New Books in Music

If, as John Lennon reportedly stated, “Before Elvis there was nothing,” then after Elvis there had to be something, right? That something, argues Robert Pielke in Rock Music in American Culture: The Sounds of Revolution, 2nd Edition (McFarland, 2012), is a cultural revolution with the expansion of individualism and diversity at its core. Originally published in 1986 as You Say You Want a Revolution, Pielke insists that, rather than being a part of the revolution, rock music was and is the force behind it. All revolutions, writes Pielke, both negate and affirm cultural values. Consequently, Elvis negated existing values of race, sex, and gender while, a few years later, the Beatles affirmed a new set of values to take their place. Included in Pielke’s tale of revolution is an examination of the mediums in which rock music comes: radio, records, film, television, and the internet. In this second edition Pielke extends the revolution through the counter-revolution of the Reagan years and into the twenty-first century. Robert G. Pielke is a retired professor of philosophy and the author of many scholarly articles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and substance abuse leading to an early death. In light of this tendency, Carolyn Burke‘s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Knopf, 2011) serves as a much needed corrective, breathing life back into the chanteuse’s legacy. During her short life Piaf consistently demonstrated an extraordinary boldness- in her relationships, yes, but also in her singing, her spirituality, her artistic collaborations and her commitment to France during World War II. And the music! That voice! “Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” seems to pulse beneath the text of Burke’s book and, reading it, one cannot help but be steered back to Piaf’s records. Burke was undoubtedly conscious of this as it’s where she got her title. “That kid Piaf tears your guts out.” So said Maurice Chevalier after hearing the 19-year-old newcomer sing in a Parisian nightclub. Nearly 50 years after death, as No Regrets proves, she still does. *No Regrets will be available in paperback on April 1, 2012, from Chicago Review Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In Had Me a Real Good Time: Faces Before, During, and After (Omnibus 2011) Andy Neill provides a detailed account of Faces, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed groups of the early seventies. Neill begins his story with biographies of those who would become Faces including, of course, sections about each of their early bands: Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, and Ian “Mac” McLagan with Small Faces; Rod Stewart and Ron Wood with the Jeff Beck Group. The book’s mid-section details Face’s career through four albums and countless tours of England and, essential for their commercial success, the United States. Also included is an analysis of the balance that was sometime kept and sometimes not, between Face’s career and the career of their superstar sfront man, Rod Stewart. Neill devotes the final part of his story to the band’s break-up and the individual members’ post-Faces careers. All-in-all, Neill provides a richly researched history of a band and all the people who went into making their tenure possible. Andy Neill is a music writer, researcher and historian who co-wrote Anyway Anyhow Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of the Who as well as compiling Across the Universe: John, Paul, George, and Ringo on Tour and on Stage. He contributes liner notes for archive projects including the Who’s back catalogue, and is a consultant on numerous music biographies and documentaries. His writing has appeared in Mojo, Record Collector, and Ugly Things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Paul Nelson, the Rolling Stone writer and Mercury Records A & R guy who signed the New York Dolls, is quoted in Kevin Avery‘s Everything is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson (Fantagraphics, 2011) as saying, “I’ve always led my life like it was a work of art and I was in it.” This quote aptly sums up Nelson’s writing style as well as his way of life. Avery presents Nelson’s biography in the first part of the book. It’s a biography of a dedicated loner, someone who shuns the type of mundane relationships most of us have with friends, colleagues, and romantic partners while at the same time clinging desperately to the rock, movie, and literary stars that he wrote about and befriended. In Avery’s biography, Nelson is a man who deeply believed in the idea of the American hero as a maverick: tough, brave, in touch with the essence of what it means to be human, and, importantly, alone. Nelson died in 2006, just as Avery was beginning to write this book. He died alone. The second part of the book is a collection of Nelson’s essays; some published, some never finished (one of Nelson’s habits). These writings originally graced the pages of Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and The Real Paper, among others, and include among them stories about and interviews with the likes of Warren Zevon, Rod Stewart, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls, and Jackson Browne. Nelson’s writing is deeply personal, inviting readers into the relationships he had with the people he wrote about. Avery’s biography similarly invites readers into Paul Nelson’s life, lonely as it was. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

