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Thursday, April 11th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | The Devilish History of the 1980s Parental Advisory Sticker: When Heavy Metal & Satanic Lyrics Collided with the Religious Right
Frank Zappa called them the “Mothers of Prevention,” the group of wives married to members of Congress who decided in the mid-80s to go to war against rock lyrics and whip up some good ol’ conservative hysteria. We’ve talked about this time before on this site, especially as Zappa himself testified in front of Congress and sparred on the Sunday Beltway shows like Crossfire. Vox’s Earworm series, now back for a second season, tackles this moment in a time that would have little ramification before the design-ugly “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” sticker. Anyway, Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) gave us a list of the “Filthy Fifteen,” including songs like Sheena Easton’s “Sugar Walls” and Madonna’s “Dress You Up,” which either contained lyrics “promoting” violence, sexual references, drug and alcohol, and Satan’s favorite, the “occult.” Estelle Caswell explores that last category and dives into the increasing popularity during the ‘80s of heavy metal music, which was often invoking Satan in its lyrics, or creating occult-like atmospheres in its production. This campy, horrorshow culture ran right into the growing power of conservative Christians and evangelical preachers who made a *lot* of money whipping up “Satanic Panic” among their national flock. They listened to rock records backwards, believing they heard subliminal messages. Of course, none of this would have gone much further than churches if it wasn’t for the major networks turning a nothing story into headlines--the Vox video reminds us how complicit Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, Geraldo Rivera, et al were in promoting it. They also looked at the rising teenage suicide rate and used heavy metal as a scapegoat, instead of--as the video explains--family breakups, drug abuse, economic uncertainty, and increasing access to guns. The warning label itself appeared in 1990, just as rap was taking off and a new lyrical boogeyman appeared. Digital media and file sharing, along with YouTube and other sites, muted this kind of censorship. And parents, in the end, still need to do the job over what their children see or don’t. However, censorship is back, but there are no Washington Wives acting as scolds. Now it is the whims of capital, as in the collapse of Tumblr, or it is a faulty algorithm that censors old master paintings filled with nudity, just as guilty as porn, that are our new decency guardians. Where are those congressional hearings? Related Content: A Brief History of Hollywood Censorship and the Ratings System Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. The Devilish History of the 1980s Parental Advisory Sticker: When Heavy Metal & Satanic Lyrics Collided with the Religious Right is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 11:00a | See the Oldest Printed Advertisement in English: An Ad for a Book from 1476
Nobody pays much mind to advertising, at least the haphazard kind of advertising that clutters the space around us. But here in the 21st century, when both that space and the ads that appear throughout it are as likely to be digital as physical, we might take a moment to look back at how the practice of putting up notices to sell things began. In the English language, it goes back to at least to the mid-fifteenth century — specifically, to the year 1476, when Britain’s first printer William Caxton produced not just a manual for priests called Sarum Pie (or the Ordinale ad usum Sarum), but easily postable, playing card-sized advertisements for the book as well. "This piece of paper, of which two copies survive, is regarded as the earliest surviving printed advertisement in the English language," writes Erik Kwakkel at medievalbooks. It states that Sarum Pie "is printed in the same letter type as the advertisement ('enpryntid after the forme of this present lettre,' line 3). Even without having seen the new book, its key feature, the type, can thus already be assessed." This pioneering advertisement also "reassures potential clients that the text of the handbook is 'truly correct' (line 4) and that it can be acquired cheaply ('he shal have them good chepe,' lines 5-6). Both features will have been welcomed by priests, the target audience, who needed their textual tools to be flawless and did not have much money to spend on them." Kwakkel also gets into other notable features of this deceptively simple-looking production, including "the precise location of Caxton’s shop," a warning in Latin urging readers not to remove the notice ("showing that it was put on display somewhere," perhaps a church porch), and even the type. In both the advertisement and Sarum Pie itself, "the letter shapes lack 'sharpness:' frequently 'blobs' and small hairlines appear as letters, while an individual letter usually has a variety of appearances when looked at in detail," possibly an attempt by the printer to create "a more 'genuine' – i.e. traditional, 'manuscript' – look." It would have been important back then to make printed books look hand-copied, since not so long before, all books were hand-copied by definition. With the first Gutenberg Bible still less than half a century old, early printers had to make sure their relatively inexpensive books didn't look like low-quality substitutes for the "real thing"; hence the assurances about both the type and the price in the text of Caxton's advertisement. That the origin of advertising turns out to be closely connected with religion may come as a surprise — though given the fact that the print revolution itself began with a Bible, a product that in either physical or digital form now practically sells itself, it may not be that big a surprise. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. via medievalbooks Related Content: Oxford University Presents the 550-Year-Old Gutenberg Bible in Spectacular, High-Res Detail One of World’s Oldest Books Printed in Multi-Color Now Opened & Digitized for the First Time Watch the First Commercial Ever Shown on American TV, 1941 Sell & Spin: The History of Advertising, Narrated by Dick Cavett (1999) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. See the Oldest Printed Advertisement in English: An Ad for a Book from 1476 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 2:00p | Economics 101: Hedge Fund Investor Ray Dalio Explains How the Economy Works in a 30-Minute Animated Video
Want to know how the economy works? It “works like a simple machine," according to Ray Dalio, who explains its mechanisms in the 30-minute video above. The presentation is “simple but not simplistic,” says the site Economic Principles, a research arm of Dalio’s company Bridgewater Associates. The lesson packs in most of the major boldfaced concepts in the average overpriced college economics textbook, “such as credit, interest, rates, leveraging, and deleveraging.” And it does so in that most engaging means of learning things online, an animated video, narrated by an expert. All that’s well and good, but can we really understand such a volatile beast as “the economy”—an abstraction that sometimes seems like a cruelly rigged game and sometimes like a not-particularly-benevolent (to most people) deity—in only half an hour? Should we trust Dalio to summarize its complexity? The billionaire hedge-fund manager did, he tells us, manage “to anticipate and to sidestep the global financial crisis.” And he has made quite an impression on people like Forbes Senior Contributor Carmine Gallo with his “7,500-word LinkedIn article titled 'Why and How Capitalism Needs to be Reformed.'”  In that piece, the “voracious learner who studies narrative and communication… turns an enormously complex subject into a simple, compelling narrative.” He also makes it clear right in the title that by “the economy” he means a capitalist economy. It’s a point largely taken for granted in the animated explainer but an important one nonetheless given the underlying assumptions of the theory. Serious critiques of capitalism seem much harder to condense because they’re tasked with unpacking all those assumptions.
Marx’s Das Kapital spans three volumes, though he only lived to publish the first one, itself a monster of a read. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is maybe a little breezier, at 696 pages (though if you let The Economist read it for you, they can sum it up in four paragraphs). By contrast, Dalio offers a comprehensive primer in brief for those of us who skipped that macroeconomics course, or who never got the chance to sign up for one. But elsewhere he has matched capitalism's biggest critics with his own best-selling book Principles: Life and Work, a huge and highly-praised look at economic crises of debt, gross inequality, stagnant wages, etc. See him describe the book, in five minutes, on 60 Minutes, just above. Capitalism's best-known critics, even those who want to see the current system swapped out for a more equitable, sustainable model, have known they must begin by learning how the current system works, or how it doesn’t. Dalio himself isn’t setting out to build a worker’s paradise or to make financiers like himself obsolete, but he does have some trenchant thoughts on capitalism’s failures—and they are many, in his estimation. Still, he believes he knows how it can be reformed “to produce better outcomes.” Learn more in his compellingly-written essay here. Related Content: David Harvey’s Course on Marx’s Capital: Volumes 1 & 2 Now Available Free Online Piketty’s Capital in a Nutshell Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Economics 101: Hedge Fund Investor Ray Dalio Explains How the Economy Works in a 30-Minute Animated Video is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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