Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture
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smart characters on
Saturday Nïght Live,
which he joined at the age of nineteen. These
included a
ghetto
satire of
children’s television
host Mr Rogers and references to black
stereotypes in media (Buck-wheat). Murphy’s highly successful film career has included
action and comic parts, often showcasing his flexibility in developing multiple characters
within the movie (
Coming to America,
1988;
Bowfinger,
1999;
The Nutty Professor
movies, 1996 and 2000). He retains his concert career as well.
S
ee also:
actors
GARY McDONOGH
Murrow, Edward R
.
b. 1908; d. 1965
One of the most respected and influential American
radio
and
television
journalists.
Joining the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1935, he went to London to direct their
European Bureau two years later, vividly reporting the rise of the Nazis and the Battle o
f
Britain. Translating his CBS radio series
Hear it Now
to a new medium, he defined
quality television news through his investigative magazine
See It Now
(1951–5). Here,
his reputation for accuracy and objectivity were crucial when he exposed Senator Joseph
McCarthy’s
anti-communist tactics in 1954. Murrow’s later
Person to Person
(CBS,
1953–61), where he interviewed
celebrities
in their homes, launched another tradition o
f
infotainment.
GAIL HENSON
Muscular Dystrophy Association
Created by parents and muscular dystrophy sufferers in 1950 to combat neuromuscular
diseases, the MDA now represents a major fundraiser in this area, as well as a significant
p
artnership of citizens and scientists supporting research and care worldwide. It has been
especially active in gene-therapy research on a number of neuromuscular syndromes.
Since 1965 its public face has been particularly associated with a Labor Day weekend
telethon hosted by comedian (and MDA national chairperson) Jerry
Lewis
. While the
telethon raised more than $1 billion, the growing consciousness of the disabled as citizens
has also led to criticism that it treats MDA sufferers paternalistically.
GARY McDONOGH
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 766
museums
Although
art museums
and
children’s museums
constitute well-known genres o
f
investigation and display, Americans have created many other centers that attract local
visitors and tourists. Among the most important categories are historical museums and
houses, science and natural history museums, ethnic museums, “professional” or thematic
museums and more offbeat idiosyncrasies celebrated in private and commercial
establishments.
Historical museums, like
historical preservation,
cherish and explain the past. Many
historic homes refer to past elites as owners of history—Manhattan’s Tenement Museum,
chronicling the struggles of European immigrants, is a rare exception. Nonetheless, social
consciousness since the Civil Rights era has forced more explanation and discussion o
f
slaves and servants who made life in the “big house” possible. Museums of
cities,
counties and
states,
as well as the
Smithsonian
as a national museum, have also
sponsored diverse exhibits on the racial, gender,
class
and ethnic intersections o
f
American history.
Historical museums may also include houses far out in the country—typical of many
Southern plantation homes—or even entire rural villages which recreate snapshots of the
past as open-air and working museums. Shaker settlements in Hancock, Massachusetts,
and Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, for example, represent modern attempts to preserve past
utopian communities, while colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, was restored with funding
from John D.
Rockefeller,
Jr.
Natural history museums like
Chicago, IL’s
Field Museum or
New York
City, NY’s
venerable American Museum of Natural History were popular attractions in nineteenth-
century cities. These, like the Smithsonian and university museums, have been centers for
investigations of animals, plants and minerals. Some also have developed extensive
collections for anthropological and archaeological investigation, especially in Native
American research. The last was a point of controversy in the 1990s as
American
Indians
demanded the return and reburial of bones and sacred artifacts.
Other science museums look forward to space, sometimes in association with
planetariums or multimedia exhibits. Here, popular culture and science coincide—an
exhibit on
Star Wars
was a major draw for the Smithsonian, while animated dinosaurs
have drawn
children
into other science centers.
Ethnic museums may develop from collections of local ethnic societies or may
represent revindications of past denials—
African American
historical museums, for
example, have grown nationwide since the 1960s, while the
Bicentennial
spurred other
ethnic projects. Churches, temples and seminaries may also sponsor religious/ethnic
museums. These museums are as diverse as New York’s Museo del Barrio or Chinese
Entries A-Z 767
Historical Museum, or the Swedish American museum in
Philadelphia, PA
. Some are
highly involved in their
neighborhoods,
while others promote a sense of elite or
historical culture. Sometimes, these museums have uneasy relations with collections built
b
y American buyers in foreign homelands that present more orientalist visions of the
“other.” These museums present connections between American citizens and larger
historical stories, powerfully embodied in Washington’s
Holocaust Museum
.
