University of Michigan Press Blog

'Bytes & Backbeats' Author Confronts Egan's 'Goon Squad'

Guest blogger Steve Savage, whose Bytes & Backbeats: Repurposing Music in the Digital Age is available now from the University of Michigan Press, examines the factors that influence the sound of contemporary popular music--and how these factors are perceived.

Sometimes the greatest reinforcement for ones academic work comes in popular literature.  Such occurred for me as I was reading Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad.  With research on very contemporary issues there’s always the fear that the cultural issues your book engages will have dissipated by the time the book is available to the public.  This fear was quickly allayed for me by the following quote that sums up widespread attitudes toward the type of digital work that I address in my book.  In the brief space of one character’s dramatic inner dialog Egan sums up attitudes toward digitization, confirms the absolute commodification of popular music, and taints most contemporary media.  The speaker is a middle-aged record executive, reflecting on the current status of his record company and the music that it is releasing:

Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he’d grown up with.  He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room.  Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape—everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out.  He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course)—above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he’d sold his label to five years ago.  But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit.  Too clear, too clean.  The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.  Film, photography, music: dead.  An aesthetic holocaust!  Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud (Egan, 23).

This expression of technological determinism amplifies the negative effects of digital technologies without acknowledging their creative potentials, misdirecting the speaker’s rage.  While there certainly may be problems in the brave new world of popular music, there is also much to celebrate regarding the enormous creative gifts that digital audio workstations (DAWs) have provided us in the realm of music production.  The ability to revise, recompose, reinvent, rearrange, reuse, reimagine, reimprovise—in short, the ability to repurpose audio has revolutionized the production of musical recordings.  At the same time the basic creative impulses and processes that have always been at the center of music production remain central to this new “constructionist” model of songwriting and composition. 

Notwithstanding Bennie’s tirade above—he’s right, popular music today may well be “too clear, too clean”—the heart of the problem is not to be laid at the feet of digitization.  The real demon that Bennie identifies in his tirade is manifested by his attempts “to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he’d sold his label to five years ago.”  Commodification is the primary force that squeezes the life out of music, not the details of the production techniques being used.  Francis Bacon said “There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”  It’s the notion that the marketplace will not tolerate strangeness that is at the heart of Bennie’s aesthetic holocaust. 

Author David Savran awarded 2011 Kurt Weill Article Prize for 'Highbrow/Lowdown'

American Theatre professor David Savran has been awarded the 2011 Kurt Weill Article Prize for the chapter “Fascinating Rhythm” in his University of Michigan Press book Highbrow/Lowdown:  Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class.  

Described by the panel as “vivid and eminently readable," Savran's work "beautifully contextualizes – from the viewpoint of a theater scholar/cultural historian – George Gershwin’s works for the musical stage.”

“It has wide appeal, as seems fitting for a prize bearing the name Kurt Weill. In fact, in its lucid portrayal of the ‘crossing of categories’ between highbrow and lowbrow elements in 1920s theater, the chapter ‘Fascinating Rhythm’ offers a rich background to the situation of musical theater as Weill found it when he arrived in New York in the mid-1930s and began his own series of ‘crossings,’” the judges wrote.

Savran will receive a a cash award of $2,000 and a plaque commemorating his achievement. He'll be honored at a reception following the annual meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Kurt Weill Foundation, to be held on Dec. 19, 2011. Congratulations, David!

Q&A with Theo Cateforis, author of Are We Not New Wave?

New wave emerged at the turn of the 1980s as a pop music movement cast in the image of punk rock's sneering demeanor, yet rendered more accessible and sophisticated. Artists such as the Cars, Devo, the Talking Heads, and the Human League leapt into the Top 40 with a novel sound that broke with the staid rock clichés of the 1970s and pointed the way to a more modern pop style.

