The Modernist World: Celebrity and Modern Life Paul Whiteman Music As the war overtook the United States, a significant economic struggle surfaced in musical entertainment. In the 1920s appropriation and assirnilation of black culture continued; the blandness of Whiteman's music seemed more comfortable, staking out a neutral ground amid the furore. We have seen Whiteman deliver the music of his day from the ignominious rôle of obsequious hanger-on of the fashionable world and make it a universal thing. Read More Prohibition and the Jazz Age When threats from these quarters were added to a storm of disapproval aroused by the revelation of a number of scandals at Hollywood, the motion-picture industry in some trepidation summoned to the rescue Will H. Hays, a politician high in the councils of the Republican party. Read More Jazz: I was born with music inside me Jazz owes much to the district where George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin started their careers. The wise-cracking brand of humor, and much language which has become part of popular speech, have roots in the Lower East Side. Such expressions as gabfest, plunderbund, it listens well, bum, dumb (in the sense of stupid), come from the Germans; the Jews have given words like kibitzer, kosher, mazuma, phooey; and the Irish, shillelagh, smithereens, ballyhoo, and shehang. Read More Jazz, Blues and Black Audience Black blues singers emerged in the early twentieth century as popular and powerful celebrities. They were urban, secular singers who turned their rich experiences into social lessons for their audiences. They were usually bolder than white women singers. Performing before exclusively black audiences, they discussed sexual disappointments and the failures of love with great candor.  Read More White Popular Music The opening of the Metropolitan, for all its importance in the world of music and drama, illustrated even more vividly than any formal dinner or fancy-dress ball society's irresistible impulse to make its amusements an occasion to flaunt its wealth. For true music-lovers of the 1880's the operas currently being given at the Academy of Music fully met all artistic standards. Read More The New Woman and the Twenties The twenties likewise saw a form of art, music--that Britain for two centuries had chiefly regarded as an alien importation from the Continent--at length achieving a new status, as major native composers awakened the interest of an alert and educated public. Read More Chanel Creations At this period Chanel' s designs were for the leisured rich, the new international set who traveled Europe and the United States in a restless search for seasonal diversions; and the irony of her fashions was that she gave the richest women in the world a look that was indistinguishable from that of a shop girl or office worker. Dressed in this ultra-chic "poor look" - in a sirnple black dress either with a demure white Peter Pan collar, or, more likely, completely unadomed - the society women who affected it paid everything for a fashion that looked like... Read More Fashion and Modernity Chanel's collaboration with the Parisian artistic avant garde had been much more successful. As early as 1922 she worked with Jean Codeau, Picasso and the composer Arthur Honegger on a production of the classical Greek play Antigone; and from 1923 to 1927 she worked with Sergei Diaghilev and Codeau on ballet designs. Read More