Sinopsis
Interviews with Scholars of Music about their New Books
Episodios
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Steve Bergsman, “The Death of Johnny Ace” (Dancing Traveler Publishing, 2012)
24/07/2013 Duración: 01h03minIt’s Christmas Eve at the Houston City Auditorium, 1954, and Big Mama Thornton is belting out “Hound Dog,” her hit from the previous year. It’s the years just before Elvis, before rock and roll, when white and black musics were still segregated, officially at least. But the white kids were catching on to the Rhythm and Blues sounds of cats like Fats Domino, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and, up in his dressing room waiting for his turn on stage, Johnny Ace. Tragically, however, Ace wouldn’t make it to perform. A favorite hand-gun mixed with a tough-guy attitude, a couple of pretty women, and an arch-nemeses lead to death by his own hand; Johnny Ace shot himself this night in a game of Russian Roulette. In The Death of Johnny Ace (Dancing Traveler Publishing, 2012), Steve Bergsman gives a fictionalized account of the years leading up to Ace’s demise: his humble beginnings in Memphis, his mercurial rise to stardom on Duke-Peacock Records, and his final hours in Houston. Joh
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Michael Streissguth, “Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville” (It Books, 2013)
18/07/2013 Duración: 52minIn the late 1960s, Nashville’s recording industry was a hit-making machine. A small clique of writers, producers, engineers and session musicians gave sonic shape to the pop-friendly “Nashville Sound” and generated hit after hit for artists like Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. For up-and-coming artists like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, the same rules regarding creative control applied. Decisions about song choices and production teams would be made by executives at big record labels like RCA and not the artists. By the early 1970s, a rebellion was afoot in Music City. As Michael Streissguth demonstrates in his page-turning Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris and the Renegades of Nashville(It Books, 2013), the commercial ascent of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson coincided with their fierce challenge to the industry’s power structure. In Kristofferson’s case, his 1970 debut album — nurtured and recorded by a production team independent of the Nashville Machin
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D.X. Ferris, “Reign in Blood” (Continuum, 2008)
02/07/2013 Duración: 01h11sBy the fall of 1986, the Los Angeles heavy metal band Slayer had two solid but unspectacular records, 1984’s Haunting the Chapel and 1985’s Hell Awaits, to their name. Meanwhile, producer Rick Rubin had started a record company, Def Jam, in his dorm room in NYU, and after a handful of successful rap releases, was on the lookout for new talent for his label. In a New York City nightclub, he found it in Slayer. D.X. Ferris, in his taut and entertaining 33 1/3 series bookReign in Blood, explains how this seemingly incongruous paring of a rap guru and four speed-metal merchants ended up making rock history with their 1986 thrash-metal release Reign in Blood. Rubin, whose genius has always resided in his ability to help artists capture the essence of their greatness, found the band’s lengthy, more traditional heavy metal songs unappealing. What he liked, Ferris argues, was the faster, heavier, and aggressive aspects of Slayer’s material. This made him a perfect partner for the band’s
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Greg Kot, “Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music” (Scribner, 2009)
25/06/2013 Duración: 01h02minAt the dawn of the twenty first century, the music business looked forward to its sixth decade of monopolistic dominance of the sale and manufacture of recorded music. An industry that once had dozens of labels competing for consumer dollars had become, thanks to a series of mergers, controlled by a small handful of international conglomerates by the late nineties. Similar trends had played out in the commercial-radio and concert industry sectors of the industry. The net result was massive profits for these multinational corporations, and rising prices for compact discs and concert tickets for consumers. Yet as Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot ably and acerbically shows in his page-turning Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music(Scribner, 2009) the landscape of the industry had been utterly transformed within a decade. In 1999, the introduction of the Napster peer-to-peer file sharing service made it possible for anyone with an Internet connection and a computer to download and create a hug
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Howard Marshall, “Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri” (University of Missouri Press, 2012))
18/06/2013 Duración: 01h04minWhat’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin? What about the difference between a hornpipe and a reel, a hoedown and a breakdown? The answer to the former, of course, is that you don’t spill beer on a violin. For answers to the latter, I point you to Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri (University of Missouri Press, 2012) where Howard Wight Marshall details the history and intricacies of a style of music that has endured 200 or so years of cultural migrations, regionalisms, taverns, schools, and contests. Marshall tracks the music as it came to America in colonial times with the French, Scottish, and Irish, but was also played by Germans, African-Americans, and Native Americans. He shows the prevalence of the violin among brigades on both sides of the American Civil War, the influence of musical literacy on the upkeep of the fiddling, and the assimilation of fiddle playing with ragtime and jazz in the early 20th century. All-in-all, Marshall’s text offe
