New Books in Music

What is the punk music scene like in Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, or Mongolia? Who listens to punk in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans? What kind of venues host punk shows? Punk musician and writer Franz Nicolay explores these questions and much more in his Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar(The New Press, 2016). The book chronicles his various tours through Eastern Europe between May 2012 and July 2014. Traveling by himself in a rental car or by train with his wife, Nicolay explores cities and towns with small but devoted punk scenes and describes what he sees in Soviet post-industrial towns. Along the way, he learns what Russian punks think about the Pussy Riot controversy and he experiences first-hand political turmoil in the Ukraine. Blending travel memoir, cultural criticism, and popular music studies, Nicolay’s writing explores the life of a touring musician, the people that they encounter on tour, and his response to what he sees and experiences. The resulting book is insightful, funny, and essential for anyone who wants to learn more about punk in Eastern Europe and the life of a touring musician. Franz Nicolay is a New York musician, who has played with many acts, such as the Hold Steady, Against Me!, and the Dresden Dolls. He is a writer whose work appears at Slate.com and in the New York Times and teaches courses at Bard College. Fans can buy his music, explore his writing, and learn about his performances at his website. Richard Schur, professor of English at Drury University, is the host for this podcast episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

As audio technology has advanced, so has our love-affair with deep bass. Dr. Paul Jasen‘s book, Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2016), probes the much-mythologized field of bass and low-frequency sound. It begins in music but quickly moves far beyond, following vibratory phenomena across time, disciplines and disparate cultural spheres. Dr. Jasen asks what it is about bass that has fascinated us for so long and made it such a busy site of bio-technological experimentation, driving developments in science, technology, the arts, and even religious culture. The guiding question is not so much what we make of bass, but what it makes of us: how does it undulate and unsettle; how does it incite; how does it generate the phenomenon of bodily thought? As one critic puts it, Low End Theory provides us with an ontology of bass. With its focus on sounds structuring agency and the multi-sensory aspects of sonic experience, Dr. Jasen’s work stands to make a transformative contribution to the study of music and sound, while pushing scholarship on affect, materiality, and the senses into fertile new territory. Dr. Paul Jasen received BA in History from Lakehead University, and did his MA in Canadian Studies and PhD in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Currently he is an instructor in Music and Communication Studies at Carleton and teaches courses in digital, visual and audio culture, as well as digital media production. He has a professional background in web/multimedia development and graphic design. And he has also been a DJ, with recordings featured on radio and podcasts in several countries, and a sound designer, having collaborated with architects and cartographers on large-scale multimedia projects. You can find out more about his projects at www.riddim.ca, www.deeptime.net/blog, and soon at his new site apeopleofoscillators.com. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City.   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, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea (Akashic Books, 2017), Danny Goldberg explores the political, social, and cultural influences of 1967–a pivotal year in American history. Goldberg, who graduated from high school in 1967 and was influenced by the cultural of the1960s, presents a subjective history on what he sees as the legacy of 1967 fifty years later. In In Search of the Lost Chord, Goldberg examines not only the music scene of 1967, but the role of psychedelics, hippies, protest culture, Eastern religions and spirituality, politics, the Black Power movement, and activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammad Ali, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Cora Weiss, and Tom Hayden. Goldberg’s book is well researched and informed by interviews of some of the most influential participants during 1967, giving readers a greater understanding of the complexities of this influential time in American culture. 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

What is the role of the deejay in shaping hip-hop? Did deejays shape the technology that is used to create the music or were they simply consumers of mixers, faders, and microphones? What is the relationship between deejays and the manufacturers that produced the technology that made hip-hop possible? Andre Sirois explores these questions in his book, Hip-Hop DJs and the Evolution of Technology: Cultural Exchange, Innovation, and Democratization (which can be downloaded for free here). Sirois is both a scholar and a deejay, and his book brings academic discourse into dialogue with working deejays. Hip-Hop DJs and the Evolution of Technology (Peter Lang, 2016) draws on extensive interviews with the deejays that have shaped hip-hop and the technology manufacturers who made the products behind the deejays. The podcast covers the history of deejays, examining the three legends that are considered the founders of hip-hop: DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash. He looks at how they transformed the role of the deejay through their digging in the crates, the development of deejaying techniques, and how they developed a collaborative ethos among deejays even as they sought to develop their own reputations. Then, Sirois explores other deejays, such as DJ Trix, DJ Craze, the Scratch Hamsters, and the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, who worked with manufacturers, including Vestax and Rane, to produce signature mixers and other equipment. (You can view Sirois’s collection of vintage mixers at djpedia). The podcast also examines the complicated ways that deejays and manufacturers worked together even though few deejays received significant economic benefit from these collaborations. Dr. Andre Sirois, also known as DJ food stamp, is an instructor at the University of Oregon, where he teaches courses on filmmaking and popular culture in the media. He has over 17 years experience as a hip-hop, scratch, club, and radio DJ. His scratches have been featured on numerous artists songs, including the gold-selling single by Spose, “I’m Awesome.” He is one of the founders of DJistory/DJpedia, a non-profit organization and archive dedicated to preserving and telling histories of DJ technology and culture. Richard Schur, Drury University professor of English and Director of the Honors Program, is the host for this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

