New Books in Music

Timothy Hampton's Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (Zone Books, 2020) is a fascinating and meticulous study of Bob Dylan's songwriting craft. Hampton discusses how Dylan incorporated and then transcended the Greenwich Village folk music tradition, how he reinvented himself as a visionary poet in the mid sixties, how he learned from poets as diverse as Rimbaud, Brecht, and Petrarch, and how his late-career work draws on and extends the themes he's been pursuing for his whole life. Hampton's book is written in a clear and accessible style and should appeal to anyone interested in the technique of this master songwriter.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head.By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, Can Music Make You Sick?: Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition (University of Westminster Press, 2020) proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions.Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In his new book, We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America (Oxford UP, 2020), Kevin Mattson documents punk rock in the early 1980s through a comprehensive look into the music, zines, films, bands, and punk Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics. He shows how widespread the punk movement was in creating a counterculture that challenged the conservative narrative of 1980s America. Mattson places the punk countercultural movement into the wider context of Reagan’s America and the cultural war that his presidency created. In opposition to Reagan’s panic narratives of nuclear wars, his tax cuts for the rich, and cuts to public education and other social services, punks saw themselves as everything they rejected about the US. Mattson’s extensive archival research into the punk counterculture makes for an informative and captivating read into the larger ways in which punk impacted American cultural identities and challenged 1980s conservativism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

CAN you hear the people sing? Political music is often understood as the property of the common people, used as a potent (and noisy) weapon against the interests of the powerful. This is particularly true within the unruly context of the early American republic, when rowdy public demonstrations typically went along with democratic politics.In Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865 (UNC Press, 2020), Billy Coleman pushes back against such assumptions, revealing an influential strand of conservative music-making that exerted influence on public life from the beginning of Washington’s government until the Civil War. Tying musical practice to visions of natural hierarchy, an intergenerational group of elites employed tempo and melody in an effort control the disorder they saw threatening the nation. Expanding our understanding of both the cultural and political dynamics of the early republic, Coleman provides a deft and theoretically innovative account of an underexamined intellectual tradition, challenging numerous assumptions about the meaning and importance of music along the way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In 1985, Greg Mack, a DJ working for Los Angeles radio station KDAY, played a song that sounded like nothing else on West Coast airwaves: Toddy Tee’s “The Batteram,” a hip hop track that reflected the experiences of a young man growing up in 1980s Compton. The song tells about the Los Angeles Police Department’s battering ram truck, an emblem of the city under Police Chief Daryl Gates, and which terrorized largely African American neighborhoods across Los Angeles under his watch. In To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America (Harvard UP, 2020), historian at San Francisco State University Felicia Angeja Viator describes how rap leapt across the continent from its New York roots in the mid-1980s and took hold in Los Angeles. Often gaining popularity by word of mouth and mobile DJ parties, local groups like NWA pioneered a new, harder-edged, style of hip hop music that reflected their experiences as youth growing up in Gates era LA. Viator explains how the rapid rise of West Coast rap became engulfed in the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s and shaped perceptions of the 1992 LA uprising. When gangsta rap hit the American mainstream in the early 90s, the artform changed the face of popular music and American culture forever.For a playlist of songs featured in To Live and Defy in LA, see the following link.Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Born around 1820, Augusta Browne was a pianist, organist, composer, music pedagogue, entrepreneur, music critic, and writer. In Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2020), author Bonny Miller contextualizes the life and career of this remarkable woman who built a public career that at times seems at odds with her conservative Christian belief system. Browne spent much of her life in New England and the area around Washington, D.C. and had a regional reputation by the time of her death in 1882. Miller uses Augusta Browne as an example at once of an extraordinary woman who was involved in establishing nineteenth-century musical culture in the US, but also an ordinary woman whose experiences were typical of people in that era—the loss of loved ones, the trauma of the Civil War, the pain of dislocation and living through financial hardship, the comfort of deep religious belief, and the joys of marriage and a close family. In Miller’s hands, Brown’s life and career becomes a way to examine antebellum American culture through the lens of a peripheral figure perfectly placed to understand music making among middle-class Northern women.Bonny H. Miller is in independent scholar who holds master’s and doctoral degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. She has taught piano and music history at universities in Missouri, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia. Her essays also appear in Beyond Public and Private: Re-Locating Music in Early Modern England and Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music.Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson's Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Duke UP, 2020) is an engaging and interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary black popular culture and how to think about this broad and diverse landscape, especially in relation to power, capitalism, gender identity, and presidential politics. Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson have pulled together a fascinating array of scholars of popular culture, cultural critics, as well as those who have produced popular artifacts. A number of the cultural voices in Are You Entertained? are presented in interviews at the end of each section of the book, with artists thinking through questions about black popular culture from an expansive perspective as a maker of art and as someone who creates within the context of politics, economics, and culture. Are You Entertained? is a dynamic, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary analysis of contemporary shifts, trends, and debates within the context of seeing and understanding black popular culture.The book is divided into four thematic sections that pull together chapters that speak across academic disciplines and cultural artifacts to focus on the topics of “Performing Blackness,” “Politicizing Blackness,” “Owning Blackness,” and “Loving Blackness.” This approach weaves together the conversations in each chapter in an organic fashion, pulling together conceptual ideas as well as providing the reader with deep dives into films, music, television, visual art, theater, advertising, fashion, web series, and more. Embedded within the book are not only scholarly analyses of different kinds and sites of popular culture, but also images of fine art that are critiqued in context and extend the discussion of what the “pop” in popular culture means when discussing different forms of art and culture. Drake and Henderson have assembled authors and analysis that take the reader on an enlightening journey not only through popular culture artifacts, but also complex conversations about commodification, capitalism, and consumerism, and the tension between art and profit. The idea for this edited volume was to trace how and where black culture (high, low, popular) has moved from the margins to the mainstream, and what this means in terms of artistic ownership. Within this stream of analysis, there is the enduring dynamic that often surrounds black art and production, which centers around the unequal treatment and consumption, in all dimensions, of black art. This book not only takes up the question of black popular culture in the 21st century, but also provides the reader with actual engagement with art and critique, an experiential and academic undertaking for both the reader and the authors/editors.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In his new book, Memoir of a Roadie: Axl said I made a great Cup of Tea…Scott Weiland liked The Carpenters…and Ozzy Drinks Rosé (2020) Joel Miller recounts his time in the early 2000s as a road for Stone Temple Pilots, Guns N’ Roses, Poison, and The Cranberries. Using his journal entries from being on the road, Miller shares what it was like for a young man in his early 20s to be on the road, learning about what it meant to be a roadie. Often humorous and also thoughtful, Miller brings readers into the backstage world of the hardworking crews that make sure performances and tours go on without a hitch (or at least without a hitch for the fans). Although the book does share insight into some of the biggest names in rock-n-roll during the time Miller was a roadie, the focus on the day to day life and Miller’s attempt at trying to navigate the world during this time is what readers will find most interesting.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/music

How do we distinguish art from non-art artifacts, and what does cognitive science have to do with it? In Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2020), William Seeley offers a cognitive science-based account of how we engage with art, what it is that artworks do, and what artists do to make sure they do it. In his diagnostic recognition framework for locating art, artworks are communicative devices in which artists embed perceptual cues that enable the perceiver to categorize the work as intended and thereby unlock its meanings. Seeley, an associate professor at the University of Southern Maine, also considers how his framework might handle conceptual art, what goes wrong when a novice about art perceives an artwork, and the relation between the neuroscience of art and neuroaesthetics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Farzaneh Hemmasi is the author of Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California's Iranian Pop Music (Duke UP, 2020). The title obviously refers the song "California Dreamin'," but in this case the "Dreaming" refers to the active imagining, or reimagining, of Iranian and Persian identity by the artistic community that relocated to southern California following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In our discussion, Farzaneh and I discuss the history of popular music in Iran, the correlation between notions of morality and music in general, and women's voices in particular, and the kind of cultural output that is generated by an artistic community in a highly-politicized and not impoverished diaspora. We talk about a couple of the artists she highlights in her book, Googoosh and Dariush Eghbali, and discuss their personal and political messages, as well as Farzaneh's personal experience of their music.Professor Farzaneh Hemmasi is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music