Specialized museums also portray professions or interests—firemen,
police,
military
museums, the elaborate Museum of Broadcasting in Manhattan or the new
Rock ’n’ Roll
Hall of Fame
in
Cleveland, OH
. Naval museums, incorporating historic ships from the
nineteenth century through the Second World War, have also become popular as America
distances itself from the experience of
war
.
Museums can also shade over into more personal or idiosyncratic memorials.
Museums celebrating
Liberace (Las Vegas),
Elvis
Presley
(Memphis) or
cowboy
Roy
Rogers turn
celebrities
into history; other museums celebrate, for example, dolls, plastic,
pretzels and locks. While such diversity speaks to individual tastes and
freedom,
some
are little more than
roadside attractions
.
Many of these museums, despite their collections, face constant struggles for survival,
whether in endowment, fundraising, competition for government support or competition
for members and visitors. This has led to increasing commercialization in both showbiz
exhibits and museum shops that offer goods with high status value. At the same time,
museums must be careful of whom they offend. As heirs and guardians of American
culture, museums are also caught in its debates as they shape its future.
GARY McDONOGH
music, popular
American popular music has transformed dramatically in the past half-century, so much
so that now the generic term “pop music”
b
ears only traces of its meaning at the end o
f
the Second World War. At the most basic level, popular music has always been just
that—songs that appeal to a broad listener market. In 1945, however, pop music meant
“hit parade” songs, usually sung by white crooners like Bing
Crosby,
accompanied by
lush instrumentation. The intent was not to assault the audience, but to provide it with
soothing and occasionally danceable songs about love and romance. Such music had its
roots in European classical melodies and harmonies, albeit in simplified form, and to a
lesser extent in American
jazz
. Considering the breadth of the classical tradition, this was
not an inelastic definition. Still, the reshaping of pop in subsequent decades allowed for a
vast expansion of the term’s meaning, an expansion closely aligned with the dramatic
social transformations of the postwar era. Within fifteen years, Barry Gordy, the founder
of the incredibly successful
Motown
Records, could convincingly say that “pop” meant
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 768
popular, whether
rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll,
or
country and western
.
Gordy’s aesthetic populism was merely a reaction to the obvious: the explosion o
f
regional and vernacular styles in the musical marketplace. Country and western, blues,
folk, swing and jazz had existed for some time, but had been categorized as something
other than “popular”—C&W, hillbilly, race music and later the more sanitized “rhythm
and blues.” Rock ’n’ roll, the mongrel offspring of all of these styles, made the greatest
inroads into the mass marketplace; indeed, it was the key style that redefined the popular,
with Elvis
Presley
as its archetype. The dissemination of these styles beyond their initial
audiences and their coalescence into rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s was a function of deeper
transformations in American society.
Most importantly, the
Civil Rights movement
opened up the marketplace—albeit only
slightly—to
African American
musicians. The fights against fascism abroad and racism
at home, expanding educational opportunity, internal
migration
of rural Southern blacks
and
whites
to
cities
and the growth of
mass media
all played a role in America’s
increasing cultural egalitarianism. These roughly cut vernacular genres found audiences
among American youth, beneficiaries of a broad economic boom, who possessed
unprecedented disposable income and little responsibility.
Technological advances played a role as well. Music was now easier to produce and
disseminate, as evidenced by both the numerous small record labels able to score major
hits with blues and country and western-derived music and the successful
radio
stations
that played it. People in the music business were shocked by this music’s popularity but it
only occurred because the styles had become newly accessible to a potential mass
audience.
The newly popular styles grafted themes idealized by youth—romantic longing,
inchoate rebellion, and sex onto the raw dance music perfected by black musicians and
rural white Southerners. Popular music performed by figures like Little Richard was now
brasher, rougher, louder and—to put it mildly—less refined than before. By the mid-
1950s, popular music was in large part youth music, although the older pop form still
retained a sizable audience. American youth now set the standard, and music
entrepreneurs who recognized this stood to make millions. Thus, figures like Dick Clark,
who cared not one whit about the content of the rock ’n’ roll, doo-wop and rhythm and
b
lues featured on his show, latched on to the new forms. Whatever their motivations,
Clark and his ilk helped redefine what “pop” meant, in the process allowing currents o
f
American subaltern vernacular culture to flow into mainstream channels.