In Are We Not New Wave? Theo Cateforis provides the first musical and cultural history of the new wave movement, charting its rise out of mid-1970s punk to its ubiquitous early 1980s MTV presence and downfall in the mid-1980s. The book also explores the meanings behind the music's distinctive traits—its characteristic whiteness and nervousness; its playful irony, electronic melodies, and crossover experimentations.

Theo Cateforis is Assistant Professor of Music History and Cultures in the Fine Arts Department at Syracuse University.  His research is in the areas of American Music, Popular Music Studies, and Twentieth-Century Art Music. He was editor of the anthology The Rock History Reader.

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Terrance McKnight to honor Hazel Scott’s elegant and innovative music

Upon discovering the vast accomplishments of Hazel Scott, Terrance McKnight, host of “All Ears with Terrance McKnight,” is refocusing the spotlight on musical phenomenon Hazel Scott by paying tribute to her work on his WQXR program.

Scott's life is the subject of Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist, from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC, by UM Press author Karen Chilton.

Recognizing her acceptance to Julliard at age 8, her marriage to Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and her national television show, McKnight plans to tell her story in an effort to re-captivate a listening audience; quoting the Yoruba tribe, “people are not dead until they are forgotten, they can live on through their music.”

On February 26^th at 10 p.m., McKnight will air a tribute to Scott; “Still Swinging, Still Classic: A Musical Biography of Pioneering Pianist Hazel Scott,” as a part of his Black History month programming on Classical 105.9 in New York. In an article by Clem Richardson in the New York Daily News, you can find a preview of the highlights McKnight will be discussing on the program and the story on how he came to discover her work through Chilton's book.

'Blues in Black and White' named a 2011 Michigan Notable Book

Blues in Black and White, photographed by Stanley Livingston, text by Michael Erlewine, was recently selected as a 2011 Michigan Notable Book.

The Library of Michigan annually selects 20 books that highlight Michigan people, places and events, and the list highlights exceptional books published in 2010 that bring attention to Michigan authors and topics. These lists aim to be reflective of Michigan’s diverse ethnic, historical, literary, and cultural experience.

Previous University of Michigan Press titles that have also been selected for this honor in 2009 and 2010 include: Bath Massacre, Isadore’s Secret, "Jiffy," Looking for Hickories, Ninety Years Crossing Lake Michigan, and The Toledo War.

Erlewine and Livingston capture the Ann Arbor Blues Festivals via the text and photographs throughout Blues in Black and White. The Ann Arbor Blues Festival was a festival and celebration of city blues. It helped to mark the discovery of modern blues music (and the musicians who made that music) by a much larger audience. These groundbreaking festivals were the seed that grew into the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, which was continued annually for many years.

Livingston unfortunately passed away late in 2010, but lived to see the book's release.

Q&A with Albin Zak, author of I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America

The 1950s marked a radical transformation in American popular music as the nation drifted away from its love affair with big band swing to embrace the unschooled and unruly new sounds of rock 'n' roll.

The sudden flood of records from the margins of the music industry left impressions on the pop soundscape that would eventually reshape long-established listening habits and expectations, as well as conventions of songwriting, performance, and recording. When Elvis Presley claimed, "I don't sound like nobody," a year before he made his first commercial record, he unwittingly articulated the era's musical Zeitgeist.

The central story line of I Don't Sound Like Nobody is change itself. The book's characters include not just performers but engineers, producers, songwriters, label owners, radio personalities, and fans—all of them key players in the decade's musical transformation.

Written in engaging, accessible prose, Albin Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody approaches musical and historical issues of the 1950s through the lens of recordings and fashions a compelling story of the birth of a new musical language. The book belongs on the shelf of every modern music aficionado and every scholar of rock 'n' roll.

Albin J. Zak is Professor of Music at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the editor of The Velvet Underground Companion and the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, a groundbreaking study of rock music production. Zak is also a record producer, songwriter, singer, and guitarist.

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Stanley Livingston, Ann Arbor photographer for "Blues in Black and White," dies

Stanley Livingston, Ann Arbor music and celebrity photographer, passed away Wednesday, September 15, from a heart attack. He had had heart surgery earlier this year.

