Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit by Danny Goldberg

From the Publisher

Music industry insider and progressive activist Danny Goldberg has spent decades tuning in to the rhythms and voices that speak straight to the hearts and desires of America's youth. In that time, one fact has become increasingly clear: our venerable political leaders are tonedeaf. In this startling, provocative book, Goldberg shows how today's professional public servants have managed to achieve nothing less than the indefensible, wholesale alienation of an entire generation. Elvis has left the building -- and he's taken just about everybody under thirty with him. To anyone born after 1960, it's hard to imagine that there was a time in the United States when mass, popular culture actually helped to shape and advance the social agenda. When contemporary music and film were not greeted with arrogant disdain or willful incomprehension. When new forms of self-expression inspired our leaders to take action, not to demand censorship and warning labels. Danny Goldberg takes us into the trenches of the so-called culture wars to find out what caused this radical change in our national psyche.

He shines a spotlight on the conservative pundits and party leaders who are orchestrating dangerous attacks on civil liberties and youth culture. Granted, Goldberg doesn't expect an Ashcroft or Cheney to suddenly confess an appreciation for Nelly's lyrics or Pink's feminist ethos. But what about the people who should be making every effort to bridge this cultural chasm -- liberal democrats? With intelligence and wit, Goldberg blasts the hypocrisy of all those who claim to speak for the very citizens -- mainly young Americans and black Americans -- whose culture they would prefer to sanitize and shrink-wrap. As a baby boomer, Goldberg is particularly disappointed in the failure of his own generation to reach out to younger people.

Goldberg has unique insight into the way business gets done in both Hollywood and Washington, D.C. For over four decades, he has worked closely with a vast number of great performers -- everyone from Led Zeppelin to Bruce Springsteen, from Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne to Kurt Cobain and rap impresario Russell Simmons. As an activist, he's gone head-to-head with countless political figures, including Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Ronald Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Joseph Lieberman, and Al and Tipper Gore. From the intersection point of popular and political culture, Danny Goldberg now issues a rousing call to reclaim our democracy, so that we might once again see ourselves -- and our children -- reflected in our leaders' words and deeds.

Time Out New York

Goldberg authoritatively dissects the disconnect between progressive politics and younger voters.

Vanity Fair

Rock, rap, reactionaries, and liberals all get a thrashing in Goldberg's insightful Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Publishers Weekly

In a meeting with Jack Newfield, according to Goldberg, liberal Sen. Charles Schumer confessed to having never heard of Eminem. This illustrates record producer and civil liberties activist Goldberg's powerful critique of the left and the Democratic Party's failure to stay in touch with its broad popular base and with popular culture as a way of reaching them. It takes a while for the political content to kick into gear, but once broached, it never lets up. Here is that rare breed of book that can deconstruct gangsta rap as effectively as it analyzes the 1988 presidential election, a book in which Lenny Kravitz and Kurt Cobain have an equal footing with Joe Lieberman and John McCain. The long battle Goldberg helped wage against Tipper Gore over rock lyrics in the 1980s underscores many of the book's themes, such as the disconnect between politics and popular music and the "arrogant sense of entitlement" among many powerful Democrats and leftists, which alienates young voters. The author's own record label, Artemis, has sparked controversy, releasing both the Steve Earle song "John Walker's Blues," which infuriated conservative pundits, and Cornel West's rap album, which Harvard president (and former Clinton treasury secretary) Larry Summers said "embarrassed" the university. Whether boomer Democrats heed his call to abandon their hostility to younger voters (whom, Goldberg says, they term "ignorant") remains to be seen, but few people could make the case as effectively as Goldberg does. Agent, Andrew Wylie. (June) Forecast: With the focus today on civil liberties, Goldberg is bound to be popular in the media, which should help sales. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Goldberg, 52, is the CEO of Artemis Records and a self-described "aging hippie." He might seem like an odd choice as author of a political tract, but having been a civil libertarian activist and journalist, he is discouraged about the rightward tilt in American politics and society. His book is a sincere effort to rescue the progressive agenda from those who have "grown increasingly elitist, snobbish, and removed from huge chunks of the American people." In addition to its call to arms, though, this book is also an affecting memoir of his experiences within the clash of popular culture and politics. Surprisingly, most of Goldberg's battles have been with liberals who have sided with cultural conservatives, i.e., "liberal snobs." He is highly critical of the contemporary Democratic Party and what he calls the self-righteousness of Joe Lieberman. While Goldberg's political views may seem unrealistic, the great value of his book is as an insider's tour of American cultural life from the Sixties to the present. High school and college students will be a very receptive audience. Recommended for most academic and large public libraries.-Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Smart reports from the countercultural trenches, where ’60s veterans trudge onward. The subtitle is a little misleading, holding forth the promise of contrarian political analyses à la Hitchens or Cockburn, if a little than the usual Nation fare. Goldberg, a longtime music-industry exec and now CEO of the embattled Steve Earle’s Artemis label, gives readers principled arguments aplenty, but in the main, this is more personal than all that—it might better be subtitled, "How I Remained Rad and Mad While Everyone Else Became Yuppies." Rad-mad Goldberg has indeed remained, fighting such good (if ultimately compromised) fights as the music industry’s efforts to buck the Tipper Gore-led crusade to sticker potentially offensive recordings. Tipper serves as a handy foil for Goldberg’s First Amendment absolutism throughout, as does her husband Al. "A major reason Gore lost in 2000," Goldberg writes, neatly sidestepping the question of whether he lost at all, "was a very severe case of liberal snobbery. With his unwillingness or inability to communicate in ordinary language . . . his shrill attacks on popular culture, his selection of a running mate even more sanctimonious and elitist than he, and his obsessive need to distance himself from President Clinton, Gore turned off millions of voters he could have attracted." And therein, in Goldberg’s feisty analysis, lies the problem with liberal/progressive politics in America: its elder practitioners have no interest in the young, are insulated from popular culture, are dreadful snobs, and have as little idea of the realities of working-class life as George Bush. The right, he continues, is far more at ease working the youth-culture angle,co-opting pop stars and movie idols to further its dark agenda. Throughout his winding narrative, which chronicles his sentimental education as an activist (and which music buffs will find much fun to read), Goldberg urges lefties to let down their hair and start trusting the under-30 crowd, whereupon a new age of Aquarius will descend on the land and the likes of Dubya will go unemployed. Members of the DNC will want to study up on this one. Agent: Andrew Wylie/Wylie Agency

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