> Can you cite some examples of the more interesting critical theory/cultural
> studies work going on?
Anything by Tricia Rose or Pierre Bourdieu is a good bet. Juan Flores' "From Bomba to Hip Hop" rocked the mike. A book of Dai Jinhua's essays, covering the politics of the Chinese consumer culture, has been translated into English. (I'd have a bigger list, but I'm outside of academia right now, though not by choice).
My own feeling is that the author of the article is confusing what critical intellectuals are saying about the theory-market with theory itself -- but they're not the same, any more than the price of a textbook is the same as its intellectual content.
> And usually this doesn't provide any deeper
> "theoretical" insight as a trade-off, just gives you a set of more academics
> terms for the words you'd otherwise use to discuss the topic. A good
> example I recently encountered was the cultural studies-oriented book
> "Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA."
Ah, yes, I just read that book. Quite disappointing. It was basically a bunch of anthropologists, as I recall, who said nothing interesting about the music, its form, or its micropolitical potential. Tricia Rose' "Black Noise" is still the single greatest text on hip hop -- where it came from, why it's important, etc.
-- DRR