New Books in Music

I Was Britpopped: The A-Z of Britpop (Valley Press, 2017) is a comprehensive guide to the people, the bands, the places, and the events that shaped British music in the mid-to-late 1990s. Taking on the form of a A-Z guide, the book doesn’t gloss over even the most remote B-Side or bands who only fleetingly played a role in the genre. Every entry is carefully researched and expertly written to paint a picture of a music scene that was at once full of some of the most creative and inspirational individuals of a generation and trendy chancers wanting a bit of fame and some quick cash. The Britpop scene flashed before our eyes, yet it still lingers in the collective souls of those that lived it. Authors Jenny Natasha and Tom Boniface-Webb grew up in the nineties and experienced the Britpop scene first hand. They met while they were both band members of the indie rock band the Requiems. Originally hailing from Wales, Jenny experienced the music of the early nineties with her group of girlfriends who saw Oasis perform at Knebworth in 1996. She was given a guitar for her sixteenth birthday, which led her to join various bands in London, where she resides. She currently works at MTV in Camden town. Tom Boniface-Webb was born in southeast England and destined for a life of music. He learned how to play the guitar at fifteen and played in a number of bands throughout the nineties and noughties. Today he is a writer and filmmaker living in New Zealand with his wife. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer and author of several books on the subjects of film and popular culture. He lives in Ontario, Canada. Follow him on Twitter @riffsandmeaning.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Richard Power Sayeed’s book, 1997: The Future that Never Happened (Zed Books, 2017), is a brilliant and exhaustively researched account of the late 1990s. The subject matter covered is broad. From music to politics, from feminism to the media, it paints a picture of an era in which those living and invested in British society never had it so good. The outlook was sunny, yet this positive future never materialised. Richard Power Sayeed is a writer and documentary maker based in London. 1997: The Future that Never Happened his first book, and he has somehow managed to finish it without losing his love for the minutiae of nineties Britain. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer and author of several books on the subjects of film and popular culture. He lives in Ontario, Canada. Follow him on Twitter @riffsandmeaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Often, poetry and punk rock are seen as distinct activities that occur in different locations with separate audiences. Many would also ascribe to them varying levels of cultural and political capital. Daniel Kane, the author of Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2017) challenges these notions and explores the interaction between the New York Schools of Poetry and early punk music. In this podcast, we discuss how poets, such as Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, affected the writing and careers of Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. We also explore how punk rock, in turn, shaped the work of Elaine Myles and Dennis Cooper. Kane’s work helps re-map the relationships between poetry and punk rock. Daniel Kane is Professor in English and American literature at the University of Sussex in Brighton. His books include We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry (2009) and All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (2003). The host for this episode is Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University. He is the author of Parodies of Ownership: Hip Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law and the co-editor of African American Culture and Legal Discourse. 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, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Cultural Studies scholar Joel Dinerstein explores the cultural history of cool and the codes that defined the style and attitude of this relatively new concept. Using cultural icons such as Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Albert Camus, Billie Holiday, Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando, Miles Davis, and Lorraine Hansberry to name a few, Dinerstein weaves an image of cool in the 1940s and 1950s as it intersects jazz, film noir, literature, and existentialism. Well researched and compellingly written, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America examines the ways in which popular culture works to define cool throughout the Cold War. Dinerstein’s work interrogates cool, presenting the way in which individuals show how cool is a way of rebellion and resistance against racism or other cultural and social norms. Cool brings a hope to individuals during cultural shifts that Dinerstein presents in this thorough and thoughtful exploration into cool and the icons who exuded the term. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in people’s lives. 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

At the close of the nineteenth century, Europe was teeming with apocalyptic dreams of destruction and renewal. In Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), Rebecca Mitchell traces how in late imperial Russia, music came to be seen as a transcendent force that offered salvation from the era’s atmosphere of decadence and decline. At the turn of the century, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy became a major inspiration for cultural elites looking for a solution to the problems of modernity. Nietzsche’s Russian orphans adapted the adamantly amoral German writer to suit their context, combining his belief in the transformative power of music with the visions of Orthodox philosopher Vladimir Solovev. Russian music lovers launched a search for the national Orpheus, alternately advancing Aleksander Scriabin, Nikolai Medtner, and Sergei Rachmaninoff as the chosen one. These figures differed in their engagement with musical metaphysics. While Scriabin reveled in his role of prophet and endeavored to create a musical Mystery that would mark the end of history, Rachmaninoff largely avoided philosophical musings; in a conversation with the Medtner brothers, he preferred to discuss Italian pasta. Rachmaninoff’s mass popularity was met with disapproval by some of Nietzsche’s orphans, who thought that his melancholic works reveled in the problems of the age rather than solving them. Their dreams for national salvation through music disintegrated amidst the chaos of war and revolution, and major composers including Rachmaninoff emigrated. However, Mitchell argues that their ideas found new life in the Bolshevik state, the Russian diaspora, and the post-Soviet search for national identity. Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project explores the role of death in Soviet culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

