Use in Popular Culture
The melting pot remains a stock phrase in American political and cultural dialogue. The general perception of its process and effects can be summed up in "The Great American Melting Pot" song from Schoolhouse Rock!.
In 1969 the song "Melting Pot" was released by the UK band Blue Mink and charted at #3 in the UK Singles Chart. The lyrics espouse how the world should become one big melting pot where different races and religions are to be mixed, 'churning out coffee coloured people by the score' referring to the possible pigmentation of children after such racial mixing.
On The Colbert Report, an alternative to the melting pot culture was posed on The Word called "Lunchables," where separate cultures "co-exist" by being entirely separate and maintaining no contact or involvement (see also NIMBY).
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Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races.... The economics of this musical esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)