Isaac Butler

This week on the Book Review Podcast, we look back at the culture wars of the 80s and 90s with author Isaac Butler.

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Culture wars are going to flare up all the time because the arts are how we decide who we are.

That's the terrain in which the soul of a nation is really explored and developed.

The thing I'm always trying to figure out as a cultural historian is that relationship between the works of art and the context in which they are made.

You know, how do those two things really shape each other?

Thank you so much for having me, Gilbert.

Yes, a convenient moment for us to be talking, a, I don't know, resonant moment, something.

Sure.

The succinct way that I would use the phrase is when cultural creations, you know, works of art, TV shows, albums, what have you, become political issues in and of themselves.

Mm-hmm.

Um, a very clear example from the era of my book that, you know, middle-aged people like me will remember very well is the two live crew album as nasty as they want to be.

Right.

Which was eventually the subject of an obscenity trial and all sorts of things.

But even before that, this is a thing that's being debated by politicians.

You know, what are we going to do about this?

Should this be legal?

You know, so there, there are those kinds of fights.

And because, um,

America does not have a fixed national identity in the way that like France does, right?