New Books in Popular Culture

A close look at the lives of working musicians who aren't the center of their stage.Secret (and not-so-secret) weapons, side-of-the-stagers, rhythm and horn sections, backup singers, accompanists—these and other “band people" are the anonymous but irreplaceable character actors of popular music. Through interviews and incisive cultural critique, writer and musician Franz Nicolay provides a portrait of the musical middle class. Artists talk frankly about their careers and attitudes toward their craft, work environment, and group dynamics, and shed light on how support musicians make sense of the weird combination of friend group, gang, small business consortium, long-term creative collaboration, and chosen family that constitutes a band. Is it more important to be a good hang or a virtuoso player? Do bands work best as democracies or autocracies? How do musicians with children balance their personal and professional lives? How much money is too little? And how does it feel to play on hundreds of records, with none released under your name? In exploring these and other questions, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music (U Texas Press, 2024) gives voice to those who collaborate to create and dissects what it means to be a laborer in the culture industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish GIs' expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. By examining the role that popular culture can play in normalizing wartime sexual violence and challenging readers to consider how American society should move beyond pulp conceptions of 'normal' male behavior, Daddis convincingly argues that how we construct popular tales of masculinity matters in both peace and war.Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

This enlightening book reframes the history of hip-hop—and this time, women are given credit for all their trailblazing achievements that have left an undeniable impact on music.First Things First: Hip-Hop Ladies Who Changed the Game (Twelve, 2024), hip-hop is not just the music, and women have played a big role in shaping the way it looks today. First Things First takes readers on a journey through some notable firsts by women in hip-hop history and their importance. Factual firsts like Queen Latifah becoming the first rapper to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Lauryn Hill making history as the first rapper to win the coveted Album of the Year Award at the GRAMMYs, April Walker being the first woman to dominate in the hip-hop fashion game, and Da Brat being the first solo woman rapper to have an album go platinum, and metaphorical firsts like Missy Elliott being the first woman rapper to go to the future. (Trust me, she really did.)There are chapters on music legends like Nicki Minaj, Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige, tv and radio hosts like Big Lez and Angie Martinez, and so many more ladies I would name but I don’t want to spoil the book! There are games, charts and some fire images, too.Altogether, First Things First is a celebration of the achievements of women in hip-hop who broke down barriers and broke the mold. So the next time someone doesn’t have their facts straight on the ladies in hip-hop, you can hit them with “first things first”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Kate Hext is the story of his haunting, told for the first time. Set within the rich evolving context of how the American entertainment industry became cinema, and how cinema become the movies, it reveals how Wilde helped to shape Hollywood in the early twentieth century.It begins with his 1882 American tour, and traces the ongoing popularity of his plays and novel in the early twentieth century, after his ignominious death. Following the early filmmakers, writers and actors as they headed West in the Hollywood boom, it uncovers how and why they took Wilde's spirit with them. There, in Hollywood, in the early days of silent cinema, Wilde's works were adapted. They were also beginning to define a new kind of style -- a 'Wilde-ish spirit', as Ernst Lubitsch called it -- filtering into the imaginations of Lubitsch himself, as well as Alla Nazimova, Ben Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein and many others. These were the people who translated Wilde's queer playfulness into the creation of screwball comedies, gangster movies, B-movie horrors, and films noir.Wilde and his style embodied a spirit of rebellion and naughtiness, providing a blue-print for the charismatic cinematic criminal and screwball talk onscreen. Wilde in the Dream Factory revises how we understand both Wilde's afterlife and cinema's beginnings.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

From the time he began recording with the Velvet Underground in the 1960s until his death in 2013, Lou Reed released nearly 50 original albums. In Sweet, Wild and Vicious: Listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground (Trouser Press Books, 2024), Jim Higgins delves into each one, with descriptions, details, analysis and appraisals that will amplify and expand fans' understanding and appreciation of them.This listener's guide is personal as well as definitive, a thoughtful consideration of Reed's entire career from the perspective of a devoted follower able to separate the highs from the lows.Jim Higgins is arts and books editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a former pop music and jazz critic for the Milwaukee Sentinel. He is a two-time winner of Wisconsin Area Music Industry award for music journalist of the year and twice won the Sentinel staff-voted award for humor writing. Like Andy Warhol, he is a native of Pittsburgh.Jim on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America: Music, Satire, & the Battle Against the Christian Right (LSU Press, Spring 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

F*ck The Army! How Soldiers and Civilians Staged the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War (NYU Press, 2024) offers a comprehensive history of the FTA, an antiwar variety show featuring Jane Fonda that played to tens of thousands of active-duty troops over nine months in 1971. From its conception, the civilian-led show was directed towards making visible the growing antiwar movement organized GIs, inspired by but also acting as a rebuttal to the USO tours presented by Bob Hope. Through an analysis of the FTA’s tactical performances of solidarity and resistance, Lindsay Goss brings into view the theatrical dimensions of the GI movement itself, revealing it as representative of the revolutionary and theatrical politics of the period.Dr. Lindsay Goss is a theater historian, artist, and lecturer in English and Theater Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her work explores how popular discourses of authenticity and identity rely upon historical anxieties about the actor in proximity to politics, and how these anxieties shape the fields of theater history, activism, and contemporary performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