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Steve Waksman, “This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk” (University of California Press, 2009)
06/06/2013 Duración: 57minWhen I was a teenager growing up in the early 80s, I took it as an article of faith that punk rock and heavy metal were definably different genres. To be sure, punk and metal bands both played heavy, loud, and fast music, but beyond those sonic similarities, these groups and their fans seemed to have little in common. When I read heavy metal magazines, metal musicians expressed contempt for punk bands and their purported lack of musical talent. Conversely, when I read the skateboarding magazine Thrasher, punk musicians mocked heavy metal acts for their supposed obsession with instrumental virtuosity. Closer to home, the shorthaired punkers who wore Black Flag shirts and combat boots to school sneered at the longhaired metalheads who donned their Black Sabbathshirts and high-top sneakers. And so my sense of this divide was crystal clear by the time a punk-rock loving friend of mine played the Circle Jerks’ 1985 hardcore punk anthem “American Heavy Metal Weekend” for me, which lampooned metal
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Monica R. Miller, “Religion and Hip Hop” (Routledge, 2012)
03/06/2013 Duración: 01h12minThe relationship between music and religion is a site of increasing interest to scholars within Religious Studies. Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explores the social processes and human activity related to Hip Hop music and its accompanying cultural expressions. In Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012) she introduces us to the various methods that have been used to examine Hip Hop culture and the descriptive terrain of previous scholarship. What is possibly the most laudable aspect of Miller’s efforts are her continued and repeated explorations into the purposes, effects, and operations of theory and method in the study of religion. In this regard, she does not perform a theological or religious analysis of music or lyrics as a search for meaning but rather examines the material productions of Hip Hop culture and the manufactured zones of significance within various discourses. Miller looks at the public context of Hip Hop culture and its relat
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Don McLeese, “Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere” (University of Texas Press, 2012)
23/05/2013 Duración: 01h07minBorn in Kentucky, raised in Ohio, apprenticed in Los Angeles, Dwight Yoakam is not your typical mainstream country music star. Indeed, his honky-tonk style of country has always been a throwback to an earlier era, one in which Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, and Buck Owens ruled the airwaves. It seems an anomaly that Yoakam was at his commercial peak in the days of Garth Brooks and Brooks and Dunn. In Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (University of Texas Press, 2012), music writer Don McLeese details the history of Yoakam and, especially, his music from an early failed attempt at Nashville acceptance to his tooth-cutting days in the L.A. punk and roots music scene of the early 1980s. They key to Yoakam’s success, writes McLeese, was his vision and determination to make it on mainstream country radio, and make it he did. In the late-80’s through the 90’s Yoakam was one of country music’s biggest stars. Importantly, true to his punk rock roots, he did it on his own terms, maki
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Stevie Chick, “Spray Paint the Walls: The Black Flag Story” (Omnibus, 2010)
17/05/2013 Duración: 01h19minScholars commonly trace the rise of the punk rock movement of the mid-1970s to two cities and two bands, New York’s Ramones and London’s The Sex Pistols. In Spray Paint the Walls: The Black Flag Story(Omnibus, 2010), however, journalist Stevie Chick convincingly argues that Black Flag, and Los Angeles, the city that that spawned the seminal group, deserve a place alongside these more storied locales and bands. Chick, who interviewed everyone from early fans to former band members for this engaging book, skillfully traces Black Flag’s development from its suburban garage-band beginnings through its popular peak in the early 1980s, when the Los Angeles Police Department regularly sent officers outfitted in riot gear to disrupt Black Flag’s tumultuous performances and to undermine the growing power of the city’s – and the nation’s – punk movement. Still, as Chick shows, a band whose members at times seemed willing to go to war with everyone and everything surroundi
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Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber, “Becoming Jimi Hendrix” (Da Capo, 2010)
03/05/2013 Duración: 27minAfter his incendiary performance at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix almost immediately went from obscure musician to pop superstar in America. But as Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber reveal in Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius, Hendrix was far from an overnight sensation. Drawing on an impressive research base, the authors have unearthed the early 1960s prehistory of Hendrix’s well-known but all-too-short life in the spotlight. They show that before his artistic and cultural breakthrough Hendrix had worked as a guitar-playing sideman for some of the biggest R & B acts of the 1960s, including Ike and Tina Turner, the Isley Brothers, and the incomparable Little Richard. In doing so, they paint a vivid and compelling portrait of a massively influential musician whose genius did not suddenly emerge after he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966, but rather evolved during endless nights of gigging in b
