And comics. And the mystery novel.
And Blues. And Country. And Rock and Roll.
Maybe Bennett should bestow himself on another country.
Gotta tell ya, when you look at the hip-hop culture and the music, I think Tony has a point.
Bob Dylan says modern music is worthless
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1688105/posts
Hey, Bennett idiot: if it weren't for the US, they'd be lampshades or bars of soap!
Hells bells, we gave the world Fluff & PeanutButter Sandwiches, Jello, Spam, soap operas, game shows... I could go on and on.
Heh.
If it can be called "a slice of Americana" then it is culturally significant and a contribution to the world.
He's gonna be doing a duet with the Banana Boat Man?
AlGore invented the Internet....
Of course, whether he's an "American" or not is subject to interpretation.
Start with the culture of representative democracy. The United States of America was the first and is the oldest functional representative democracy in the world.
Then think of the culture of political parties. We may or may not think this is so wonderful, but the good old USA gave birth to modern political parties.
How about "little" cultural things like the steam engine, electric lights, the assembly line, the polio vaccine, personal computers, skyscrapers, and similar things that Americans have contributed to the modern world? How about that good old brash American can-do spirit that yanked Europe and the world back from the brink in WWI, WWII and the Cold War?
How about the American musical theater, early Hollywood, the golden age of Hollywood, and television? How about the great songwriters who literally invented popular music and gave Bennett his material to sing? The Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Jonny Mercer, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein...the list is very long indeed.
How about Gable, Stewart, Wayne, Cooper, Grant, Bogart, Hepburn (both Audrey and Katharine), Garland, Monroe, Astaire and Rogers, and the whole panoply of stars who defined the very essence of what it is to be a movie star.
How about Sinatra, Garland (again), Crosby, Elvis, and the whole long list of great singers who made American popular music the most pervasive musical form in the world?
How about the moon landings, the space race, and all consumer items that resulted from it?
How about interstate highways, mass marketing of automobiles, the modern advertising industry, bikini bathing suits, transistors, the list of American inventions and cultural contributions goes on and on and on.
So Bennett should sit down and shut up, because he's making a fool of himself.
He should try spending some time in Appalachia.
Plenty of culture there and it's all-American. Story-telling, cooking, work ethic, music, art...the works.
Mr. Benedetto is a senile old boob.
You know, I really don't care about whether we as a people have created art, literature, and music to the liking of the elites in Europe. While they were playing, painting and writing, we were inventing. Things like the cotton gin, steam engine, steel plow, reaper, thresher, combine, sewing machine, railroad, telegraph, telephone, electric light, air conditioning, air planes, synthetic cloths, the transistor, and computers. The list is unending. Not to mention faster systems of manufacture of nearly everything.
Asians learn english. Moslems hate us becuase of our culture "corrupting" theirs. Europeans envy us. Mexicans are over running us because of our culture.
But I digress....
Tony Who?
I like Tony Bennett's music. But I wonder if he includes his own work as a part of America's failure to contribute anything to world culture. I doubt that he would, because that would be admitting that he's become very rich and very famous for doing nothing.
If he had taken this in a different direction-- for example, that a lot of artistic expression in America is junk, that would be true. It would also be true for Britain and France and Italy and Germany and everywhere else. But for him to overlook all of the accomplishments of Americans in art, music, literature, film, and even media such as radio, not to mention science and technology, and to boil it all down to jazz which --he says -- none of us appreciates anyway, is astounding.
Chianti, Italy by Tony Bennett
I think Tony might have a point. /s