I saw “The Decline of Western Civilization,” Penelope Spheeris’s film documenting the late seventies punk scene in Los Angeles, when it was first released in 1981/82. Performances by the “popular” bands like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, X, and Fear were instantly memorable. I’ve seen the movie many times since, I’ve even shown it in some of the classes I teach. For me one of its more salient moments is the performance of “Gluttony,” by the Bags (called “The Alice Bag Band” in the movie), an homage to food over-indulgence. In Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story (Feral House, 2011), the singer of the Bags, Alice Bag, recounts her involvement in the very beginnings of punk rock in Los Angeles. Alicia (“Alice Douche Bag” is her punk name) tells of her upbringing in East L.A., growing up Chicana with an abusive father, and her obsessions with Elton John, Cosmo, and the academic study of philosophy. Most importantly for our purposes, however, she details the formation of the Bags and their career within an important moment in the history of rock music. Along the way she outlines her relationships with and involvement in a number of important people and places in that nascent scene: Darby Crash, Belinda Carlisle, the Masque, the Canterbury, the infamous Elks Lodge Riot, her brief encounter with Sid Vicious, and, of course, The Decline of Western Civilization all get ample space. Alicia is gratifyingly open and honest in Violence Girl, which is what makes it work as a significant contribution to our understanding of punk rock generally, and punk rock in Los Angeles specifically. Alicia Velasquez now lives in Sedona, Arizona, which is where I reached her for this interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In Rock the Nation: Latin/o Identites and the Latin Rock Diaspora (Continuum, 2010), Roberto Avant-Mier challenges the traditional historical notion of rock and roll and rock being the result of the converging of white and African-American musics only. Instead, he argues, the history of rock is replete with Latin/o culture. Avant-Mier traces the Latin influence in rock back as far as any history of the rock will. Included in his story are the Mexico-based border radio stations listened to by many early blues, country and rock and roll artists, the zoot-suited pachuco culture popular among Latino/as in the 1940s and 1950s, the Latin/o influence on the classic garage rock of the 1960s, the birth of Mexican rock and its relation to Onda literature in the 1970s and eighties, the dearth of Latino/as in the global punk rock movement of the nineties and, finally, a discussion of Latin/o rock in the twenty-first century. Infused within Avant-Mier’s argument is the notion that Latin/o rock is much more than the participation of Mexican-Americans in American rock. It is a cultural movement that spans all of North and South American, calling into question traditional ideas about political and cultural borders. A serious understanding of rock en espanol or rock nacional forces a serious understanding of Latin/o cultures across borders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

From carrier of the folk torch to electric rebel, lyrical genius to literary thief, white-faced minstrel to born-again Christian-Jewish singer of Christmas carols, Bob Dylan is an enigmatic giant of American popular music. In Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday, 2010), historian Sean Wilentz presents Dylan as an artist deeply rooted in the music of America’s past (Copland, Sinatra, Crosby, McTell) while constantly reimagining and remaking its songs to tell fresh stories about its history. Wilentz chooses moments in Dylan’s career that highlight the poignant ways that he borrows from and creates anew the American story: a 1964 concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall, the making of “Blonde on Blonde”, 1975’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour, 2001’s “Love and Theft”, and Dylan’s 2004 memoire Chronicles are a few of the stops on Wilentz’s tour. Wilentz, Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University, has written critically acclaimed books on Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan, and the rise of democracy in nineteenth century America. He is also the historian-in-residence at www.bobdylan.com and was nominated for a Grammy for his liner notes to “Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964–Concert at Philharmonic Hall.” In Bob Dylan in America he applies his considerable analytic skills to understanding Dylan as an artist, and Dylan’s art as deeply embedded in the American experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Hip-hop has, within a short time span, moved from a free-flowing expression of urban youth to a global–and highly marketable–musical genre. Its influence in culture, fashion, film, and music is ubiquitous, and theories about hip-hop’s importance in the political sphere abound. But what, exactly, is the relationship between hip-hop and politics? Does hip-hop influence the expression and formation of political thought? Does it influence the expression and formation of political action? If the influence exists, what are its boundaries? These are some of the questions tackled in Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics by Lester K. Spence. Spence traces the concurrent neoliberal turn in hip-hop and American politics and examines the implications of both for the politics of black Americans. He infuses the narrative of neoliberal transformation with empirical examination of hip-hop’s impact on the political attitudes of the hip-hop generation and of urban youth. Analyzing track lyrics, survey data, and original experiments, Spence theorizes the boundaries of the space in black American life that is occupied by both hip-hop and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

To introduce his book Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion (Duke, 2011),Kevin Fellezs quotes Jeff Beck: “For Christ’s sake, I wish somebody would make up a name for this kind of music, ’cause it ain’t jazz and it ain’t rock.” Beck’s words echo Fellezs’s argument, namely, that 1970’s fusion artists situated themselves in the “broken middle” between already established genres like rock, jazz, and funk. They liberally borrowed elements from many musical styles, often to the dismay of genre purists. Fellezs provides a detailed theoretical discussion of the social construction of genre using fusion as an empirical example of how new genres emerge through the appropriation of elements of those that already exist. Fellezs also shows how our conceptions of genre are intimately linked to our ideas about larger social categories–in this case fusion artists are seen as crossing the racially charged boundaries of jazz and rock. More than half of Birds of a Feather is devoted to discussions of four artists in particular: Tony Williams, John McLaughlin, Joni Mitchell, and Herbie Hancock. Kevin Fellezs is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at University of California-Merced. Beginning January 1, 2012 he will be an Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University in the City of New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

“Before reggae there was rock steady, and before that, ska,” writes Cedella Marley in the foreword to Heather Augustyn’s 2010 book Ska: An Oral History (McFarland, 2010). By way of interviews with dozens of ska musicians, Augustyn traces the history of the music from its Jamaican roots, through its 2Tone revival in 1970’s and 80’s England, to its current regional popularity in the United States. She interviewed Derrick Morgan, Doreen Shaffer, Laurel Aitken, Toots Hibert, Judge Dread, Roddy Radiation, Dave Wakeling, Pauline Black, Kix Thompson, and Buster Bloodvessel to name just a few. The book provides a solid understanding of ska as a music with roots in American jazz and soul mixed with the indigenous music of the Carribean. Augustyn’s interviews also highlight the importance of Jamaica’s status as a former colony in the creation of English ska as well as providing an insight into the music’s reflection of British and Jamaican race and class relations. Most importantly, Ska gives voice to many of the artists responsible for the creation of one of the most enduring musical genres of the last fifty years. Heather Augustyn is a correspondent for The Times of Northwest Indiana. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Village Voice, In These Times, and The Humanist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music