New Books in Music

Art After Liberalism (Columbia UP, 2022) is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be described as a crisis of liberalism. The apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others. What happens when the framework of the nation-state,...

It was only two decades ago, but, for the women of country music, 1999 seems like an entirely different universe. With Shania Twain, country's biggest award winner and star, and The Chicks topping every chart, country music was a woman's world: specifically, country radio and Nashville's Music Row. Cut to 2021, when women are only played on country radio 16% of the time, on a good day, and when on...

The national anthem of the United States is familiar around the world from Olympic medal ceremonies and American patriotic celebrations. Like anything that is over 200 years old, the meaning of The Star-Spangled Banner has changed over time and the song has been the focus of controversy at different times in its history. What many people think they know about the anthem is as much myth and legend...

In Attack of the Monster Musical: A Cultural History of Little Shop of Horrors (Bloomsbury, 2022), Adam Abraham chronicles the history of this hit musical. Starting with the story of Roger Corman's 1960s movie that was shot in two days with a budget of $30,000, and largely forgotten, Abraham details how two decades later Little Shop of Horrors opened Off-Broadway and became a surprise success. Abr...

Combining archival research with ethnographic fieldwork, Aniket De's book The Boundary of Laughter: Popular Performances Across Borders in South Asia (Oxford UP, 2022) explores how spaces of popular performance have changed with the emergence of national borders in modern South Asia. The author traces the making of the popular theater form called Gambhira by Hindu and Muslim peasants and laborers...

This is the definitive biography of singer-songwriter Nick Lowe, best known for "Cruel To Be Kind,” “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass,” and "(What's So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding."  Biographer Will Birch, who in addition to being a music writer was a drummer and songwriter with The Records, has known Lowe for over forty years and melds Lowe's gift as a witty raconteur with his o...

Where are the success stories for people of color in opera? In Access, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Cultural Organizations: Insights from the Careers of Executive Opera Managers of Color in the U.S. (Routledge, 2021), Antonio Cuyler, Director of the MA Program & Associate Professor of Arts Administration at Florida State University (FSU), and Visiting Associate Professor of Theatre & Drama...

A journey through an artist's quest for success, deep dive into substance abuse, family tragedy, and ultimate triumph. By the mid-1980s, singer-songwriter John Hiatt had been dropped from three record labels, burned through two marriages, and had fallen deep into substance abuse. It took a stint in rehab and a new marriage to inspire him, then a producer and an A&R man to have a little faith. By F...

Music sampling has become a predominantly digitalized practice. It was popularized with the rise of Rap and Hip-Hop, as well as ambient music scenes, but it has a history stretching back to the earliest days of sound recording and experimental music making from around the world. Digital tools and networks allow artists to sample music across national borders and from diverse cultural traditions wi...

Since the 1970s, there has been a rich, global lineage of broadly guitar-based music scenes which have enacted a political critique of the commercial music industries under the banner of ‘DIY’. DIY music practice has involved taking control of production and distribution processes and lowering barriers to participation and performance, as a form of cultural resistance. In DIY Music and the Politic...

Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie (Bloomsbury, 2022) takes a close look at David Bowie's ambitious last works: his surprise 'comeback' project The Next Day (2013), the off-Broadway musical Lazarus (2015) and the album that preceded the artist's death in 2016 by two days, Blackstar. The book explores the swirl of themes that orbit and entangle these projects from a starting point in m...

Following the Drums: African American Fife and Drum Music in Tennessee (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) is an epic history of a little-known African American instrumental music form. Carefully documenting the music's early uses for commercial advertising and sports promotion, John M. Shaw follows the strands of the music through the nadir of African American history during post-Reconstructi...

Alan John Ainsworth's book Sight Readings: Photographers and American Jazz, 1900-1960 (Intellect, 2022) explores the work of a wide range of American photographers attracted to jazz during the period 1900–60. It includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject, its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did. Whi...

Jeff Hayton's book Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock in East and West Germany (Oxford UP, 2022) is a cultural history of punk in Germany. The manuscript tracks “the advent and growth of punk in divided Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, and the social and political responses to the subculture” (23). These decades witnessed an explosion of alternative culture across divided Germany, and punk was a...

Layla Murad (1918-1995) was once the highest-paid star in Egypt, and her movies were among the top-grossing in the box office. She starred in 28 films, nearly all now classics in Arab musical cinema. In 1955 she was forced to stop acting—and struggled for decades for a comeback. Today, even decades after her death, public interest in her life continues, and new generations of Egyptians still love...

Patti Smith arrived in New York City at the end of the Age of Aquarius in search of work and purpose. What she found—what she fostered—was a cultural revolution. Through her poetry, her songs, her unapologetic vocal power, and her very presence as a woman fronting a rock band, she kicked open a door that countless others walked through. No other musician has better embodied the “nothing-to-hide” r...

In 2005, Tony Perman attended a ceremony alongside the living and the dead. His visit to a Zimbabwe farm brought him into contact with the madhlozi, outsider spirits that Ndau people rely upon for guidance, protection, and their collective prosperity. Perman's encounters with the spirits, the mediums who bring them back, and the accompanying rituals form the heart of his ethnographic account of ho...

In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra boarded a Pan Am 707 plane in Philadelphia for a once-in-a-lifetime journey: a multi-city tour of Maoist China, months after Nixon’s history-making visit.  There was drama immediately after they landed in Shanghai. Chinese officials asked for a last-minute change to the program: Beethoven’s Sixth. After protests that the Orchestra didn’t bring scores with them,...

Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Alexandra M. Apolloni is about how the vocal performances of girl singers in 1960s Britain defined—and sometimes defied—ideas about what it meant to be a young woman. Apolloni takes a case study approach to tease out many different strands of the nature of femininity in 1960s Britain, but she tackles much mor...

In Black Masculinity and Hip-Hop Music: Black Gay Men Who Rap (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), XinLing Li offers an interdisciplinary study of hip-hop music written and performed by rappers who are black gay men. This study examines the storytelling mechanisms of gay themed lyrics, and how these form protests and become enabling tools for (black) gay men to discuss issues such as living on the down-low...

We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs: historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses. Under contemporary capitalism, as the gap between this self-image and reality becomes an ever greater source of soci...

Soul is the most powerful expression of American music--a distinct combination of roots, migration, race, culture, and politics packaged together for your dancing pleasure. But if you thought the sounds of Motown or Stax Records died along with 8-tracks and macramé, you'd be wrong. For two decades, Daptone Records has churned out hard funk and such beautiful soul that these records sparked a music...

Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth-Century North Africa (Stanford UP, 2022) offers a new history of twentieth-century North Africa, one that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa ar...

John Luther Adams's Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is a profound, funny, and enlightening memoir from one of our greatest contemporary composers. Adams describes the process of writing music inspired by the wild landscapes of the far north, pieces with titles like Arctic Dreams, In the White Silence, and Become Ocean. But as much as Silences So Deep is...

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman (Cornell University Press, 2021) is a truly interdisciplinary study. Dr. Thurman’s work sits at the intersection of German Studies, History, and Musicology. Beginning in the 1870s with concerts given by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Singing Like Germans covers a century of Black musicians performing classi...