New Books In Music

Junior Tomlin: Flyer & Cover Art (Velocity Press, 2020) showcases the artwork of Junior Tomlin. Featuring flyers and record covers Tomlin has created for the rave scene starting in the late 1980s, this is the first book which comprehensively and cohesively documents his work in this important UK subculture. Raised in Ladbroke Grove, west London, Tomlin’s Afrofuturism work is influenced by surrealism, science fiction, futurism, and comics. Tomlin has been dubbed “The Salvador Dali of Rave” and this magnificent collection of his work speaks to why.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Manuel Betancourt explores what makes Judy Garland’s landmark album great, and why it holds such a central place in queer culture. A hit when released in 1961 (it was the first album by a woman ever to win the Grammy award for Best Album), Judy at Carnegie Hall quickly came to occupy a central place in the gay imaginary. And yet by 1967 characters in the play The Boys in the Band would mock Judy fandom as the height of outdated cliché. What accounts for Judy Garland’s strange temporality, somehow always so ten years ago? Why is there such an intense association between Garland and nostalgia, and between Garland and nostalgia’s twin, failure? Why can we accept Judy Garland as a comeback kid but not as a success? Betancourt’s book explores these questions and more in a deep dive into the nature of queer fandom. Manuel Betancourt is a writer based out of Los Angeles. He earned his Ph.D. in English Literature from Rutgers University, USA. Andy B

What is the place of classical music in contemporary society? In Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Marianna Ritchey, an assistant professor of music history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explores the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and classical music, showing how many of the democratizing and innovative elements of the genre go hand-in-hand with corporate power. Using detailed social and musicological studies of key composers, movements, opera companies, and tech advertising, the book offers a critical but sympathetic analysis of the potential, but also the limits, of classical music. Accessibly written, blending critical theory with contemporary case studies the book will be essential reading across arts and social sciences, as well as for business and technology scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“What makes song sparrows, Verdi, medieval monks, and minstrelsy part of the same taxonomy?” So asks—and answers—Rachel Mundy, who is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers University–Newark. In her book, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), Mundy shows how the history of the humanities is intimately connected with the lives of animals. Focusing on animal musicality, with a particular emphasis on birdsong, Mundy recounts dozens of twentieth-century encounters—in North America, Europe, and Africa—between animals and human researchers working in a variety of fields, work we now recognize as belonging to the disciplines of evolutionary biology, anthropology, ethology (the study of animal behavior), and ethnomusicology. Carefully attending to the value that was assigned to animal life in the lab and in the field, Mundy relates the story of how lives that were figured as non-human or less-than-human shape the received accounts of human and animal behavi

We might call movies made before the advent of the talkies in 1927 silent films—but for the audience, they were certainly not silent. Live orchestras and solo instrumentalists accompanied early movies, adding evocative music drawn from pre-existent and newly composed sources. Kendra Preston Leonard, author of Music for the Kingdom of Shadows: Cinema Accompaniment in the Age of Spiritualism (Humanities Commons, 2010) examines the music and musicians that accompanied silent movies that she calls “spirit films” and along the way finds unexpected connections between film accompanists, mediums, and Spiritualism. A “spirit film”—unlike a horror movie—is a film that features the appearance of spirit or ghost who tries to warn the living of, or protect them from, a dangerous circumstance, often caused by business the spirit left unfinished at their death. White middle-class women were regularly employed as film accompanists and mediums, their gender and race contributing to the respectability of both Spiritualism and

In Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture (University of North Carolina Press), Grace Elizabeth Hale tells the epic story of the Athens, Georgia music scene. Hale explains how a small college town hard to get to even from Atlanta gave rise to dozens of great bands. Some of them are household names like R.E.M. and The B-52’s, but perhaps more interesting is the great music you might not know: the jittery dance-punk of Pylon, or the anguished, poetic songwriting of Vic Chesnutt. Hale also explores how these bands negotiated questions of race, class, sexuality, and authenticity. Cool Town shows how Athens, Georgia created a model of how you could “make it” without ever leaving your small town, and how a homegrown scene could feel like the biggest thing in the world. Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwrit

In Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke University Press, 2020), Shana Redmond explores the ways in which Paul Robeson, silenced by state repression in his lifetime, still speaks to us today. Through explorations of Robeson’s genre-defying genius as well as reflections on how Robeson’s legacy continues today, Redmond re-contextualizes Robeson as a thoroughly contemporary figure. Robeson’s brutal mistreatment by the US government provides a case study in how far our supposed democracy will go to crush dissent, particularly black radical dissent. Still, his vision of anti-racism grounded in global solidarity and anti-capitalism is perhaps more necessary now than ever. Redmond points out that the word that Robeson sang about Joe Hill are true also of him: “I never died, said he.” Shana Redmond is Professor, Global Jazz Studies Musicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia Univ

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay of Oakland University on their new book Women Rapping Revolution.(University of California Press, 2020). Detroit, Michigan, has long been recognized as a center of musical innovation and social change. Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay draw on seven years of fieldwork to illuminate the important role that women have played in mobilizing a grassroots response to political and social pressures at the heart of Detroit’s ongoing renewal and development project. Focusing on the Foundation, a women-centered hip-hop collective, Women Rapping Revolution argues that the hip-hop underground is a crucial site where Black women shape subjectivity and claim self-care as a principle of community organizing. Through interviews and sustained critical engagement with artists and activists, this study also articulates the substantial role of cultural production in social, racial, and economic justice efforts. Resources men

To what degree did each of The Beatles exhibit emotional intelligence in the band’s final year? You'll find out in the discussion I had with Kenneth Womack about his new book Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and The End of The Beatles (Cornell University Press, 2019). Womack is the author of a two-volume biography of the life and work of Beatles producer George Martin. His forthcoming book, John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life, will be available in October 2020. Topics covered in this episode include: --Womack explains what Solid State refers to and where Abbey Road might rank in the band’s legacy. (Fortunately, the Magical Mystery Tour album wasn’t a top-three choice of his!) --Using the Big 5 model for personality traits, what might be the dominant traits of The Beatles given the options of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. --Why the band had reached a point where, like a bad marriage, it couldn’t survive any longer. For a transcript of this episode, clic

Most books about American music ask how it sounded, who wrote it, or who performed it. In his new book, Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (Norton, 2019), Dale Cockrell asks a different question: where is American music? His answer is in the brothels, dance halls, concert saloons, and cabarets of nineteenth-century New York City. Cockrell tells a story of popular music created and enjoyed within a sexualized and commercial environment that featured robust and constant exchange between black and white people during slavery times and the deepening segregation of Reconstruction-era America. Weaving together material from police reports and governmental investigations, Cockrell has found a rich source of information about the life of working-class people in urban America, and in the process has uncovered a network of musicians and spaces that nurtured American popular culture. These places of unbridled behavior were sometimes sites of degradation including for the prostitutes force

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanati

Nick Prior—Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Edinburgh—discusses his new book, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society (SAGE Publications, 2018). The book explores the social, cultural and industrial contexts for the changes that have taken place in popular music since the widespread adoption of digital technology by creators, distributors, and listeners from the early 1980s onward. Joining insights from the sociology of culture with key analytic categories from science and technology studies (STS), Prior examines a variety of contexts in which these changes have been felt, including the novel spaces and structures of both music production and consumption afforded by digitalization, the co-construction of vocal subjects and vocal sound-processing technologies, the tactical use of portable media by young urbanites to mediate their relationship to the city, and the conjunction of music and play in the ever-growing video game sector. In addition to an acute sense for their embeddedness i

