In this thinker's guide to rock and roll, Robert Pattison contends that rock music mirrors the tradition of 19th-century Romanticism. The music is vulgar, he notes, and vulgarity is something that high culture has long despised but rarely bothered to define. This book is the first effort since John Ruskin and Aldous Huxley to describe in depth what vulgarity is, and how, with the help of ideas inherent in Romanticism, it has slipped the constraints imposed on it by refined culture and established its own loud arts.

The Triumph of Vulgarity in a thinker's guide to rock 'n' roll. Rock music mirrors the tradition of nineteenth-century Romaniticsm, Robert Patison says. Whitman's "barbaric yawp" can still be heard in the punk rock of the Ramones, and the spirit that inspired Poe's Eureka lives on in the lyrics of Talking Heads. Rock is vulgar, Pattison notes, and vulgarity is something that high culture has long despised but rarely bothered to define. This book is the first effort since John Ruskin and Aldous Huxley to describe in depth what vulgarity is, and how, with the help of ideas inherent in Romaniticism, it has slipped the constraints imposed on it by refined culture and established its own loud arts. The book disassembles the various myths of rock: its roots in black and folk music; the primacy it accords to feeling and self; the sexual omnipotence of rock stars; the satanic predilictions of rock fans; and rock's high-voltage image of the modern Prometheus wielding an electric guitar. Pattison treats these myths as vulgar counterparts of their originals in refined Romantic art and offers a description and justification of rock's central place in the social and aesthetic structure of modern culture. At a time when rock lyrics have provoked parental outrage and senatorial hearings, The Triumph of Vulgarity is required reading for anyone interested in where rock comes from and how it works.

Numerous studies on various aspects of the issues of the 1960s have been written over the past 35 years, but few have so successfully integrated the many-sided components into a coherent, synthetic, and reliable book that combines good storytelling with sound scholarly analysis.

This book is first and foremost a detailed and meticulous study of Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses (1930). No other up-to-date books explore this thinker and his great work. Most importantly, the author demonstrates the relevance and importance of Ortega y Gasset's thought and his The Revolt of the Masses for today's world, showing, for instance, how Ortega's categories like "mass man" and "decadence," have been vindicated by today's spiritual, moral and cultural decay. This aspect of the book will perhaps be of major interest to the reading public. What Ortega argues for in his brief history of philosophy is something that he has otherwise made explicit throughout his work, mainly his conviction that strictly speaking philosophy as an activity or manner of thinking that faces naked reality, holistically, ended long ago with the ancient Greeks. All subsequent philosophical endeavors have been merely a rehashing or an academic commentary on the pre-existing philosophical canon. This latter activity he saw as pertaining to the history of philosophy, but he did not regard it as philosophy. Philosophy, as a vital and life-forging way of life, he argued, had played out its originality, and thus had run its course, long ago. With a glossary of special terms as used by Ortega, and with references to Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, C.S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Josef Pieper, and others, this work is a fundamental tool for any student of Ortega, of existentialism, and 20th-century European philosophy. * Pedro Blas Gonzalez is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Barry University in Miami. His areas of specialization include Continental philosophy, specifically Phenomenology, Existentialism, and philosophical aspects of literature. His works include Fragments: Essays In Subjectivity, Individuality And Autonomy (Algora, 2005), and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega's Philosophy of Subjectivity (Paragon House, 2005). Gonzalez holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from DePaul University.

With his thumbprint on the most ubiquitous films of childhood, Walt Disney is widely considered to be the most conventional of all major American moviemakers. The adjective "Disneyfied" has become shorthand for a creative work that has abandoned any controversial or substantial content to find commercial success. But does Disney deserve that reputation? Douglas Brode overturns the idea of Disney as a middlebrow filmmaker by detailing how Disney movies played a key role in transforming children of the Eisenhower era into the radical youth of the Age of Aquarius. Using close readings of Disney projects, Brode shows that Disney's films were frequently ahead of their time thematically. Long before the cultural tumult of the sixties, Disney films preached pacifism, introduced a generation to the notion of feminism, offered the screen's first drug-trip imagery, encouraged young people to become runaways, insisted on the need for integration, advanced the notion of a sexual revolution, created the concept of multiculturalism, called for a return to nature, nourished the cult of the righteous outlaw, justified violent radicalism in defense of individual rights, argued in favor of communal living, and encouraged antiauthoritarian attitudes. Brode argues that Disney, more than any other influence in popular culture, should be considered the primary creator of the sixties counterculture—a reality that couldn't be further from his "conventional" reputation.

Reinhold Wagnleitner argues that cultural propaganda played an enormous part in integrating Austrians and other Europeans into the American sphere during the Cold War. In Coca-Colonization and the Cold War, he shows that 'Americanization' was the result not only of market forces and consumerism but also of systematic planning on the part of the United States. Wagnleitner traces the intimate relationship between the political and economic reconstruction of a democratic Austria and the parallel process of cultural assimilation. Initially, U.S. cultural programs had been developed to impress Europeans with the achievements of American high culture. However, popular culture was more readily accepted, at least among the young, who were the primary target group of the propaganda campaign. The prevalence of Coca-Cola and rock 'n' roll are just two examples addressed by Wagnleitner. Soon, the cultural hegemony of the United States became visible in nearly all quarters of Austrian life: the press, advertising, comics, literature, education, radio, music, theater, and fashion. Hollywood proved particularly effective in spreading American cultural ideals. For Europeans, says Wagnleitner, the result was a second discovery of America. This book is a translation of the Austrian edition, published in 1991, which won the Ludwig Jedlicka Memorial Prize.

Hardcore, Punk, and Other Junk: Aggressive Sounds in Contemporary Music, edited by Eric James Abbey and Colin Helb,is a collection of writings on music that is considered aggressive throughout the world. From local underground bands in Detroit, Michigan to bands in Puerto Rico or across Europe, this book demonstrates the importance of aggressive music in our society. While other volumes seek to denigrate or put down this type of music, Hardcore, Punk, and Other Junk forces the audience to re-read and re-listen to it. This category of music includes all forms that could be considered offensive and/or move the audience to become aggressive in some way. The politics and values of punk are discussed alongside the emerging popularity of metal and extreme hardcore music. Hardcore, Punk, and Other Junk is an important contribution to the newest discussions on aggressive music throughout the world.