Cultural studies
Description
Bloody Crossroads 2020 takes a deep dive into the role that mass-appeal movies, television, videos, and music played in America’s political culture in the year of Donald Trump’s failed reelection campaign. The book also explores the impact of entertainment celebrities in communications, fundraising, and campaigning to support the election of Joe Biden.
Although there existed a decades-old tradition of “liberal Hollywood,” Trump’s ascension to the presidency in 2016 triggered an unprecedented level of engagement by artists and performers. Within days of the 2016 election, a critical mass of entertainers, from teenagers to the last survivors of the World War II generation—blockbuster movie stars, art-film auteurs, Broadway dramatists, comedians, and musicians from the worlds of classical, country, pop, rock, R&B, and hip-hop—all seemed to have heard the tom-tom beat of resistance at the same moment and amplified a moral alternative to Trumpism. That level of engagement intensified with rare passion and purpose in the period of 2020 chronicled in Bloody Crossroads 2020—the Democratic primaries, the COVID-19 pandemic, the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, the conviction of sexual predator Harvey Weinstein, and the 2020 general election campaign—culminating in Trump’s failed insurrection.
Exhaustively researched, Bloody Crossroads 2020 draws from brand-new interviews with Bruce Springsteen, John Legend, Rosanne Cash, David Simon, Adam McKay, Chuck D, David Corn, Mandy Patinkin, and many more. It also explores the important political activities of entertainers like Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Taylor Swift, Cardi B, Alyssa Milano, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, Robert De Niro, Bette Midler, Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Wanda Sykes.
Bloody Crossroads 2020 expertly dissects and celebrates how the empowering actions of artists and entertainers helped a record turnout of everyday citizens realize a triumphant 2020 election.
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Endorsements
“Bloody Crossroads 2020 is a riveting and thoughtful tour of the role artists played in resisting the horrors of the Trump presidency. Danny Goldberg provides a bracing and thorough recollection that is both a service and a reminder for artists to stay engaged and awake. To counter those who continually tell me to ‘shut up and sing,’ I will buy a couple of crates of this book and get my marching boots polished. Thank you, Danny, for reminding me how it went down, and where it might go.”
—Rosanne Cash
“The people who produce our popular culture—the performers and makers of TV shows and movies and music and the rest—are nearly all on the political left. (Which drives the right crazy; crazier.) Danny Goldberg—impresario, activist, mensch—knowingly and passionately chronicles how and why more of his fellow culture-makers than ever enlisted in the fight to save American democracy in 2020. Our annus horribilis had a political happy ending, and Bloody Crossroads 2020 is its star-studded souvenir program.”
—Kurt Andersen, author of Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland
“Music and politics have been the twin engines driving Danny Goldberg for decades. In his latest work he explores how these culture-defining machines left a wannabe king in the dust.”
—Nelson George, author of Hip Hop America
“Danny Goldberg has spent his career navigating the ‘bloody crossroads’ of culture and politics. He has applied that experience and insight to produce this panoramic portrait of how popular culture, from movies to music to television, responded to the unprecedented provocations and polarization of Donald Trump’s presidency. This is an indispensable and urgent document for anyone trying to understand the collision between Trump’s vision of restoring a fading social and racial order and the artists in every field who are forging a new American identity through their works.”
—Ronald Brownstein, author of Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics
“I didn’t think there was a place in politics for people in show business until I read Bloody Crossroads 2020.”
—Al Franken
Reviews
“A cleareyed overview of the modern interaction of culture and politics.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Author Biography
DANNY GOLDBERG is the author of the acclaimed books How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, Bumping into Geniuses, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea (Akashic, 2017) and Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain. He began his career in 1969 with Billboard, for whom he reviewed the Woodstock Festival, and later wrote for Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy. He worked as a personal manager for Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, the Allman Brothers Band, and Sonic Youth, and was president of several major record companies. He currently runs Gold Village Entertainment, a management company whose clients include Steve Earle, Martha Wainwright, and the Waterboys. Goldberg is former chair of the ACLU of Southern California, serves on the board of Public Citizen, and frequently writes about politics and culture for the Nation. His latest work is Bloody Crossroads 2020: Art, Entertainment, and Resistance to Trump.
Akashic Books
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Akashic Books
- Orginal LanguageEnglish
- ISBN/Identifier 9781617759796
- Publication Country or regionUnited States
- FormatHardback
- Primary Price 27.95 USD
- Pages280
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
- Copyright Year2021
- Dimensions9 x 6 inches
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