New Books in Music

What is Ska music? This is a deceptively complicated question. In this podcast Heather Augustyn, the author of Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation(Scarecrow Press, 2013) discusses ska’s journey from a local music in 1950s and 1960s Jamaica, its journey to Great Britain and its fusion with punk and other 1970s musical forms, and then its arrival and dissemination across the United States in the 1980s and...

S. Duncan Reid has written a meticulously researched and detailed account of the performances and recording career of Bay Area-raised and small group Latin-jazz innovator and vibraphonist Cal Tjader. Tjader’s high-energy yet lyrical and melodic playing introduced new demographics of jazz listeners to the soulful sound of Latin jazz for four decades beginning in the 1940s and ending with Tjader’s u...

The last few decades has seen a turn toward traditional forms of American music; call it Americana, alternative country, or a new folk revival. In “I Hear America Singing”: Folk Music and National Identity (Temple University Press, 2014), Rachel Clare Donaldson, an independent scholar based in Baltimore, offers a history of the first folk revival, tracing it from the early twentieth century into t...

Academics don’t pay enough attention to class. And when we do, too often we only magnify the tendency for working class subjects to be defined according to middle class norms; and according to those norms, they, not surprisingly, fail in one way or another, justifying their position beneath the middle class. There are many unfortunate consequences of this dynamic. Among them, we seldom see what’s...

Who are the Clash? How did they become the “only band that matters”? In this podcast, Randal Doane, the author of Stealing All Transmissions: A Secret History of the Clash (PM Press, 2014), discusses the American context of the Clash’s popularity and their generally positive reception by FM free form deejays and rock critics. The podcast covers a lot of ground, including what Lou Reed was like as...

What are female fans of popular music seeking and hearing when they listen to music and attend concerts? In an innovative and fascinating study entitled Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos (The Scarecrow Press, 2013) Adrienne Trier-Bieniek goes inside the fan culture that surrounds Tori Amos and examines why her music appeals to her fans and how they make meaning of...

On November 29, 1957, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday, Zoot Sims, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and a multi-talented young R&B player who played jazz that night, Ray Charles, and others played a benefit concert for the Morningside Recreation Center at Carnegie Hall. Almost a half a century later, these recordings, intended to be played on radio Voice of America, were found in the Library of Congress...

Since the 1990s, the music industry has been going through a massive transformation. After World War II, the primary way audiences participated in the music business in the period between 1945 and 1990 was by purchasing records and attending concerts. The internet and the mp3 file, however, have changed how people are listening to music. In Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy: Problems and Pr...

During his lifetime, Michael Jackson became a global icon. Michael Jackson was beloved by millions; his journey began as he became a boy star with The Jackson Five and it culminated with his being crowned the King of Pop, While some of the controversy of his later years along diminished his popularity, Jackson’s status as an icon of American music has never wavered. When he died, there was a treme...

What is the value of music and why does it matter? These are the core questions in David Hesmondhalgh‘s new book Why Music Matters (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). The book attempts a critical defence of music in the face of both uncritical populist post-modernism and more economistic neo-liberal understandings of music’s worth. Hesmondhalgh develops this critical defence of music by exploring its importa...

In 2004, the traditionally Polish-Catholic community of Hamtramck Michigan became the site of a debate over the Muslim call to prayer. Members of the Hamtramck community engaged in a contest about the appropriateness of sound and its intrusion into public space. In Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism (NYU Press, 2014), this example is one of three cases that Is...

The New York-based rock band Living Colour exploded into national consciousness in 1988 after their video for the thunderous “Cult of Personality” went into heavy rotation on MTV. Their album, Vivid, broke into the Billboard Top Ten and sold more than two million copies. A worldwide tour followed, which included Los Angeles dates opening for the Rolling Stones and Guns and Roses. In subsequent yea...

In Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (University of California Press, 2013), Nicholas Harkness explores the human voice as an instrument, and object, and an emblem in a rich ethnography of songak in Christian South Korea. In Songs of Seoul, the voice is deeply embodied. It is also shaped by an aesthetics of progress, as songak singers cultivate a “clean”...

It is a challenge for all musicians to find success in the modern music industry, but women face unique challenges. Cultural narratives shape how female artists get sold to the public and those narratives, in turn, affect how the public consumes the music of these women artists. Kristin Lieb examines the business decisions that shape the careers of female pop artists. Her book, Gender, Branding an...

How did jazz take shape? Why does jazz have so many styles? Why do jazz songs get longer as the twentieth century proceeds? Marc Myers, in his fascinating book Why Jazz Happened (University of California Press, 2014) examines the social and economic forces affected the growth of jazz between 1942 and 1972. Myers considers how the American Federation of Musicians ban on recording in 1942 changes th...

In Vince Guaraldi at the Piano (McFarland Press, 2012),Derrick Bang chronicles San Francisco jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi’s sojourns into the world of jazz from the late 1940s to his untimely death in 1976. Guaraldi, known to most world-wide as the composer and pianist behind the Peanuts’ animated television specials featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy, also played in Woody Herman’s “Third Herd” big...

Today Detroit is down for the count, but as Steve Miller reveals inDetroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in America’s Loudest City (Da Capo Press, 2013), his comprehensive oral history of the city’s rock scene, the Motor City’s musicians never gave up the fight. Based on dozens of interviews with veteran promoters, leading musicians, and Uberfans, Miller’s insightful conversat...

Who is Eminem? Is he a violent misogynist, another “white” performer imitating African American musical styles, or is he something else entirely? In her provocative bookEminem: The Real Slim Shady(Praeger, 2013), Marcia Alesan Dawkins offers a fresh look at Eminem and sees him as a cultural critic, spiritual seeker, and a polyethnic American. Her study examines Eminem’s lyrics closely and helps us...

“…when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on the one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other hand – because Miles was that history.” -Herbie Hancock, 1968 Professor of music and musician/composer Keith Waters at the University of Colorado, Boulder has produced a masterful analysis of the Miles Davis second quintet studio recordings in t...

Videography is a powerful tool for recording and representing aspects of human society and culture, and anthropologists have long used – and debated the use of – video as a tool to study indigenous and traditional peoples. Indigenous people themselves, however, have increasingly turn video towards their own cultural and communal ends, and this indigenous use of video raises its own questions: who...

Conventional wisdom holds that the birth of the rock star came in 1956 with the ascendance of Elvis Presley. Not so, says author Michael Walker, who argues in his page-turning What You Want is in the Limo (Spiegel and Grau, 2013) that in 1973 the Elvis, Chuck Berry and Beatles styled “rock and roll stardom” of the fifties and sixties gave way to “modern rock stardom,” as embodied by the members of...

2013 has been an annus horribilis for thrash metal legends Slayer. In February, Slayer parted ways with longtime drummer Dave Lombardo for the third and likely final time. In May, guitarist Jeff Hanneman died of alcohol-related cirrhosis, after being sidelined for better than two years for a necrotic spider bite. As these events unfolded, journalist D.X. Ferris was hard at work on his latest book...

Thinking about “Noise” in the history and practice of music means thinking in opposites. Noise is both a musical genre, and is not. It both produces a global circulation and emerges from it. It has depended on the live-ness of embodied performance while flourishing in the context of “dead” recordings. In Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press, 2013), David Novak offers...

Before the twentieth century, opera was a kind of cultural glue: it was both a medium of mass-communication, and a powerful shaper and reflector of the popular imagination in the way TV and film are today. In Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing 1770-1900 (Stanford University Press, 2012), Andrea S. Goldman explores the history, urban culture, and gender dynamics of opera in the...

Thomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on saturation culture. Thomas traces the history of self-released audio from its origins in mail-art networks of the 1970s to the present day practice of using antiquated media – the humble cassette tape –...