The legendary band leader Sun Ra said he came from Saturn. Known on Earth for his inventive music and extravagant stage shows, he pioneered free-form improvisation in an ensemble setting with the devoted band he called the “Arkestra,” Sun Ra took jazz from the inner city to outer space, infusing traditional swing with far-out harmonies, rhythms, and sounds. Described as the father of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra created “space music” as a means of building a better future for American blacks here on earth. A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism (University of Texas Press, 2016) offers a spirited introduction to the life and works of this legendary but underappreciated musician, composer, and poet. The book explores and assesses Sun R’as wide-ranging creative output–music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry–and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement, and even space-age bachelor-pad music. By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world. Author Paul Youngquist teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is a professor in the English Department and associate chair of Graduate Studies. His current areas of research focus are British literature, cultural studies, literacy theory, popular culture, film/digital media, and Romanticism. He is the author or editor of six books, including Cyberfiction: After the Future, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, and Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic. Dr. Youngquist now devotes much of his energy to studying the histories written and oral of resistance and creativity in the Caribbean. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Do you love Rock and Roll or is Rock and Roll music dead? Are you old enough to have put any money in a jukebox to hear your favorite song, watched American Bandstand, or spent any hours viewing music videos on MTV? It has been said that music can truly bring people together. Rock music today is universal and its popular history is well known. Yet few know how and why it really came about. Taking a fresh look at events long overlooked or misunderstood, Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll (McFarland, 2016) tells how some of the most disenfranchised people in a free and prosperous nation strove to make themselves heard and changed the world. So where did it all begin? Not where you may think. Describing the genesis of rock and roll, author James A. Cosby covers everything from its deep roots in the Mississippi Delta and The Blues to key early figures, like deejay “Daddy-O” Dewey Phillips and gospel music star Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Also discussed are the importance of country music performers and the influence of the so-called holy rollers of the Pentecostal church who became crucial performers in Rock and Roll’s early years –artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. James A. Cosby is an attorney by day and entertainment writer, book author, and music enthusiast by night. He is a regular contributor on pop culture matters for PopMatters.com as well as other media outlets. Cosby resides in Philadelphia, a great music city, and is currently conducting research for his second Rock and Roll book about the further history of the music genre from the early 1960s through the present day. Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll is his first book. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a “racial democracy” in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2015), Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaeton musicians critique racial democracy’s privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaeton, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaeton’s origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan’s slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaeton, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora. Petra Rivera-Rideau is an associate professor of American Studies at Wellesley University. She earned her B.A. at Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research examines the cultural politics of race in Latin American and Latina/o communities. Rivera-Rideau is primarily interested in how ideas about blackness and Latinidad intersect (or not) in popular culture, especially popular music. In addition to Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, Rivera-Rideau also co-edited Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism the Americas, an interdisciplinary volume that combines academic analysis, personal reflections, interviews, and photography to examine how different ideas about blackness travel across Latin America, the Spanish Caribbean, and the United States. Beyond her book-length works, Rivera-Rideau has also published articles about reggaeton in journals such as Popular Music & Society, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Her current research project explores representations of Latinidad in the Zumba fitness program, tentatively titled Fun, Fitness, Fiesta: Zumba and the Production of Latinidad. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In her new book, Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Anna Harwell Celenza examines the arrival of jazz in Italy after World War I and the role of Mussolini in promoting jazz throughout Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. With the technology of the radio and gramophone, jazz became part of the local music culture and ethnic and national identities were not viewed across the new mediums. In Jazz Italian Style Celenza explores how Italians made jazz their own, creating a genre distinguishable from American varieties and influencing Italian-American musicians. Well researched and documented, Celenza’s work presents a narrative of jazz that is seldom heard and must be remembered. In addition, Celenza uses @JazzItalianStyl to promote Italian Jazz and share some of the music she recovers in her book. 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

What do you know about Houston, Texas? That Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States? That Houston was the home of the 2016 NCAA Final Four in basketball and the home of the NFL’s Super Bowl LI in 2017? That Houston is the home of the world’s largest medical center and is also the hub of the American energy industry? All of the above are true, and even more Houston is noted for its rich diversity of people and blending of cultures. Beginning after World War I, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (University of California Press, 2015) draws on social and cultural history to show how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations particularly those of Mexicans from across the border and Creoles from Louisiana complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race. This migration history also uses music and sound to examine these racial complexities, tracing the emergence of Houston’s blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics. Houston Bound is both an innovative historiography about migration and immigration in the twentieth century as well as a critical examination of a city located in the former Confederacy. Author Tyina L. Steptoe is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arizona. Her work focuses on the cultural and social history of the United States especially race, ethnicity, and gender. After Houston Bound, her current research concerns how rhythm and blues performers Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Little Richard subverted and challenged gender norms in the 1950s. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In Mozlandia: Morrissey Fans in the Borderlands (Headpress, 2016), Melissa Hidalgo examines the world of Morrissey fandom in US-Mexico borderlands. As the frontman of The Smiths, Morrissey is regarded as one of the most influential and iconic musical performers to come out of the Manchester music scene. Yet, for the past three decades, Morrissey has made a name for himself as a solo performer, with committed and passionate fans across the world. As a solo performer, Morrissey has a larger fan base in borderland cities such as Los Angeles, the focus of Hidalgo’s work. In Mozlandia, Hidalgo deftly unpacks fandom, specifically as it plays out with Chicano/a, Latino/a, and Mexican fans. Hidalgo presents the ways in which fans contribute to the Morrissey community through MorrisseyOke, tribute bands, radio shows, plays and other literary tributes. By situating her work in the borderland city of Los Angeles, Hidalgo is able to present what a fan community looks like and the variety of ways fan culture is enacted. A fan of Morrissey herself, Hidalgo effectively weaves an academic lens with a true tribute book to Morrissey and his fan. 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