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A cinemusicaliterary analysis of the American dream as represented by biographical jazz comedepictions in the golden age of Hollywood biopics: Blow, Horatio, Blow; O, Jakie, O; Go,Tommy, Go; No, Artie, No

Columbia University, USA, mbh3{at}columbia.edu

This essay argues that our grasp of marketing theory benefits from an awareness of the rags-to-riches ethos that characterizes the paradigmatic American Dream. In this connection, the essay presents a cinemusicaliterary analysis of how this success-story ideal has shaped some artistic manifestations of the consumer culture in ways that have appeared conspicuously in various literary, cinematic, and musical creations. Thus, beginning with the literary works of Horatio Alger and their reification of the rags-to-riches prototype, the essay traces the evolution of this success-story paradigm through its cinematic embodiment in The Jazz Singer (1927) to its appearance in the underlying musical structures that characterize five comedepictions of jazz heroes during the golden age of Hollywood biopics: The Fabulous Dorseys (1947); The Glenn Miller Story (1954); The Benny Goodman Story (1955); The Five Pennies (1959); and The Gene Krupa Story (1959). The essay ends by considering an instructive counterexample based on the life and writings of a different kind of hero, Artie Shaw, who abandoned $ucce$$ as an enormously popular musician to pursue different artistic goals as an author.

Key Words: American Dream • art versus commerce • Cinderella myth • jazz biopics

Marketing Theory, Vol. 9, No. 3, 259-313 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1470593109338141


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