How do women experience and participate in Metal? This question forms the core of Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), the new book from Rosemary Lucy Hill, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Leeds. Hill’s book is both empirically detailed, drawing on analysis of Metal media, and theoretically rich, engaging with a range of work on music and gender. The book outlines the imagined community of Metal, thinking through the myths underpinning that community. By exploring myths of equality and authenticity, along with the problematic tropes of “warriors” and “groupies,” the analysis makes clear the gendered tensions of Metal fandom.The book concludes with some thoughts on how to build a new cultural vision for Metal, which will realize the promise of egalitarianism offered in much of the community and in the music. It will be essential reading across sociology, music, and media studies, as well as for all Metalheads too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

What is the labor for Black soldiers of the regiment? That is the question Johari Jabir asks in his book Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army” (Ohio State University Press, 2017). Conjuring Freedom analyzes the songs of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of Black soldiers who met nightly in the performance of the ring shout the counterclockwise song, dance, drum, and story in African American history and culture. Conjuring Freedom reflects the ring shout structure. Jabir illustrates three new concepts to cultural studies to describe the practices, techniques, and implications of the troop’s performance. First, Black Communal Conservatories, borrowing from Robert Farris Thompson’s “invisible academies” to describe the structural but spontaneous quality of black music-making. Then Listening Hermeneutics that accounts for the generative and material effects of sound on meaning-making. And finally Sonic Politics, which points to the political implications of music’s use in contemporary representations of race and history. The book discusses the meaning of conjure as a political and epistemological practice. Jabir demonstrates how the musical performance allowed troop members to embody new identities about national citizenship, militarism, and masculinity in more inclusive ways. Jabir also establishes how these musical practices of the regiment persisted long after the Civil War in Black culture, resisting, for instance, the paternalism and co-operative state anti-racism of the film Glory, and the assumption that Blacks need to be deracinated to be full citizens. JOHARI JABIR, a practicing musical artist since age eight, serves as Associate Professor of African American Studies for the Department of African American Studies College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at The University of Illinois at Chicago. He frames his courses, African American introductory course, religious traditions, history, and music, using music as an epistemological frame. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Philosophers have long tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. But voices resonate among bodies and texts; they are singular, as unique as fingerprints, but irreducibly collective too. They are material, somatic, and musical. Voices also give body to concepts that cannot exist in abstraction, essential to sense yet in excess of it. They complicate the logos of the beginning and emphasize the enfleshing of all words. Karmen MacKendrick’s The Matter of Voice: Sensual Soundings (Fordham University Press, 2016) explores all this and more through theology and philosophy, pedagogy, translation, and semiotics. It is a beautifully written and challenging book. Karmen MacKendrick is Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Jennifer Fleeger‘s Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine (Oxford University Press, 2014) tells the story of women in film and their representation as aberrations, but also as moments of emancipation and agency. Fleeger’s book discusses exceptional voices such as Kate Smith, known as the First Lady of Radio; Deanna Durbin, whose soprano voice allegedly saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy, Susan Boyle the woman who shocked Britain’s Got Talent jury and public to the point of tears, amongst many others. Fleeger’s approach broadens the traditionally cinematic context of feminist psychoanalytic film theory to account for literary, animated, televisual, and virtual influences. All the songs played in this episode are available on the books companion website, available here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Adriana Helbig saw African musicians rapping in Ukrainian and wearing embroidered Ukrainian ethnic costumes. Her curiosity about how these musicians came to be performing during the protests led to her study of immigration, integration and identity in Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (Indiana University Press, 2014). Through interviews with hip hop musicians and African immigrants in Ukraine, Helbig explores multi-valent racial imaginaries connected with U.S. hip hop and black identity construction through music. She also traces how Africans and Ukrainians both construct these identities by conducting research in Uganda, the home country of a number of African Ukrainian musicians. Multimedia resources for Hip Hop Ukraine are available through Indiana University Press Ethnomusicology Multimedia. Adriana Helbig is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. She directs the Carpathian Music Ensemble and is affiliated faculty in Global Studies and the Center for Russian and East European Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music