Modern Day Vaudeville

This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

I’ve been trying to stay off Facebook, but somehow this has just gotten me started answering questions on Quora. Frying pan, fire, right? The funny thing is, sometimes I’ll answer a really stupid question there, just because it gets me thinking about things in a new way. And then I realized something about my whole long-ago post on popular music as a hybrid performance art, rather than a musical genre: The whole popular music paradigm is, in some sense, just the modern-day form of vaudeville. Popular music (a term I use for basically all the stuff North Americans think of as “music”—rock, pop …

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