Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading

Contents

• Acknowledgments xiii
• Introduction 1
• I. Collectibles
• The Informer: John Leonard's When the Kissing Had to Stop 11
• Advertisements for Everybody Else: Jonathan Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence 14
• Democratic Vistas: Dave Hickey's Air Guitar 17
• II. From Blackface Minstrelsy to Track-and-Hook
• In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter 23
• The Old Ethiopians at Home: Ken Emerson's Doo-Dah! 40
• Before the Blues: David Wondrich's Stomp and Swerve 43
• Rhythms of the Universe: Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music 46
• Black Melting Pot: David B. Coplan's In Township Tonight! 49
• Bwana-Acolyte in the Favor Bank: Banning Eyre's In Griot Time 56
• In the Crucible of the Party: Charles and Angelilki Keil's Bright Balkan Morning 59
• Defining the Folk: Benjamin Filene's Romancing the Folk 64
• Folking Around: David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street 67
• Punk Lives: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me 70
• Biography of a Corporation: Nelson George's Where Did Our Love Go? 72
• Hip-Hop Faces the World: Steven Hager's Hip Hop; David Toop's The Rap Attack; and Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski's Fresh 75
• Making Out Like Gangsters: Preston Lauterbach's The Chitlin' Circuit, Dan Charnas's The Big Payback, Ice-T's Ice, and Tommy James's Me, the Mob, and Music 80
• Money Isn't Everything: Fred Goodman's The Mansion on the Hill 86
• Mapping the Earworm's Genome: John Seabrook's The Song Machine 89
• III. Critical Practice
• Beyond the Symphonic Quest: Susan McClary's Feminine Endings 97
• All the Tune Family: Peter van der Merwe's Origins of the Popular Style 100
• Bel Cantos: Henry Pleasant's The Great American Popular Singers 102
• The Country and the City: Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City 109
• Reflections of an Aging Rock Critic: Jon Landau's It's Too Late to Stop Now 115
• Pioneer Days: Kevin Avery's Everything Is an Afterthought and Nona Willis Aronowitz's (ed.) Out of the Vinyl Deeps 117
• Impolite Discourse: Jim Derogatis's Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer's A Whore Jus Like the Rest, and Nick Tosches's The Nick Torches Reader 123
• Journalism and/or Criticism and/or Musicology and/or Sociology (and/or Writing): Simon Firth 129
• Serious Music: Robert Walser's Running With the Devil 137
• Fifteen Minutes of . . . : William York's Who's Who in Rock Music 139
• The Fanzine Worldview, Alphabetized: Ira A. Robbins's (ed.) Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records 140
• Awesome: Simon Reynolds's Blissed Out 143
• Ingenuousness Lost: James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin 147
• Rock Criticism Lives: Jessica Hopper's The Fist Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic 151
• Emo Meets Trayvon Martin: Hanif Abdurraquib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us 156
• IV. Lives in Music Inside and Out
• Great Book of Fire: Nick Tosches's Hellfire and Robert Palmer's Jerry Lee Lewis Rocks! 163
• That Bad Man, Tough Old Huddie Ledbetter: Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell's The Life and Legend of Leadbelly 169
• The Impenetrable Heroism of Sam Cooke: Peter Guralnick's Dream Boogie 171
• Bobby and Dave: Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One and Dave Van Ronk's The Mayor of MacDougal Street 178
• Tell All: Ed Sanders's Fug You and Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water 180
• King of the Thrillseekers: Richard Hell's I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp 185
• Lives Saved, Lives Lost: Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl and Patti Smith's M Train 189
• The Cynic and the Bloke: Rod Stewart's Rod: The Autobiography and Donald Fagen's Eminent Hipsters 194
• His Own Shaman: RJ Smith's The One 199
• Spotlight on the Queen: David Ritz's Respect 201
• The Realist Thing You've Ever Seen: Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run 205
• V. Fictions
• Writing for the People: George Orwell's 1984 213
• A Classic Illustrated: R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis 217
• The Hippie Grows Older: Richard Brautigan's Sombrero Fallout 222
• Comic Gurdjieffianism You Can Masturbate To: Marco Vassis' Mind Blower 224
• Porn Yesterday: Walter Kendrick's The Secret Museum 225
• What Pretentious White Men Are Good For: Robert Coover's Gerald's Party 230
• Impoverished How, Exactly? Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked into Doors 236
• Sustainable Romance: Norman Rush's Mortals 237
• Derrnig-Do Scrapping By: Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue 240
• Futures by the Dozen: Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire 245
• YA Poet of the Massa Woods: Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star 248
• A Darker Shade of Noir: The Indefatigable Walter Mosley 252
• VI. Bohemia Meets Hegemony
• Epatant le Bourgeoisie: Jerrold Seigel's Bohemian Paris and T. J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life 263
• The Village People: Christine Stansell's American Moderns 278
• A Slender Hope for Salvation: Charles Reich's The Greening of America 280
• The Lumpenhippie Guru: Ed Sanders's The Family 285
• Strait Are the Gates: Morris Dickstein's Gates of Eden 289
• The Little Counterculture That Could: Carol Brightman's Sweet Chaos 293
• The Pop-Boho Connection, Narrativized: Bernard F. Gendron's Between Montmarte and the Mudd Club 297
• Cursed and Sainted Seekers of the Sexual Century: John Heidenry's What Wild Ecstasy 301
• Bohemias Lost and Found: Ross Wetzsteon's Republic of Dreams, Richard Kostelanetz's SoHo, and Richard Lloyd's Neo-Bohemia 304
• Autobiography of a Pain in the Neck: Meredith Maran's What It's Like to Live Now 309
• VII. Culture Meets Capital
• Twentieth Century Limited: Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air 315
• Dialectical Cricket: C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary 320
• Radical Pluralist: Andrew Ross's No Respect 323
• Inside the Prosex Wars: Nadine Strossen's Defending Pornography, Joanna Frueh's Eroctic Faculties, and Lara Kipnis's Bound and Gagged 327
• Growing Up Kept Down: William Finnegan's Cold New World 331
• Jesus Plus the Capitalist Order: Jeff Sharlet's The Family 334
• Dark Night of the Quants: Ten Books About the Financial Crisis 338
• They Bet Your Life: Four Books About Hedge Funds 345
• Living in a Material World: Raymond Williams's Long Revolution 350
• With a God on His Side: Terry Eagleton's Culture and the Death of God, Culture, and Materialism 369
• My Friend Marshall: Marshall Berman's Modernism in the Streets 374
• Index 381