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Alexandra Hui, “The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910” (MIT Press, 2013)
30/04/2013 Duración: 01h12minIn The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history in a period when musical aesthetics and natural science came together in the psychophysical study of sound in nineteenth century Germany. Though we tend to consider the performing arts and sciences as occupying different epistemic and disciplinary realms, Hui argues that the scientific study of sound sensation not only was framed in terms of musical aesthetics, but became increasingly so over time. The book traces a series of arguments by practitioners of the study of sound sensation as they sought to uncover universal rules for understanding the sonic world: How much epistemic weight ought to be placed on the experiences of an individual listener? What sorts of expertise were relevant or necessary for a sound scientist’s experimental practice? Did musical training matter? Was there a proper way to listen to music? The Psychophysical Ear follows s
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Amanda Weidman, “Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India” (Duke UP, 2006)
30/04/2013 Duración: 01h08minIn Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Duke University Press, 2006) ) Amanda Weidman (scroll down to see her profile) explores how the colonial encounter profoundly shifted the ways South Indian Karnatic music was performed, circulated, and talked about in the twentieth century. The violin became the standard accompanying instrument largely because of the way it could imitate the voice and was seen as modernizing the musical tradition. Karnatic music began to be performed in large concert halls where music reformers expected “pin drop silence” as one would find in European symphony orchestra halls. When musicians published various forms of notation to capture music that had been traditionally passed down orally, new ideas came into being about the composer having sole authorship of a composition. The performers of the music changed as well. Before the early decades of the twentieth century, the only women who could perform South Indian musi
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Laina Dawes, “What are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal” (Bazillion Points, 2012)
25/04/2013 Duración: 01h03minExtreme metal, punk, and hardcore. Slayer. Sick of it All. Cro-Mags. Decapitated. Behemoth. Musically aggressive rock bands with growling vocals and lyrics about annihilation, death, and dismemberment. A genre of music that, even more than more mainstream music genres, seems to be the province of (straight) white males. But wait. In What are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (Bazillion Points, 2012), Laina Dawes examines an overlooked and numerically small segment of the extreme music scene: black women. Putting her sociological training to good use, Dawes presents a macro structural cultural analysis of race in North America (Dawes is Canadian) and how this plays out in the micro-arenas of high school community and heavy metal shows. Using in-depth interviews with a number of black women punk and metal artists including Skin, Sandra St. Victor, Militia Vox, Diamond Rowe, Urith Myree, Tamar-Kali, Ashley Greenwood, Yvonne Ducksworth, Camille Douglas, Alexis Brown, and ot
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Erica Fox Brindley, “Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China” (SUNY Press, 2012)
16/04/2013 Duración: 01h10minErica Fox Brindley‘s recent book explores the centrality of music to early Chinese thought. Making broad use of both received and newly excavated texts, Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (SUNY Press, 2012) offers readers a history of harmony in early China. Brindley shows how the concept was integral to integrating what might otherwise be considered disparate areas – music, the body, and the cosmos – into a system that had ramifications for politics, ethics, and health. Pt. I of the book focuses on the connection between music and the state. Crucially, music was not just reflective of state health in early China, but could causally influence the health of the state and the cosmos. It was treated as a civilizing tool and a mode of cultural unification. Pt. II looks at relationships between music, politics, and religion, paying special attention to how music influenced the emotional, moral, and physical health of individuals. The concept of “music” here i
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Matt Rahaim, “Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music” (Wesleyan UP, 2012)
13/04/2013 Duración: 45minHave you seen North Indian vocalists improvise? Their hands and voices move together to trace intricate melodic patterns. If we think that music is just made of sequences of notes, then this motion may seem quite puzzling at first. But the physical motion of singers reveal that there is much more going on than note combinations: spiraling, swooping, twirling–even moments of exquisite stillness in which time seems to stop. This kinetic aspect of melodic action is the topic of Matt Rahaim‘s new book, Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2012). Rahaim first traces a history of ideas about moving and singing in Indian music, from Sanskrit treatises to courtesan dance performance to the 20th century boom in phonograph recordings. He then leads the reader through vivid melodic and gestural worlds of ragas with illuminating and concise analyses of video data and interviews from years of training in North Indian vocal music, and suggests ways in which melodic
