George Case's Blog, page 13

Ask a typical heavy metal fan who they consider to be their community’s most despised enemy and you may get a variety of responses.  Is it the evangelical Christian denouncing the music as the devil’s work?  The teenybopper boy band polluting the airwaves with their upbeat synthesized love ballads?  The snooty critic dismissing electric guitar […]

National Lampoon once ran a spoof of the old EC horror comics stories, “Tales From the Tombs,” in which a bigoted gay-basher winds up – via the traditional EC twist ending – in an entirely gay society.  “Everyone in the world is a homo!” the bully realizes in the last panels.  What was a joke […]

My opinions as a middle-aged straight white guy, I’m sure, often veer into the curmudgeonly and the petulant.  It’s true that being annoyed by piped-in hip-hop at the mall is not the same as being lynched, and being told you are a racist when you are a good person is not the same as being […]

The term “white guilt” has been around for several decades and can be defined in a number of ways. Foremost of these definitions stems from the historical fact that white Europeans enslaved millions of Black Africans and cruelly murdered or displaced millions of Indigenous North and South Americans, along with Aboriginal Australians and other Pacific […]

Part of the political polarization which characterizes our era is the weaponizing of language. Where once we had indifference, now we have hate. Where once we had freedom of conscience, now we have -phobia. In such cases, the open exchange of ideas is reduced to a binary right-wrong, heads-I-win, tails-you-lose, Do-you-still-beat-your-wife paradigm that discredits one […]

The entertainment industry has been around for so long now that nearly everyone understands the mechanics of hype and manipulation which drive the business. Or do we? Particular books, movies, television, or music might be resisted by audiences as “too commercial,” but all of them, no matter how they’re perceived, have been commercially marketed to […]

I once heard something to the effect that if aliens wanted to meet with an average, typical representative of the human race, they would be given an audience with a middle-aged Chinese woman – statistically, there are more of them than any other category of person on the planet. Yet such numerical considerations are often […]

What do COVID, the Ukraine war, monkeypox, climate change, trucker protests and systemic racism have in common? They are all topics of ongoing news coverage in many forums, and they have all had the veracity of that coverage challenged by critical commentators and ordinary people. These days, regular media consumers – which is to say, […]

A quick Google query, or a study of news and magazine articles, should demonstrate how prominent the term whiteness has become over the last ten years or so. Whiteness, as it is lately used by educators and writers, does not refer to the glare of Arctic snow, but to hitherto unexamined presumptions around race and […]

My most recent book, Takin’ Care of Business: A History of Working People’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, grew out of a post I originally wrote for this blog. I have long enjoyed (in addition to plenty of other music) the unpretentious, unrepentant sounds of AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, Motörhead, and other guitar-based raunch from the 1960s, […]