By the 1960s, pop music was now associated with signatures of the
baby boom
—
novelty, innovation, and to a certain extent danger—rather than sentimentalism and
tradition. The major change in the 1960s was that pop became, rather self-consciously
“art.” Whereas pop music prior to the 1960s was perceived alternately as shallow,
artificial, or sweetly naive, the new pop was aligned with its era, in which
teenage
life
had become a serious affair. Now, social protest was an acceptable theme in the mass
marketplace. Older forms did not disappear; body-centered dance music, saccharine
“bubblegum”
p
op, crooners, and torch singers all retained some popularity. But the
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signature artists of the period—Bob
Dylan,
the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, the
Beatles,
Jimi
Hendrix
and Sly Stone, to name a few—had transformed from imitators o
f
rudimentary rock and R&B into self-styled progeny of the bohemian tradition, at one
with an age of radical experimentation and cultural revolution. All of them still sang
simple songs about love and pleasure. Yet by the decade’s end they were most famous for
coupling abrasive distortion and lyrics extolling mysticism, irrationality illicit sex, drugs
and revolution. These were the themes of bohemian cognoscenti, not Frank
Sinatra
. Yet
they resonated with a massive youth audience that was larger, richer and better educated
than any previous generation. A sizable segment of that audience perceived themselves as
radical opponents of the
Vietnam War,
as well as the culture and social system of the
American establishment. For them, 1960s rock became the soundtrack of their lives.
By 1970 pop music had been fundamentally redefined. Now, it was primarily music
derived from African American styles, some of it selfconsciously experimental and
oppositional (e.g. the Jefferson Airplane) and some of it still focused on the old themes o
f
love and heartbreak (e.g. most of Motown). In the process of this transformation,
however, a dissonance emerged, one that was irrelevant twenty-five years before. Now,
many popular artists and their legions of fans saw themselves as rebels against a nebulous
“system” supporting
war
, imperialism, racism and capitalism. Yet that system is what
drove American popular music. Major labels at the end of the 1960s dominated the
production and dissemination of this ostensibly radical content. This raised the twin
specters of toothlessness and a system so resilient that it welcomed radical aesthetics as a
necessity to keep pace with stylistic turnover in the broader marketplace.
As popular rebel artists, fans and critics came to the realization that they were cogs in
the machinery of pop-music production, new styles emerged, this time in line with the
post–1960s zeitgeist. Experimentalism, no longer a pathway to cultural revolution,
became an avenue to hedonistic pleasure.
Disco
embodied this trend and, while less self-
consciously revolutionary than 1960s protest music, the culture it generated was a novel
one, fusing black R&B and a newly emergent gay subculture. In another development,
aesthetic radicalism often degenerated into a turgid aestheticism obsessed with technical
virtuosity best exemplified by “progressive rock.” Also, the raw and rough edges o
f
blues-
b
ased music found a new carrier in the cartoonish exaggeration of heavy metal, and
folk-derived pop shifted from socialprotest themes to personal confessionalism. In sum,
the definition of pop diversified even more, but the transformed social and political
environment molded its outlines.
Perhaps the most lasting effect of post-1960s disillusionment on popular music was an
evergrowing strain of irony. Sometimes paralyzing, sometimes revelatory, the irony-
suffusing pop exemplified an era lacking a sense of revolutionary possibility. In much o
f
the popular music of the post-1960s era, irony is a fundamental component, evident in the
work of David Bowie,
Madonna,
David
Byrne,
Beck, and lately even U2. Certainly
some massively popular artists have mostly steered clear of it (Bruce
Springsteen,
the
Clash, and Public Enemy for instance). Also, ingenuous pop still has a large audience, as
evidenced in the music of Michael
Jackson,
Debbie Gibson and Whitney Houston. Still,
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 770
the fact that ironic selfconsciousness is one of the key features of pop music is
remarkable, given that the category once consisted primarily of earnest odes to love and
heartbreak.
