No Respect

Disrespect/hostility, paternalism/deference, elitism/populism, authority/delinquency - these are some of the features that characterise the historically fraught relationship between intellectuals and popular culture. In arguing that these features are inherently linked, No Respect shows how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is mutually bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America over the past fifty years. Far from an aesthetic activity, 'taste' is seen as an exercise in cultural power which serves to police and to redefine the social relations between 'educated' and 'ordinary' people. Categories of taste like hip, camp, kitsch, sick and midcult are analyzed through examples drawn from bebop jazz, soul music, drag shows, 'bad' films, performance comedy, TV quiz shows, spy fiction, women's pornography, and the 'people's culture' of the popular front.