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Stacy Wolf of Princeton University about her book Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America (Oxford University Press, 2019), an exploration of the complexities of amateur and local theatre across the United States. From backstage moms to tiny divas to dinner theatres, Wolf demonstrates that this charming pastime of American culture that is anything but past. On the contrary, musical theatre continues to be an important culture touchstone for many and a pipeline to national phenomenon such as the High School Music franchise. Told in a stunning voice with a wealth of attention to its case studies and examples, Beyond Broadway feels like backstage pass combined with a cross-country road trip in early Fall. A must read for anyone interested in the untold story of musical theater, American culture, and truly embedded ethnography with a ground-up point of view. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Stacy ab

How does technology shape music? In Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies (Routledge, 2019), Paul Harkins, a lecturer in music at Edinburgh Napier University, looks at the relationship between the rise of digital sampling, technology, and music. The book draws inspiration from Science and Technology Studies to explore the impact of specific technologies, such as the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, programming languages, and studio practices, on artists and producers. The analysis also thinks through the evolution of digital sampling across a variety of genres, including pop, folk, and hop-hop. Drawing on a wealth of examples, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of music, the history of technology, and the history of contemporary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do young men use drill music and social media to gain power? In his new book, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy (Princeton University Press, 2020), Forrest Stuart uses ethnographic and interview methods to explore the lived experiences of young men on Chicago’s south side. Stuart peels back the layers on what is commonly referred to as the digital divide, or the idea that there is unequal access to and use of technology, to instead find what he refers to as digital disadvantage (read the book to find out more!). The book tackles issues including who the audience really is for drill music and the social media output produced by these young men, and how they are sometimes exploited in the process. Exploration of authenticity, micro-celebrity, and self-branding contribute to larger understandings of race, stratification, and power in America. Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/a

In his new book, Tween Pop: Children’s Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture. Starting with how Kidz Bop and Disney’s High School Musical (2006), Bickford argues that tween music culture flourished due to the commodification of childhood and the rise of television and pop music stars. Focusing on the ways that femininity and whiteness are markers are innocence and childhood, Bickford examines Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana through a postfeminist discourse of work life balance, Taylor Swift’s longstanding relationship with girlhood and whiteness, and Justin Bieber’s label as child prodigy as a way to cement his position as a super star. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as P

How does music help us to understand the contemporary city? In It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City (Manchester UP, 2019), Caspar Melville, co-chair of the Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies at SOAS, University of London, explores three music scenes to tell the story of modern London. In doing so it rethinks the story of crucial cultural moments, such as the birth of acid house, and brings new depth and detail to research on cities and music. The book draws on extensive empirical material, foregrounding analysis of space, race, and music to deliver both a comprehensive history as well as a significant contribution to urban studies. The book is essential reading for music and social science scholars, as well as for anyone interested in London and its culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historians, musicologists, and sociologists have long studied the relationship between politics and music. Peter La Chapelle’s new book, I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music (University of Chicago Press, 2019) traces interactions between country music and politics beginning with two late nineteenth-century politicians who fiddled to their supporters and ending with the 2016 election season. He establishes some long-standing associations between celebrity candidates, populist insurgents, outsider politics and country music. La Chapelle also does not shy away from exposing the ways that racist and anti-Semitic political figures have used country music to support their beliefs. While today many people think of country music as a politically conservative genre, La Chapelle brings to light a more complex story of politicians across the spectrum looking to country music to support their beliefs, publicize their campaigns, and establish their authenticity with their cons

Performance / Media / Art / Culture: Selected Essays 1983-2018 (Intellect Books, 2019) collects more than thirty years of critical writing by artist and writer Jacki Apple. These essays trace important developments in performance art both in the Los Angeles and New York scenes, discuss artists including Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Meredith Monk, and Lin Hixson, and track cultural shifts such as the culture wars of the 1980s, the emergence of left-wing censorship in the 1990s, and the emerging ecological consciousness of today. An essential monument to performance practices that often left behind few records and produced scant archives but radically reshaped performance in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Andy Boyd is a playwright and podcaster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices