Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture

I hope you don't take too much stock in the prior "review." Lipsitz's Time Passages is a great introduction to thinking critically about different forms of popular culture (TV, film, music, and so on). Lipsitz links a diverse range of pop cultural forms with the larger worlds around us. That takes a lot of doing, especially since we take for granted most of what we consume passively. Most of us figure that entertainment doesn't hold any significant meaning beyond our own individual enjoyment. Lipsitz reminds us that what we often take for granted is almost never taken for granted by corporate elites who spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out how to create loyalties, tastes and styles emptied of substantive content. The book also reminds us that pop culture is a place where ordinary folks have also tried to say important things about the world as they see it and sometimes as how they'd like to see it.