Livingston had taken tens of thousands of professional celebrity photographs over the years, including artists ranging from John Lennon to B.B. King. His most recent project was Blues in Black and White, a book of photographs from the early years of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival published this year by the University of Michigan Press. Funeral services have not yet been set. Livingston is survived by his wife, Susan, and daughter, Bethany.

Stanley was a superb photographer, known for solving the most difficult photographic challenges for his commercial and industrial clients. Until his recent book, few people knew the depth of his work in photographing blues musicians in and around Ann Arbor.

He also created an exceptional portfolio of landscapes and environmental portraits of neighbors near his summer cabin at the northernmost tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. This wooded region, which was especially dear to Stan, is where he passed away this week.

“I was Stan's partner in creating the recent Blues In Black and White book, and also worked as his assistant for several years in the 1970s,” said designer Tom Erlewine. “His dedication to impeccable quality in image-making was an inspiration that has guided me ever since.”

The University of Michigan Press extends its condolences to Stan's family on their loss.

David Savran's 'Highbrow/Lowdown' selected as best theater and performance book of the last two years by NYU

David Savran's Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class was just given one of the highest accolades in the theater and performance world: the prestigious Joe A. Callaway Prize, awarded to the best book on drama or theater in 2008 or 2009.

Savran's book explores how the explosion of jazz in the 1920s helped to change theater forever, as playwrights, producers, and critics successfully rushed to distinguish the newly emerging literary theater from its "illegitimate" cousins.

The Prize is awarded biennially by New York University, and carries a cash award of $9,000.

"The book was selected from a large number of distinguished works on dramatic literature, performance theory, and theatre history," said a statement by NYU.

The three-member panel of judges, chaired by Una Chaudhuri, professor of English and Drama at NYU, characterized Highbrow/Lowdown as a “work of deeply researched, theoretically sophisticated, and ideologically provocative scholarship.”

A new paperback version of the book was released this month by the University of Michigan Press, publisher of the original hardcover.

Sins Invalid Interview: Terry Rowden

Sins Invalid’s Leroy Moore recently interviewed Terry Rowden, an Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Staten Island. Terry is the author of The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness and coeditor of Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: As a Black professor and author teaching and writing on topics of popular culture, transnational cinema and philosophy, do you have a personal connection to what you teach and write about? Please give some background on why you teach and write on subjects that you do.

Terry Rowden: My interest in disability emerged primarily from within my teaching and research interests in African American and queer literature once I began to realize that all marginalized social identities reproduce to some extent the dynamics of disability as both a social construct and a lived condition. Disability has a special force as a means of rewriting normalizing narratives because it occurs across all social groups and categories. My overall project as a scholar is to reveal that abnormality is really just a political construct used to ground social hierarchies. For instance, all people who live into advanced old age, simply for that reason alone, will eventually experience some lessening of physical functioning significant enough to remove them

Django Reinhardt turns 100 January 23

Famed jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt would have been 100 on January 23, and Benjamin Givan, author of the new book The Music of Django Reinhardt, took some time out in honor of the anniversary to answer a few questions.

Givan authored a previous blog entry on Reinhardt, including a rundown of his enormous impact on everything from blues to rock 'n' roll and a video of him performing with frequent collaborator Stéphane Grappelli. Musicians ranging from B.B. King to Carlos Santana list Reinhardt as a major influence.

QUESTION: Why did you choose Reinhardt as a subject?

ANSWER: I chose Reinhardt as a subject because I had enjoyed listening to his music for a long time. I was aware that most of the previously published literature on Reinhardt consisted of either biographical studies geared toward the casual jazz fan or “how-to” books oriented toward people who want to learn how to play the music. And I thought that Reinhardt’s music deserved to be taken seriously at a more scholarly level in order to gain a more thorough, detailed understanding of what and how he played.