, those styles, those ways of thinking about song structure - even thinking that vocals aren't necessarily the central element - those ideas have made their way into popular culture.
From sublime affairs of state to the stark and vulgar popular culture of our own contemporary lives, let's make this descent into the lower registers together and recognize the good, nasty fun of 'Gone Girl,' Chicago writer Gillian Flynn's novel about the mysterious disappearance of a clever and deceptive young Midwestern housewife.
Getting 'Millionaire' right was as hard as writing 'Dirty Pretty Things.' Harder. In the pilots, contestants kept wanting to take the money; we had to find ways - the lifelines - of keeping them in the seat, answering the questions. But there is so much snobbery about popular culture. A game show just isn't valued as much as a novel.
I do make some conscious efforts to write female friendships, intergenerational female friendships. I make a conscious effort to include things that I see as important real parts of my life that are not reflected as much as I think they should be in popular culture. We very seldom have the opportunity to see women compete and remain friends.