From Doug to Brad:
>Jazz and rock and roll strike some sorts as disorderly, chaotic, and
>rebellious. Some revolutionaries seem to prefer a new order - their
>order - to disorder, chaos, and rebellion. Complaints about the
>"anarchy of capitalist production" fall along those lines.
>
>Then there's the class thing - Sweezy comes from a fairly posh
>background. As did Adorno, who didn't like jazz, and no doubt would
>have hated rock and roll. Those hippie girls who shook their breasts
>at him probably helped bring on his death.
>
>Modern art is a mixed bag. The cultural elite who ran the Congress
>for Cultural Freedom liked it because it was elitist (but yahoos in
>the U.S. Congress thought they were supporting Commie art by funding
>the likes of Jackson Pollock). There's some resemblance between
>Jesse Helms and Joe Stalin's artistic taste, no?
A sign of middlebrow used to consist of its incomprehension of high art and horror of lower-class entertainment (or so says our common sense). Today most of us in rich nations are all trained to enjoy high & low, but never middle (though one can say there is nothing more middlebrow than a studied contempt for middlebrow). A cultural avoidance of the middle serves as a dialectical opposite of the embrace of the middle in political rhetoric (a deconstructive neither-nor, a pox on both houses, the Third Way, etc.). Must be an indirect effect of post-WW2 expansion of higher education.
The Popular Front culture, in contrast, was often decidedly middlebrow (Orson Welles and his love of popularizing Shakespeare, for instance) in taste but politically partisan (which side are you on?).
Yoshie