From the inception of cinema to today’s franchise era, remaking has always been a motor of ongoing film production. Hollywood Remaking: How Film Remakes, Sequels, and Franchises Shape Industry and Culture (U California Press, 2024) challenges the categorical dismissal in film criticism of remakes, sequels, and franchises by probing what these formats really do when they revisit familiar stories. Kathleen Loock argues that movies from Hollywood’s large-scale system of remaking use serial repetition and variation to constantly negotiate past and present, explore stability and change, and actively shape how the film industry, cinema, and audiences imagine themselves. Far from a simple profit-making exercise, remaking is an inherently dynamic practice situated between the film industry’s economic logic and the cultural imagination. Although remaking developed as a business practice in the United States, this book shows that it also shapes cinematic aesthetics and cultural debates, fosters film-historical knowledge, and promotes feelings of generational belonging among audiences.For more on the Hollywood Memories project, go here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left (Akashic Books, 2024) explores how that pivotal slice of time tastes to a bright, obsessive-compulsive boy who is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding school as he reaches the age of thirteen--just as Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band explodes.When he arrives in January 1966, Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for the comforts of home and his family's loving au pair, Teresa. By December 1967, he's mutated into a 6'2? tall rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really high and fly to Nashville.In between--as the hippie revolution blossoms in the world outside--Hitchcock adjusts to the hierarchical, homoerotic world of Winchester, threading a path through teachers with arrested development, some oafish peers, and a sullen old maid--a very English freak show. On the way he befriends a cadre of bat-winged teenage prodigies and meets their local guru, the young Brian Eno.At the end of 1967, all the ingredients are in place that will make Robyn Hitchcock a songwriter for life. But then again, does 1967 ever really end?Robyn Hitchcock is a rock 'n' roll surrealist. Born in London in 1953, he describes his songs as "pictures you can listen to." Hitchcock has floated at a tangent to the mainstream for nearly five decades, and his songs have been performed by R.E.M., the Replacements, Neko Case, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Lou Barlow, Grant-Lee Phillips, Sparklehorse, and Suzanne Vega with the Grateful Dead, among others. Hitchcock lives in London with his wife Emma Swift and two cats, Ringo and Tubby.Robyn on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America: Music, Satire, & the Battle Against the Christian Right (LSU Press, Spring 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

For twentieth-century Jewish immigrants and their children attempting to gain full access to American society, performative masculinity was a tool of acculturation. However, as scholar Miriam Eve Mora demonstrates, this performance is consistently challenged by American mainstream society that holds Jewish men outside of the American ideal of masculinity. Depicted as weak, effeminate, cowardly, gentle, bookish, or conflict-averse, Jewish men have been ascribed these qualities by outside forces, but some have also intentionally subscribed themselves to masculinities at odds with the American mainstream. Carrying a Big Schtick: Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century (Wayne State UP, 2024) dissects notions of Jewish masculinity and its perception and practice in America in the twentieth century through the lenses of immigration and cultural history. Tracing Jewish masculinity through major themes and events including both World Wars, the Holocaust, American Zionism, Israeli statehood, and the Six-Day War, this work establishes that the struggle of this process can shed light on the changing dynamics in religious, social, and economic American Jewish life.Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Jewish stars have longed faced pressure to downplay Jewish identity for fear of alienating wider audiences. But unexpectedly, since the 2000s, many millennial Jewish stars have won stellar success while spotlighting (rather than muting) Jewish identity. In Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy (NYU Press, 2024), Jonathan Branfman offers case studies on six top millennial Jewish stars: the biracial rap superstar Drake, comedic rapper Lil Dicky, TV comedy duo Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, “man-baby” film star Seth Rogen, and chiseled film star Zac Efron.Branfman argues that despite their differences, each star’s success depends on how they navigate racial antisemitism: the historical notion that Jews are physically inferior to Christians. Each star especially navigates racial stigmas about Jewish masculinity―stigmas that depict Jewish men as emasculated, Jewish women as masculinized, and both as sexually perverse. By embracing, deflecting, or satirizing these stigmas, each star comes to symbolize national hopes and fears about all kinds of hot-button issues. For instance, by putting a cuter twist on stereotypes of Jewish emasculation, Seth Rogen plays soft man-babies who dramatize (and then resolve) popular anxieties about modern fatherhood. This knack for channeling national dreams and doubts is what makes each star so unexpectedly marketable. In turn, examining how each star navigates racial antisemitism onscreen makes it easier to pinpoint how antisemitism, white privilege, and color-based racism interact in the real world.Jonathan Branfman is the Eli Reinhard Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Stanford University.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture