Rating: 
Summary: Indulgent and not very informative
Review: I was disappointed that Seabrook so cursorily examined the topic of this book. It's important, and much more easily explained using examples chosen from outside the author's personal experience as a writer for Tina Brown's The New Yorker. Even the examples he chooses from that indisputably interesting time aren't very well fleshed out in defense of his thesis. Readers interested in this topic might be better served by joining Adbusters.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not brilliant
Review: I was lucky enough to receive an uncorrected proof of this novel. Despite my optimistic enthusiasm, I was slightly let down by the book. It reads like an MTV video with choppy edits of memoir mixed in with moments of pseudo-epiphany. He puts into words many ideas that I have been thinking, but not in an analytical, sociological sense. Rather, he takes the approach of personal cultural experiences as evidence of larger cultural trends. I found the chapters to be somewhat random and unconnected; however, in the end he did tie in all concepts/chapters rather nicely in order to prove his thesis. Nobrow is an interesting look at the commercialization & marketing of culture and art, though I was hoping for something of the magnitude and strength of Dery's Escape Velocity or Rushkoff's Coercion.
Rating:
Summary: Lite Theory
Review: If you're an academic used to rigorous scholarship, Nobrow will not satisfy you. (RE: NO FOOTNOTES) But it's a quick, interesting read for a general readership not familiar with cultural studies or Raymond Williams. Nobrow is anecdotal, the prose is pleasurable, and the stories about Tina Brown are entertaining. I only underlined a few sentences--mostly because the phrasing rather than the sentiment was outstanding.General Readers: Recommended Academic Readers: Skim in the stacks.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Thesis Could Use More Detail
Review: In his peregrinations for the New Yorker magazine, author John Seabrook noticed a curious thing. The old cultural elite's distinction of high, middle and low culture seems to have broken down. (Example: classical music is somehow "better" than jazz, jazz better than rock, rock better than hip-hop, etc.) Instead, opines Seabrook, we live in an age of "Nobrow," in which cultural consumers and cultural providers read each other's needs so acutely that it is marketing that drives the culture and in turn, culture drives the marketing. In other words, the hegemony that cultural critics enjoyed in deciding what was art and wasn't (defining hegemony as "taste as power pretending to be common sense" [p. 53]) has pretty much been blown away. What do we have now? We have Nobrow. People who pick and choose from all kinds of options without worrying too much whether it used to be considered trashy, egghead, mainsteam, avant-garde, cutting-edge, or declasse. We have saturation of the culture by media to the extent that culture and media--particularly televised media--become synonymous: "MTV has produced a new audience for whom the distinction betwen the market and culture was almost nonexistent." (p. 94) Since the old distinctions are all but gone, the old venues have changed, too. You don't have to visit a museum to see museum pieces any more. "In Nobrow, paintings by van Gogh and Monet are the headliners at the Bellagio Hotel while the Cirque du Soleil borrows freely from performance art in creating the Las Vegan spectacle inside." (p. 162). For Seabrook, the consummate example of this culture-marketing-culture interplay is George Lucas: "You could see Lucas as the first . . . appropriator of world culture, which he sold back to the world as Star Wars. Or you would see Lucas as an early sampler, a groundbreaker in which would become the essential Nobrow esthetic: making art out of pop culture." (p. 145). All of this is interesting, even provocative. Occasionally I felt the journalism overexplained the thesis or was irrelevant to it (especially in the chapter on MTV); many if not most of this material originally appeared in the New Yorker and the magazine origin occasionally shows through. For the sake of good sportsmanship if nothing else, Seabrook should really have dealt with one of the bastions of high culture--a museum or symphony orchestra--to see how they are dealing with the new, allegedly classless, era of cultural distinctions. But he definitely has given me a new yardstick to measure things by. And I finally figured out why The Simpsons is my favorite TV show; it's so Nobrow in its mix of cultural references, everything from flatulence jokes to Eudora Welty and Steven Hawking.
Rating: 
Summary: everything for sale
Review: In much the same way that Henry Adams skewered the cultural pretensions and greed of America's robber barons at the end of the nineteenth century, Seabrook portrays the status-hungry vapidness of today's fin de siecle media barons. His portraits of George Lucas and David Geffen, alone in their California fantasylands, are creepy, funny, and ultimately damning. Nobrow's surreal opening scene--a walk through Time's Square on Clinton's inaugeration day--perfectly encapsulates Seabrook's larger themes. We now live in a culture where everyone and everything are for sale. This book is superb.
Rating: 
Summary: No Reason For Reading Nobrow
Review: In what reads like a series of loosely-related magazine pieces strung together, Seabrook displays his profound grasp of the obvious. Seabrook thinks his rich daddy was hibrow because he read the New Yorker and appereciated High Art - Sonny Boy doesn't understand that the New Yorker was always middlebrow, and that his father's passions were an aspiring aristo joke. Seabrook thinks he's different from Rich Dad because he likes the Chemical Brothers. Wow! Is he just slumming, or does he really not get the implicit irony? And do we really need to be told this again? I think not.
