Word: pop
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They called her the Asian Madonna because, in the ultra-staid world of Hong Kong pop music, her boldness was not just a sensation but an affront. If Madonna was the Material Girl, Anita Mui Yim-fong was the Bad Girl. That was the title of her 1985 hit song (which was briefly banned from radio for its raunchy lyrics) and best-selling album. In concert, Mui was a strutting, scowling presence, exuding sexuality like a visual and aural musk. She didn't simply command the stage; she commandeered it. She set attendance records with concert series...
...devout and PG. It's tempting to borrow the electoral blue-state/red-state template and say there are two mainstreams, equal and opposite--but that beggars the definition of mainstream, no? The year 2003, we've heard, was when the swing voter became irrelevant. It could be that our pop culture too no longer has that swing...
...Wonderful Town--and the music business heaved up a slew of standards albums.) When old stars pass, they take with them a piece of a time when we weren't so niched and subdivided by the market and our own choices. To make the metaphor a little homier, the pop-culture mainstream is a family that used to get together for dinner once a week but now does so only at weddings (or dating-show finales, anyway)--and funerals...
...iPod users pick and choose singles rather than pay $18 for filler-loaded albums (which were invented more for business than artistic reasons in the first place), it frees them to sample more genres and artists. The trade-off is a flightier, more mercurial and more tabloid pop culture. Its one unifying trait, perhaps, is simply the desire to check out what all the fuss is about. But at least we're still connected enough to care about one another's fusses now and again...
CHARGED. MICHAEL JACKSON, 45, eccentric pop star; with seven counts involving a lewd and lascivious act upon a child and two counts of administering an "intoxicating agent," in connection with allegations that he molested a cancer-stricken boy, now 14, in February and March; in Santa Maria, Calif. Jackson could face more than 20 years in prison if convicted on all counts of molestation...