Dean Van Nguyen is the author of Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur.
The dance marathons of the Great Depression have gone down in legend as a way of turning desperate people into fodder for exploitative entertainment. The spirit of the marathons is alive and well in the contemporary world of reality TV.
Culture industries are dominated by a few big corporations that prefer to keep flogging old stories instead of taking a risk on something new. Creative workers can still produce fresh ideas, but they’re snuffed out before they get a chance to breathe.
After winning their independence from France, some of Africa’s new states banded together to form their own airline. The rise and fall of Air Afrique mirrors the hopeful age of postcolonial liberation and Africa’s subsequent neoliberal regression.
From brutalism to Stranger Things, Western pop culture is full of nostalgia for Cold War aesthetics and lost futures. Young people in ex-Soviet countries have developed their own version, Sovietwave — a music genre that summons up the spirit of the space age.
Since it first went mainstream in the 1980s, hip-hop has been a big business, and many of its leading figures have a strongly capitalist ethos. But there’s an alternative tradition of socialist rap music that challenges the status quo.
The music industry bounced back from a seemingly terminal post-Napster crisis, but the profits from streaming go to big companies and a handful of top artists. Can we build an alternative model that encourages more innovative — and more radical — music?