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Nathan Hesselink, “SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
28/03/2013 Duración: 01h18minThe name of the group is deceptively simple: Samul (“four objects”) + Nori (“folk entertainment”) = SamulNori. Nathan Hesselink‘s new book traces the transformations of this complex contemporary Korean drumming ensemble from its first concert in a cramped Seoul basement in 1978 through the 1990s, by which time they had become a prominent media presence in Korea and abroad. SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2012) introduces readers and listeners to the wider history of Korean percussion music. Hesselink locates the roots of SamulNori in itinerant performance culture in Korea, focusing in particular on the namsadang wandering minstrels and their acrobatics, puppetry, and other performing arts in what reads as a wonderful contribution to the broader history of movement and itinerancy in world history. (Fans of the film The King and the Clown [Wang ui namja, 2005] will recognize this category of nams
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Catherine Tackley, “Benny Goodman’s Famous 1939 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert” (Oxford UP, 2011)
19/03/2013 Duración: 39minFeed: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Comic: “Practice!” When I first began to build a jazz record library back in the early 1960s, one particular album stood out. A rare “double-album,” Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert was more akin in appearance to the records in my parents’ classical record collection. The back stories and analyses of the concert, the marketing of the recording 12 years later in 1950, and the subsequent canonization of the concert and recording is the story Catherine Tackley tells in her new book for the Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz Series, Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (Oxford University Press, 2011) Tackley is an extremely busy and talented woman. An academic, musician, writer, teacher, and performer, she adores both the study of and playing jazz. She played Goodman’s songs herself with her big band Dr. Jazz and the Cheshire cats “in a room full of the world’s leadin
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Peter Benjaminson, “Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar” (Chicago Review Press, 2012)
09/03/2013 Duración: 01h04minWho is Motown’s first real star? The answer, of course, is Mary Wells, singer of such classics as “My Guy,” “Bye Bye Baby,” “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Two Lovers,” among others. All of these hits were released in just four years between 1960 and 1969. In Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar (Chicago Review Press, 2012) author Peter Benjaminson chronicles the life of this singular performer from her early days as a young rock ‘n’ roll diva to her last years struggling with cancer. Along the way we learn that Wells was a tireless performer. She never stopped touring, never stopped reaching for the brass ring of financial success that eluded her for much of her career. It seems she never did receive the money she felt she deserved for the songs she released for Motown, while the record company appeared to rake in a handsome profit. She left Motown in 1964, released reco
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Reiland Rabaka, “Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement” (Lexington Books, 2012)
19/02/2013 Duración: 01h06minIn Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (Lexington Books, 2012), the second installment of his hip hop trilogy, Reiland Rabaka again discusses, in great detail, many of the essential historical, musical, aesthetical, political, and cultural movements and moments of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first African America. Building on his overtly Africana, feminist, and queer critical theoretical analyses of black movements in Hip Hop’s Inheritance (the first installment), Rabaka uses a more comparative historical eye in this book to show how (A) there are many aspects of early blues, jazz, bebop, and soul musical movements, especially as they related to other political and cultural movements of their times, that can inform us as to the place of modern rap and neo-soul movements and their relationships with other modern cultural and political movements, and (B) the modern hip hop movement (musical and otherwise) can benefit from an un
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Preston Lauterbach, “The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll” (W. W. Norton, 2011)
15/01/2013 Duración: 58minWhere does rock ‘n’ roll begin? In The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll (W. W. Norton, 2011), Preston Lauterbach makes a strong case for its beginnings in the backwoods and small-town juke joints, fed by big-city racketeering, of the black American South. It begins, possibly, on Indianapolis’s Indiana Avenue where Denver Fergusun ran numbers, paid-off cops, and operated the Sunset Terrace. It begins, maybe, in Houston where Don Robey was the proprietor of the Bronze Peacock, oversaw a network of bars and taverns throughout Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, and was a founder of the seminal Peacock Records. Maybe it began in Memphis, home of W.C. Handy, Beale Street, and the Mitchell Hotel. Or maybe it was the multitude of juke joints that littered the American South from Texas to Florida, Georgia to Chicago, in the 1930s and 40s that afforded artists such as Walter Barnes, Louis Jordan, Little Richard, and Roy Brown a series of non-stop one-nighters to ply their