In 1962, the raw material for one of the largest shifts in popular music could still fit inside a paper sleeve. American rhythm and blues records crossed the Atlantic aboard ships, entered British ports, and passed through specialist shops and private collections into rooms where young musicians played them repeatedly. The records carried songs, but…
Savonarola and Martin Luther had already demonstrated something unsettling about organized culture: songs could gather people, move them, and turn participation into political force. Episode 5 followed that struggle through music. In England, the same problem soon appeared somewhere more physical. The question moved from what people sang together to where they gathered, how they…
The institutions had spent the end of the 1950s trying to regain control. The Payola hearings had wounded independent disc jockeys, Alan Freed was finished, Elvis Presley was in the Army, and Buddy Holly was dead. The rawer edges of early rock were giving way to young male singers whose songs, clothes, and public behavior…
Carnival Before the Seizure In fifteenth-century Florence, Carnival occupied the city physically. Songs moved through streets and public squares while masks loosened ordinary identities and seasonal excess temporarily rearranged the social order. The Medici tolerated and sponsored a civic culture in which spectacle and government were closely entangled. Carnival gave Florence a sanctioned place to…
The problem reached Avignon from inside the choir. By 1324, the papal court had become one of the great administrative centers of Western Christianity, and Pope John XXII governed an institution whose authority depended on more than doctrine. Authority also lived in ritual, in the repeated forms through which doctrine became audible and recognizable. Plainchant…
On February 3, 1959, the Winter Dance Party tour was already in trouble before an airplane ever left the ground. Buddy Holly had been crossing the Midwest on a bus whose heater had failed during one of the coldest stretches of the tour. The next performance was roughly three hundred miles away, so Holly chartered…