This is not to say that after the 1960s pop music settled into a static state, featuring
only surfaces and artifice. Actually, the pop marketplace has been refueled repeatedly by
unruly bursts from the host culture. The most renowned of these forms were
punk, rap
and new wave, all of which reintroduced a street-level urgency and raw, enthusiastic
amateurism. Interestingly, even after the music industry figured out how to integrate
these particular forms into their business models, the process kept reoccurring via genres
such as gangsta rap, trip hop, indie rock,
grunge,
riot grrl and retro-lounge. While the
p
rocess of independent innovation followed quickly by incorporation has become as
predictable as the sun’s morning rising, it does endow pop with an undeniable vitality.
Moreover, pop has lost whatever monolithic qualities it once had, as
niche markets
and genres flourish. Changes in the measurement of popularity have abetted this trend.
B
illboard MagaZine’s
introduction of a new, more exacting system to gauge popularity
showed that genres like metal and rap were far more popular relative to traditional pop—
that is, simple love songs featuring melodic hooks and a “pleasant” sound—than once
thought.
Of course, pop music has remained a profitdriven big business, where sales, not styles,
are what really matter to the people who run the enterprise. In the 1980s, while new
subcultural genres grew like weeds, the industry itself found a novel way to boost sales
b
y integrating sound and image to an unprecedented degree. Almost immediately after it
appeared in the early 1980s,
Music Television
became instrumental in shaping the
contours of pop music.
Film
and
television
had long been important in promoting
popular music, as evidenced by movies like
Blackboard Jungle
(1955). But now, an
effective video was almost as important as the execution of a musical style. Pop artists
and their marketers now had to consider seriously how to best marry music and image. In
its early years, MTV did not acknowledge the proliferation of niche markets, particularly
ones dominated by
African Americans
(in fact, many accused the institution of racism).
After the massive video success of Prince and Michael Jackson in the mid-1980s,
however, MTV’s programming became as niche-segmented as the market itself, featuring
rap, metal, top-of-the-charts, Latin and punk shows. To this day MTV and its sister
network VH1 remain crucial determinants of popularity.
At present, the market is best characterized as a hyper-segmented one, where a “pop”
center does not exist except on a sales chart. Even the recent resurgence of sugary pop in
the form of “boy bands” and teenage divas has not re-centered pop. Ironically the new
“pop” is a niche market in the much broader market of the popular (i.e., what sells). This
new conception of popular music far better represents American culture and society than
what “pop” connoted in 1945. When one thinks of pop music today it usually is taken to
encompass a dizzying array of styles. For instance, a group whose modus operandi is to
shock and annoy the goth-metal band Marilyn Manson, rightly consider themselves a pop
b
and. The same logic applies to gangsta rappers like Ice Cube, who exaggerate the form
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into its most antisocial extreme. In a word, they count because they sell products in vast
quantities. Moreover, at one level they are peculiarly representative of a new American
culture, one that, for better or worse, has mostly dispensed with the artificial cultural
hierarchies that were so pervasive in the mid-twentieth century.
Popular music, then, is now more like the actual consuming public—racially polyglot,
suspicious of hierarchy youthful, obsessed with stylistic turnover, sexually open and
clearly segmented. This did not occur overnight. Rather, the process has occurred in
steady increments over the last fifty years, beginning with the unprecedented popularity
of African American musical styles among a mass white audience. Subsequent
developments have all rested on this basic foundation.
Further reading
Chapple, S. and Garafalo, R. (1977)
Rock and Roll is Here to Pay,
Chicago: Quadrangle.
Frith, S. (1981)
Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock and Roll,
New
York: Pantheon.
Gillett, C. (1970)
The Sound of the City,
New York: Dutton.
Gurlalnick, P. (1986)
Sweet Soul Music,
reprint edn, New York: Harper & Row.
Hoskyns, B. (1996)
Waiting for the Sun,
New York: St. Martin’s.
Marcus, G. (1975)
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll Music,
New
York: Dutton.
Miller, J. (1999)
Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947–1977,
New
York: Simon & Schuster.
Rimmer, D. (1985)
Like Punk Never Happened,
London, Faber & Faber.
Savage, J. (1992)
England’s Dreaming,
New York: St. Martin’s.
Smith, S. (2000)
Dancing in the Street,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
DAVID McBRIDE
musical, Broadway
While librettos, storylines, choreography music and staging have seen enormous changes
since the 1940s, Broadway musicals have grown in popularity and scale in the United
States and abroad. Nonetheless, the annual Tony
Awards
for excellence often raise
questions about the dominance of familiar works and variety reviews over new forms,
audiences and sites for the future.
