The crooner Rudy Vallée's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity. Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.

You want a plot summary? OK. It's the story of Thor (not that dreamy Chris Hemsworth) or the love child of Elvis and Mickey Spillane or the Godfather's son in witness protection. It's a satirical view of society from the hooded eyes of the Last of the Real Men Private Investigators! A parody of the hard-boiled, film noir detective genre, it murderizes pop icons and trends past and present that really need murderizing.

DIVEssays on film soundtracks composed of popular music (rather than the composed film score) both in relation to the films, and circulating separately on record./div

Congregational music can be an act of praise, a vehicle for theology, an action of embodied community, as well as a means to a divine encounter. This multidisciplinary anthology approaches congregational music as media in the widest sense - as a multivalent communication action with technological, commercial, political, ideological and theological implications, where processes of mediated communication produce shared worlds and beliefs. Bringing together a range of voices, promoting dialogue across a range of disciplines, each author approaches the topic of congregational music from his or her own perspective, facilitating cross-disciplinary connections while also showcasing a diversity of outlooks on the roles that music and media play in Christian experience. The authors break important new ground in understanding the ways that music, media and religious belief and praxis become ’lived theology’ in our media age, revealing the rich and diverse ways that people are living, experiencing and negotiating faith and community through music.

What makes a Man? Perhaps the question ought to be: How is a Man made? --Lets try again. By what process is the boy, the young male human, transformed into that kind of adult human male whom societies recognize as a Man? If it were merely a process of physical maturation, then the Twentieth Century would not have spent nearly a quarter its literary substance on exploring the question. There would be no massive accumulation of psychological difficulties associated with insecurity about the matter. Ramfis S. Firethorn asserts, in Blindfold on a Tightrope, that Manhood is a real psychological state, attained through ritual Mysteries which a healthy society provides to its young males; and that the absence of these Mysteries in post-industrial times has been psychologically debilitating to the individual (both male and female) and culturally devastating to society. No one can teach you the Mysteries; but in this book (which is part anthropological exploration, part poetic evocation) Firethorn points out some guideposts along the way. From the hunt to the dance, from ancient myths to modern misconceptions, exploring Manhood and Godhead, the author offers exercises that may help you identify the Gateway. Not for the faint-hearted nor prudish: this is a journey for those who want a spiritual challenge! When first published in 1993 the book was well-received by men and women alike: but there were those who did not like it, and perhaps the best review, the most important, came from a Southern California High Priestess who stormed into the publishers office, slammed her first down on the desk, and proclaimed: Men must not be allowed to think these thoughts! It can be transformative: it can also be dangerous.

The term "queer cinema" is often used to name at least three cultural events: 1) an emergent visual culture that boldly identifies as queer; 2) a body of narrative, documentary, and experimental work previously collated under the rubric of homosexual or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) cinema; 3) a means of critically reading and evaluating films and other visual media through the lens of sexuality. By this expansive account, queer cinema encompasses more than a century of filmmaking, film criticism, and film reception, and the past twenty-five years have seen the idea of "queer cinema" expand further as a descriptor for a global arts practice. As the first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema treats these three currents as art and critical practice, bringing the canon of queer cinema together with a new generation of makers and scholars. The Handbook's contributors include scholars who research the worldwide canon of queer cinema, those who are uniquely positioned to address three decades of its particular importance, and those best positioned to ponder the forms it is taking or may take in our new century, namely digital media that moves in new circuits. In eight sections, they explore the many forms that queer cinema takes across time, discussing narrative, experimental, documentary, and genre filmmaking, including pornography. Likewise, although the study of cinema and media is not restricted to a single method, chapters showcase the unique combination of textual analysis, industrial and production history, interpretation, ethnography, and archival research that this field enables. For example, chapters analyze the ways in which queer cinema both is and is not self-evidently an object for study by examining films that reinforce negative understandings of queerness alongside those that liberate the subject; and by naming the films that are newly queered, while noting that many queerly-made texts await discovery. Finally, chapters necessarily assert that queer cinema is not an Anglophone phenomenon, nor is it restricted to the medium of film.

Tracing the cultural, technological, and economic shifts that shaped the transformation of the recording industry