Doing Our Own Thing : The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care

Once languages become written, they change. Only in writing does language develop the artfulness and richness that we associate with a Shakespeare, a Proust or a Whitman. Yet over the last forty years, the English-language has effectively gone into reverse – taking our lead from America and the legacy of the 19060s, our culture increasingly privileges the oral over the written, spurning the art of elaborated, ‘written’-style language in favour of returning to the state of a spoken culture. Parallel developments have occurred in music. In this controversial and thought-provoking book, Jon McWhorter argues that the 1960’s rejection of cultural traits associated with the Establishment, as well as a democratic celebration of what anyone can do over what requires training or talent, has led to our culture being increasingly impoverished, both intellectually and artistically, a culture that hates itself.