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mistletoe
mistletoe common name for the Loranthaceae, a family of chiefly tropical hemiparasitic herbs and shrubs with leathery evergreen leaves and waxy white berries. They have green leaves, but they manufacture only part of the nutrients they require. Mistletoes are aerial hemiparasites, attaching themsel...
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Paul Simon
Paul Simon 1941-, American singer, songwriter, and guitarist, b. Newark, N.J. A polished and intelligent folk-rock lyricist and performer, he first gained fame as half of Simon and Garfunkel. Not long after their highly successful album Bridge over Troubled Water (1970), Simon split with Garfunke...
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David Bowie
David Bowie 1947-, British rock and roll singer and songwriter, b. Brixton as David Robert Jones. He scored his first hit with "Space Oddity" (1969), in which he assumed the role of astronaut Major Tom. A student of mime, the tall, slender, theatrical Bowie has been the ultimate pop chameleon. ...
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Joan Baez
Joan Baez , 1941-, American folk singer and political activist, b. New York City. Baez began singing traditional folk ballads, blues, and spirituals in Cambridge, Mass., coffeehouses in a clear soprano voice with a three-octave range. She made folk music, which had been largely ignored, popular. Bae...
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John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker 1917-2001, American blues singer and guitarist, b. near Clarksdale, Miss. From a cotton-sharecropping family, he learned the blues from his stepfather and various visiting Delta bluesmen, constructing his first instrument from strings made of rubber inner tube nailed to a barn. He l...
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Della-Cruscans
Della-Cruscans [from the Accademia della Crusca, founded for linguistic purity, Florence, 16th cent.], a group of English poets living in Italy at the end of the 18th cent. who published pretentious, sentimental verse in The Arno (1784) and The Florence Miscellany (1785). Robert Merry, writing ...
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Kate Greenaway
Kate Greenaway 1846-1901, English illustrator and watercolorist. She is famous for her fanciful, humorous, delicately colored drawings of child life. She influenced children's clothing and the illustrating of children's books and was often imitated, though never successfully. Among the books for wh...
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sandalwood
sandalwood name for several fragrant tropical woods, especially for Santalum album, an evergreen partially parasitic tree either native to India or introduced there centuries ago. It is used for joss sticks in Buddhist religious ceremonies and funeral rites and is made into ornamental wares. Oil ...
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Michael Joseph Jackson
Michael Joseph Jackson 1958-, American performer, b. Gary, Ind. Jackson is known as a superb dancer and pop singer, often conveying an androgynous image and an ambiguous sexuality, but offstage he has become known for various alleged eccentricities, for his sharp business acumen, and for a physical...
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Hip-Hop Culture
HIP-HOP CULTURE
Background
During the late 1970s an underground urban movement known as "hip-hop" began to develop in the South Bronx area of New York City. Encompassing graffiti art, break dancing, rap music, and fashion, hip-hop became the dominant cultural movement of the African American and H...
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