Interesting comparison in New York Magazine,
a dario
http://www.newyorkmag.com/page.cfm?page_id=6099
Facing the Music
Rock stars and music-industry execs once ruled the earth, but now -- in
terms of size and profit margins -- the music industry is becoming the book
business (minus the literacy).
BY MICHAEL WOLFF
Hemingway had rock-star status (and even impersonators). Steinbeck was
Springsteen. Salinger was Kurt Cobain. Dorothy Parker was Courtney Love.
James Jones was David Crosby. Mailer was Eminem. This is to say -- and I
understand how hard this is to appreciate -- that novelists were iconic for
much of the first half of the last century. They set the cultural agenda.
They made lots of money. They lived large (and self-medicated). They were
the generational voice. For a long time, anybody with any creative ambition
wanted to write the Great American Novel.
But starting in the fifties, and then gaining incredible force in the
sixties, rock-and-roll performers eclipsed authors as cultural stars. Rock
and roll took over fiction's job as the chronicler and romanticizer of
American life (that rock and roll became much bigger than fiction relates,
I'd argue, more to scalability and distribution than to relative influence),
and the music business replaced the book business as the engine of popular
culture.
...
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