Rating:
Summary: not great
Review: Interestingly, I read this book in one setting, but, upon finishing it thought to myself: 'And what of it?' Never a good sign when reading, or reacting to, a book. I suppose I read it all in one sitting because I'm a devoted New Yorker reader and have lived in New York my entire life, so there was a large part of my ego that was gratified when I read references about which I was intimately familiar (New York City) or read references to the culture of a magazine I read regularly (The New Yorker). But, again, what of it? All his observations are anecdotal but they don't add up to much beyond incidental coherence. For example, Seabrook refers to a 14-year-old kid who just signed a multi-million dollar recording contract with Mercury Records. In his recollection of his encounter with the kid, he makes reference to the kid playing Star Wars on Nintendo. Next chapter, Seabrook is out in California meeting with George Lucas to discuss the myth of Star Wars and understand for himself how Star Wars exemplifies the 'low brow' culture which is the centerpiece of the book. Thus, incidental coherence. There is an incidental relationship between the teenager and George Lucas: namely, Lucas received more money in the year that the kid (or his parents) bought the game than if the kid never had the game. Perhaps I'm being too drastic here, but it seems that the message of the book is that low brow culture has permeated American (if not the world's) culture, and therefore, it is easy to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, or phenomena that are only tangential or loosely related to one another. This is the narrative as told by anecdote: Anecdote A makes reference to issue 1, and issue 1 can be turned into anecdote B because it allows us to make reference to issue 2, et cetera. But, of course, given a large enough and vibrant enough culture (low or high) it is highly probable that seemingly unrelated anecdotes can be said to have common threads. What of all this? Again, the same question.
Rating:
Summary: not great
Review: Interestingly, I read this book in one setting, but, upon finishing it thought to myself: 'And what of it?' Never a good sign when reading, or reacting to, a book. I suppose I read it all in one sitting because I'm a devoted New Yorker reader and have lived in New York my entire life, so there was a large part of my ego that was gratified when I read references about which I was intimately familiar (New York City) or read references to the culture of a magazine I read regularly (The New Yorker). But, again, what of it? All his observations are anecdotal but they don't add up to much beyond incidental coherence. For example, Seabrook refers to a 14-year-old kid who just signed a multi-million dollar recording contract with Mercury Records. In his recollection of his encounter with the kid, he makes reference to the kid playing Star Wars on Nintendo. Next chapter, Seabrook is out in California meeting with George Lucas to discuss the myth of Star Wars and understand for himself how Star Wars exemplifies the 'low brow' culture which is the centerpiece of the book. Thus, incidental coherence. There is an incidental relationship between the teenager and George Lucas: namely, Lucas received more money in the year that the kid (or his parents) bought the game than if the kid never had the game. Perhaps I'm being too drastic here, but it seems that the message of the book is that low brow culture has permeated American (if not the world's) culture, and therefore, it is easy to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, or phenomena that are only tangential or loosely related to one another. This is the narrative as told by anecdote: Anecdote A makes reference to issue 1, and issue 1 can be turned into anecdote B because it allows us to make reference to issue 2, et cetera. But, of course, given a large enough and vibrant enough culture (low or high) it is highly probable that seemingly unrelated anecdotes can be said to have common threads. What of all this? Again, the same question.
Rating: 
Summary: A silly little book.
Review: Is this some sort of dismal trend? A New Yorker "writer" taking a dumb little idea that he undoubtedly thinks is brilliant, worth at best a few hundred words as an op-ed piece in the New York Post, and instead inflating it into an overpriced, overhyped book that would float on helium? First Malcolm Gladwell and now John Seabrook.... No wonder the New Yorker is what it is today.
Rating:
Summary: Is "Culture" Gone?
Review: John Seabrook has written an insightful personal view of the anglo-american popular culture that seems to expand its territory to all parts of human life. Seabrook's point of view is the change in the editorial focus of The New Yorker magazine, where he has worked as a writer. Seabrook describes how the magazine changed its elitistic "high culture" approach during the 90's to that of market driven. Seabrook connects occasions in the magazine in the commercial development of the american culture at large. The book is easy to read and includes many interesting details. Seabrook describes his adventures in the world of "buzz" where he meets the leading brains behind the american pop culture. Hollywood directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas in side with music producer David Geffen and managers of MTV get their share in the book. Seabrook argues that producers of cultural products rely more on market analysis than artistic taste. He writes how individuals in the information society consume faster and get easily tired. Quick cuts and music overheads replace heroism in sports. Products that have most promising consumption figures are put out. Artist on the MTV is selling at the same time a bundle of products tied to his context and doing a performance. In the end, more and more content is created and delivered to the market that seems impossible to satisfy Seabrook has his points. The book is worth a quick read to anyone interested in the role and dominance of pop culture in today's society. Seabrook's book is one thread in the current discussion of the life of american elite in the information society. Another recent and much discussed book that has the same perspective is David Brooks: Bobos in Paradise (2000). Be warned. In my opinion, this Bobo stuff is less critical and hence worth even a quicker read.
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