Dancing Queen. Respect. Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl). There are some songs so infectious that you can’t help but belt out the lyrics along with the singer. Karaoke—meaning “empty orchestra” in Japanese—gets rid of the singer and leaves you in the spotlight alone. It is the social manifestation of our desire to sing, in tune or out, and in three short decades, it has exploded into a worldwide craze. In this unprecedented study, Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco engagingly examine karaoke and all its associated kitsch, crime, and weirdness.
Usually thought of as the pastime of desperately bad singers and slurring drunks, karaoke has never enjoyed a particularly stellar image. Xun and Tarocco, however, reveal its surprisingly complex history and significant cultural impact around the world. Originating in postwar Japan, karaoke soon spread to Southeast Asia and the West. Karaoke traces how it became a wildly successful social phenomenon that constantly evolved to keep pace with changes in technology and culture. Drawing on extensive research and international travels, the authors chart the varied manifestations of karaoke, from karaoke taxis in Bangkok to nude karaoke in Toronto to the role of karaoke in prostitution. Extensive personal anecdotes reveal the dramatic range of social experiences made possible by karaoke and how the obsession with performance and song has touched politics, history, and pop culture throughout global society.
Karaoke bars are at the heart of rich escapist fantasies and the authors—in readable fashion and using vibrant full-color illustrations—document this unpredictable fantasy world and the people who inhabit it. Karaoke,therefore, will delight anyone who has had the courage to take the mike and front the “empty orchestra.”
This book attempts to analyze a major part of Mansfield's fiction, concentrating on an analysis of the various textures, themes, and issues, plus the point of view virtuosity that she accomplished in her short lifetime (34 years). Many of her most famous works, such as "Prelude" and "Bliss," are explicated, along with many of her less famous and unfinished stories.
A historian of science examines key public debates about the fundamental nature of humans to ask why a polarized discourse about nature versus nurture became so entrenched in the popular sciences of animal and human behavior.
Are humans innately aggressive or innately cooperative? In the 1960s, bestselling books enthralled American readers with the startling claim that humans possessed an instinct for violence inherited from primate ancestors. Critics responded that humans were inherently loving and altruistic. The resulting debate—fiercely contested and highly public—left a lasting impression on the popular science discourse surrounding what it means to be human.
Killer Instinct traces how Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and their followers drew on the sciences of animal behavior and paleoanthropology to argue that the aggression instinct drove human evolutionary progress. Their message, spread throughout popular media, brought pointed ripostes. Led by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, opponents presented a rival vision of human nature, equally based in biological evidence, that humans possessed inborn drives toward love and cooperation. Over the course of the debate, however, each side accused the other of holding an extremist position: that behavior was either determined entirely by genes or shaped solely by environment. Nadine Weidman shows that what started as a dispute over the innate tendencies of animals and humans transformed into an opposition between nature and nurture.
This polarized formulation proved powerful. When E. O. Wilson introduced his sociobiology in 1975, he tried to rise above the oppositional terms of the aggression debate. But the controversy over Wilson’s work—led by critics like the feminist biologist Ruth Hubbard—was ultimately absorbed back into the nature-versus-nurture formulation. Killer Instinct explores what happens and what gets lost when polemics dominate discussions of the science of human nature.
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