United States

Game of ThronesPeter Dinklage (as Tyrion Lannister) in a scene from the HBO series Game of Thrones. © 2013 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved.Even in the countless fictional programs that filled American evening television, a sense of spontaneity and immediacy seemed to be sought and found. Though television produced many stars and celebrities, they lacked the aura of distance and glamour that had once attached to the great performers of the Hollywood era. Yet if this implied a certain diminishment in splendour, it also meant that, particularly as American film became more and more dominated by the demands of sheer spectacle, a space opened on television for a more modest and convincing kind of realism. Television series, comedy and drama alike, now play the role that movies played in the earlier part of the century or that novels played in the 19th century: they are the modest mirror of their time, where Americans see, in forms stylized or natural, the best image of their own manners. The most acclaimed of these series—whether produced for broadcast television and its diminishing market share (thirtysomething, NYPD Blue, Seinfeld, Lost, and Modern Family) or the creations of cable providers (The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Boardwalk Empire, Girls, and Game of Thrones)—seem as likely to endure as popular storytelling as any literature made in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Popular music

Every epoch since the Renaissance has had an art form that seems to become a kind of universal language, one dominant artistic form and language that sweeps the world and becomes the common property of an entire civilization, from one country to another. Italian painting in the 15th century, German music in the 18th century, or French painting in the 19th and early 20th centuries—all of these forms seem to transcend their local sources and become the one essential soundscape or image of their time. Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel, like Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, are local and more.

At the beginning of the 21st century, and seen from a worldwide perspective, it is the American popular music that had its origins among African Americans at the end of the 19th century that, in all its many forms—ragtime, jazz, swing, jazz-influenced popular song, blues, rock and roll and its art legacy as rock and later hip-hop—has become America’s greatest contribution to the world’s culture, the one indispensable and unavoidable art form of the 20th century.

The recognition of this fact was a long time coming and has had to battle prejudice and misunderstanding that continues today. Indeed, jazz-inspired American popular music has not always been well served by its own defenders, who have tended to romanticize rather than explain and describe. In broad outlines, the history of American popular music involves the adulteration of a “pure” form of folk music, largely inspired by the work and spiritual and protest music of African Americans. But it involves less the adulteration of those pure forms by commercial motives and commercial sounds than the constant, fruitful hybridization of folk forms by other sounds, other musics—art and avant-garde and purely commercial, Bach and Broadway meeting at Birdland. Most of the watershed years turn out to be permeable; as the man who is by now recognized by many as the greatest of all American musicians, Louis Armstrong, once said, “There ain’t but two kinds of music in this world. Good music and bad music, and good music you tap your toe to.”