New Books in Music

Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power (U Chicago Press, 2019), Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for black America’s future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like “We’re a Winner” and “I Plan to Stay a Believer.” Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago’s homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago’s black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization.Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil. Aaron Cohen covers the arts for numerous publications and teaches English, journalism, and humanities at City Colleges of Chicago. He is the author of Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace."Aaron Cohen 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, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. 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/music

Nancy Barile shares her love of hardcore punk in her new memoir, I'm Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises and All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion (Bazillion Points, 2022). From disaffected Catholic schoolgirl and glam maniac to instigator on the 1980s hardcore punk scene, Barile discovered freedom at a time when punk music was new and dangerous. She made her place behind the boards and right in the front row as insurgents such as SSD, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, the Dead Kennedys, and Black Flag wrote new rules and made history. She survived punk riots and urban decay, ran the streets with outcasts, and ultimately found true love as she fought for fairness and found her purpose. Her memoir archives her first-hand experiences in the early Philadelphia punk scene and forefronts the role of women in the scene. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Has the internet really been the main culprit behind the upheaval of the contemporary media industries? In Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars (MIT Press, 2021), Professor Amanda Lotz provides a rebuttal to persistent myths about disruption across the mediascape of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Through a granular reading of four media industries – newspapers, recorded music, film and television – Lotz demonstrates that the internet has had diffuse and divergent effects in each, none of which are adequately explained through simplistic narratives of piracy or cannibalism. Lotz suggests that the speed and scale of reconfiguration in these industries has stemmed more from built up consumer demand and business (mal)practices, often with deep historical roots, which have only then been catalysed by the advent of the internet.Alongside laying out what we often get wrong about the internet and the media industries, Lotz provides detailed analyses of those media businesses which managed to negotiate this tumultuous period successfully. Media Disruption helps us understand how the media industries got to where they are today and provides valuable lessons for those seeking to weather disruptions to come.Professor Amanda Lotz works at the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Randall J. Stephens is an Associate Professor of British and American Studies at the University of Oslo. He previously taught at Northumbria University (Newcastle upon Tyne) and Eastern Nazarene College (Quincy, Massachusetts). He is a historian of religion, conservatism, the South, environmentalism, and popular culture. He is the author of The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Harvard University Press, 2008); The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, co-authored with physicist Karl Giberson (Harvard University Press, 2011); and editor of Recent Themes in American Religious History (University of South Carolina Press, 2009). His latest book is The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll (Harvard University Press, 2018). Stephens has written for the Atlantic, Salon, the Wilson Quarterly, Christian Century, the Independent, History Today, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and the New York Times. He has been interviewed for news and culture programs on the BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera, KBYU-FM 89.1, Austrian Youth Radio, and NPR. Stephens is one of the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020) Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.Holiday Powers is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Why do corporations fund cultural organisations and events? In Black Culture, Inc: How ethnic community support pays for corporate America Patricia Banks, Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College, explores the role of corporate funding in shaping cultural life, from historical examples of tobacco advertising and media, through to contemporary social media businesses’ presence at music festivals. The book draws on a wealth of examples and scholarship on Black culture in America, alongside analysis of diversity policy and practices. Most crucially, the book introduces the idea of ‘diversity capital’, showing the costs of corporate influence on culture, as well as the ambivalence and enthusiasm of cultural producers and audiences. Moving beyond simple explanations and analysis of race, corporate funding, and culture, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the arts today.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In the late ’90s, third-wave ska broke across the American alternative music scene like a tsunami. In sweaty clubs across the nation, kids danced themselves dehydrated to the peppy rhythms and punchy horns of bands like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish. As ska caught fire, a swing revival brought even more sharp-dressed, brass-packing bands to national attention. Kenneth Partridge's Hell of a Hat: The Rise of '90s Ska and Swing (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) dives deep into this unique musical moment.Prior to invading the Billboard charts and MTV, ska thrived from Orange County, California, to NYC, where Moon Ska Records had eager rude girls and boys snapping up every release. On the swing tip, retro pioneers like Royal Crown Revue had fans doing the jump, jive, and wail long before The Brian Setzer Orchestra resurrected the Louis Prima joint. Drawing on interviews with heavyweights like the Bosstones, Sublime, Less Than Jake, and Cherry Poppin' Daddies—as well as underground heroes like Mustard Plug, The Slackers, Hepcat, and The New Morty Show—Kenneth Partridge argues that the relative economic prosperity and general optimism of the late ’90s created the perfect environment for fast, danceable music that—with some notable exceptions—tended to avoid political commentary.An homage to a time when plaids and skankin’ were king and doing the jitterbug in your best suit was so money, Hell of a Hat is an inside look at ’90s ska, swing, and the loud noises of an era when America was dreaming and didn’t even know it.Looking for the bands Partridge didn't get to highlight in the book? You can find his writing about them on his Substack. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

El Sistema is Venezuela's large scale classical music education program for poor and working class people on the economic, social, and physical margins. In Sonorous Worlds: Musical Enchantment in Venezuela (University of Michigan, 2021), anthropologist Yana Stainova follows the lives of musicians in examining the effects of the program on individuals and communities. Through conversations and interactions with musicians during music lessons, performances, and during their daily lives, Stainova finds that classical music education opens up a space to dream and makes possible different futures than those generally available to working class youth. Stainova theorizes that musicians engage in enchantment, which arises from, for example, the music itself, the labor of musical practice, and the relations between people and their instruments. Yet, enchantment also exceeds these components and gives way to escape, rupture, and resistance to power structures. Stainova examines these matters as Venezuela falls into violence from economic and governmental crisis. During our discussion we talked about the arguments of the book, the writing and structure of the book, and conducting field research in the circumstances described above. Yana Stainova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In his fascinating and riveting new book Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism (NYU Press, 2021), historian Richard Brent Turner tells a moving though rarely discussed narrative of the intersection and cross-pollination between Jazz and African American Islam from the 1940s to the 1970s. How did Islam and conversion to Islam inform the lives, careers, and musical productions of prominent jazz musicians in this period? And how did jazz spaces and culture provide the fodder for important African American Muslim movements and figures, such as the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X? Turner addresses these and other questions with profound historical depth and analytical ingenuity. Over the course of this book, the reader learns about such enormously interesting themes as the landscape of African American politics during the interwar period and beyond in major Northeastern cities (especially Boston), the intimate relationship between Jazz and the Ahmadiyya, the relationship between John Coltrane and Malcolm X, and the encounter of Jazz with Black internationalism. This lucidly written book will also animate great discussions in the classroom.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Dr. Francis Stewart completed her doctoral thesis on punk rock as a surrogate for religion, with a particular emphasis on Straight Edge punk, in 2011 at the University of Stirling.Within the thesis, Stewart examined the notions of community, authenticity, integrity, DIY, and salvation. She also engaged with the connections between music and the expression of emotions, particularly those emotions which are deemed socially 'undesirable' or 'negative'. She also engaged with the question of what do we mean by the terms 'religious', 'spiritual' and 'faith'.Her book, Punk Rock is My Religion: Straight Edge Punk and 'Religious' Identity, is out now from Routledge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music