Following the Second World War, musicals turned from comedic, sexy dance-oriented
p
ieces towards more romantic, complex and lyrical works in the tradition of Jerome
Kern’s
Showboat
(1927). Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Richard Rogers
revitalized the genre with
Oklahoma!
(1943),
Carousel
(1945),
South Pacific
(1949),
The
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 772
K
ïng and I (1951)
and
The Sound of Music
(1959)—bringing on stage such “non-
musical” themes as
death, miscegenation,
globalization and Nazis. Another team,
Frederick Loewe and Allan Jay Lerner, added
Brigadoon
(1948) and
My Fair Lady
(1956) to the canon. These golden decades also saw Cole Porter’s urbane wit (
Kï
s
s Me
K
ate,
1948), the urban underworlds of
Guys and Dolls
(Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows,
premiered 1950) and Leonard
Bernstein’s
gang opera
West Side Story
(1957), with
Jerome Robbin’s magnetic choreography.
Broadway’s hegemony was reinforced by starladen
Hollywood
films of major hits
(sometimes showcasing “non-singing”
stars
). Yet despite traditional hits in the 1960s
(
Camelot,
1960, which loaned its aura to the Kennedy years;
Hello, Dolly!,
1964;
Fiddler
on the Roof,
1964), composers and producers began to chafe at traditional formats. Shows
such as
How to Succeed in Business without
Really Trying
(1961), with satiric, anti-
sentimental tones, paved the way for the dark visions of Nazism and sexuality in
Cabaret
(1966). Despite challenges to character development and a “songs and scenes” layout,
rock music and youthful attitudes came on stage with
Hair
(1967),
Jesus Christ Superstar
(1972) and
The Wiz
(1974), which also marked the increasing recognition of blacks on
center stage.
While classic musicals became staples of local theaters and school productions across
the US, Broadway musicals in the 1970s and 1980s moved towards more eclectic
productions, such as those of darkly toned composer Stephen Sondheim (
Company,
1970;
Sweeney Todd,
1979;
Into the Woods,
1987) and the choreographic vitality of Michael
Bennett (
A Chorus Line,
1975) and Bob Fosse (
Chicago,
1975). English composer
Andrew Lloyd Webber, with Tim Rice, fostered an alternative “mega-musical” model
with lavish, long-running lyrical productions like
Cats
(1981),
The Phantom of the Opera
(1987) and
Sunset Boulevard
(1993).
Disney’s
Beauty and the Beast
(1994) and
The Lion
K
ïng
(1998) also translated
family
animated films into long-running Broadway
spectacles.
Despite continuing complaints about the prohibitive cost of production and tickets and
the presence of stage “elephants,” the genre still allows experimentation and renewal.
This vitality may be seen in the 1996 youthful
Rent
(Tony and Pulitzer winner), in
continuing exploratory revivals of older musicals and in the success of off-Broadway and
regional theater productions even more than Broadway itself.
Further reading
Ganzl, K. (1997)
The Musical: A Concise History,
Boston: Northeastern University
Mordden, E. (1976)
Better Foot Forward,
New York: Grossman.
MIREILLE GOUIRAND
Entries A-Z 773
musical, Hollywood
While Broadway’s show-stopping tunes, dancers and
stars
might seem to determine this
film genre, the
Hollywood
musical has a more complex social and cultural history. At
times, it has dutifully translated
Broadway
success into lavish new productions, reaching
audiences far from Manhattan. Hollywood also has widened the scope of music, dance
and story, creating magic with mice, mermaids and Astaire, using music to underpin or
label the action rather than move it along, and targeting new audiences.
The Hollywood musical responds to the Hollywood silent, which actually relied on
accompanying sound. In addition to filming existing musicals, operettas and Vaudeville
acts, Hollywood explored backstage comedies (
42nd Street,
Warner Bros, 1933), biopics
(
The Great Ziegfeld,
MGM, 1936). Filmed dancing showed elegance defying physics and
human limits in choreography (Busby Berkeley’s directing, Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers dancing at RKO Studio), especially when MGM polished the film. Whether
audiences escaped the Depression or explored new techniques of sound and vision, 1930s
musicals defined a first golden age, including
children’s
classics like Shirley Temple
movies,
The Wizard of Oz
(MGM, 1939) and
Disney’s
animated
Snow White
(1937).
Above all, these were consummate products of a studio system able to marshal legions o
f
stars to sing and dance. Theme songs and associated music also developed in this era for
dramatic and comedic films.
Musicals went to war in the 1940s with a relentlessly cheery and patriotic face (e.g.
Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Warner, 1942). This also set the stage for a renewed golden age,
stretching to the 1960s, when mature stars and new talents meshed in bigger and bigger
p
roductions that would begin to crash in the late 1960s. Characterized by an overall
“niceness,” even when dealing with
race, class,
gambling
or selling a soul to the devil
for
baseball
glory MGM and other studios produced a string of classics like
Singin’ in
the Rain
(MGM, 1952), which recast the story of musicals themselves,
An American in
P
aris
(MGM, 1951) and
The Kïng and I
(Twentieth Century FOX, 1956), with stars like
Gene Kelly Julie Andrews, Leslie Caron and Rex Harrison. Musicals, in fact, captured an
unprecedented five Oscars for Best Picture after 1958’s
Gigi
(MGM):
West Side Story
(1961);
My Fair Lady
(Warner, 1964);
Sound of Music
(FOX, 1965) and
Oliver!
(Columbia, 1968). In 1964, in fact, musicals swept the major categories, drawing in Julie
Andrews for her performance in Disney’s
Mary Poppins
(1964) as well. By the late
1960s, success gave way to larger and ponderous failures like
Paint Your Wagon
(1969)
and
Mame
(1974).
Star
power also became a point of conflict as non-singing (or non-
dancing) stars were dubbed into parts in ways that disconnected them from fundamental
action and brought the genre to a long dry spell from the 1970s onwards, broken by
stellar exceptions like the work of Barbra
Streisand
or
Cabaret
(1972).
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 774
But Hollywood musicals also looked beyond Broadway. Disney, for example, has its
own tradition of animated musicals translated into Broadway after the success of
Beauty
and the Beast
(1991) and
The Lion Kïng
(1993). Recording artists and appeals to
teenage
audiences were also important from roles showcasing
Sinatra
in the 1930s and 1940s to
those that followed Elvis in the 1950s, the
Beatles
in the 1960s and “soundtrack”
musicals like
Saturday Nïght Fever
(1977) or
The Big Chill
(1983), where music moves
the action but surges from the stereo or background to do so. Whitney Houston’s
romantic role in the diva-pic
The Bodyguard
(1992) also underscores the integration o
f
the musical, although
African Americans
were sometimes trapped in all-
b
lack stories
not so far from Broadway segregation (
Cabin in the Sky,
1943;
Carmen Jones,
1956;
The
Wiz,
1978). Meanwhile, the centrality of movie themes and scores (marketed with
blockbuster
movies) creates yet another domain of musical entertainment.
Further reading
Mordden, E. (1981)
The Hollywood Musical,
New York: St. Martin’s.
Kobal, J. (1983)
Gotta Sing Gotta Dance,
London: Spring.
GARY McDONOGH
music and television
The music industry and
television
have had a long relationship. Along with
variety
shows
and
MTV,
network shows aimed at
teenagers
such as
Shindig, Hullabaloo,
A
merican Bandstand
and the stillrunning
Soul Train
have showcased performers singing
their latest hits as well as dancers interpreting the latest discs. For both record companies
and artists, appearing on these shows insured sales and exposure. The hosts—the upbeat
and ever-young white Dick Clark epitomized
American Bandstand
and the black Don
Cornelius’ suave and deep-voiced persona symbolized
Soul Train
—also reflected the
racial divide in American youth and music (see John Water’s
Hairspray,
1988).
By the late 1960s,
The Monkees
and
The Partridge Family
also combined
sitcoms
and
bands. Both shows followed the adventures of studio-created groups, and the singles that
were released became the centerpiece of the show. Saturday morning cartoons geared to
children,
such as
The Archies
and
Josie and the Pussycats,
also became names for bands
that record companies created, using studio musicians in a genre nicknamed bubblegum
music.
Meanwhile, popular music was used on the soundtracks of many shows from
The Mo
d
Squad
to
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. Moreover, the theme song of television shows in the
1960s and 1970s became a crucial way to lend definition to the program. Themes from
Entries A-Z 775