The Morning Star's Brett Gregory speaks with Toby Manning, author of Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music. Manning asserts that “Rock and pop music were the unexpected consequences of the working-class entering history.”
The Original Bill of Rights (in 1689), OSHA Comes of Age (1974), Shake, Rattle, and Roll (1954), A Win for Black Studies in Dixie (1969), FBI Frame-Up Falls Apart (1999), Compensation for Black Lung (1969), A Rare Espionage Act Acquittal (1919)
In a new biography, the Velvet Underground front man embodies a New York that exists only in memory.
Nothing could ever scare the fire out of her voice, which carried the whole story of American music in it. Tina Turner’s voice will never go silent. In the end, she is the big wheel who keeps on turning, forever. The Queen of Rock and Roll.
Mr. Watts, who had no taste for the life of a pop idol, was an unflashy but essential presence with the band and brought to it a swinging style.
Much commentary on the late Chuck Berry will focus on how his songs expressed fun and teenage angst. This is the right thing to do. Yet there’s more. For example, Berry’s obsession with the comparative qualities of fast cars — most brilliantly displayed in his song “Maybellene” — did not just reflect the rise of post-WW II consumerist culture....He preferred V-8 Fords over Cadillacs because he spent several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s helping make Ford cars.
Rock and roll music has always been a site of struggle over issues of race and racism. In this insightful review, Colin Vanderburg surveys what Jack Hamilton has o say regarding how rock music succumbed to the lure of American racism.
With this book, Springsteen has joined the ranks of those musicians who have also produced first-rate autobiographies. Indeed, the musician's biography has developed into its own literary genre. Long-time music critic Christgau offers a detailed appreciation of this important memoir.
Even in the era of the Beatles and Motown's roster of stars, the brilliant James Brown established a place that was his alone. His was not about magic, it was about power that could not be denied by anyone brought within its field of influence. What the book's author also finds is a wary solitariness that paradoxically found its fullest expression in Brown's ability to give himself so completely in performance to suggest a generosity approaching self-immolation.
Pro baseball player and coach Dusty Baker was a teenage rock and roller. His new memoir details those years, centered on the legendary Monterey Pop Festival, where Jimi Hendrix played his way to stardom. Charles Bethea profiles Baker in advance of his memoir of those year of hanging out with a host of legendary musicians and learning how rock and roll is like baseball.
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