An engrossing tour of the global cutting edge, balanced between memoir, musicology, and technology.
Sharply detailed exploration of how technology and globalization have transformed participatory audio culture for top-dollar DJs and African ensembles alike.
Clayton, a contributor to n+1 and the Washington Post, among other publications, has toured and recorded as DJ/rupture, reflecting a lifelong obsession with the behind-the-scenes functionality of popular music. “I’ve spent time in music venues all over the world,” he writes, “from bacchanalian raves in Bristol to Egyptian street weddings.” His fundamental thesis is that the current pessimism (and shaky finances) surrounding the music industry conceals remarkable opportunities. “For each of the avenues closed down by the proliferation of digital technology, unexpected new pathways have opened up,” he writes. Though his cultural perspective seems sprawling, this collection is cohesively structured: each essay examines different technological innovations alongside the far-flung musical subcultures utilizing them to leapfrog past relative obscurity. For example, he discusses the controversial song-polishing program Auto-Tune via its embrace by Moroccan Berber pop musicians: “Auto-Tune sound tracks…a bucolic nation made real only in its digital diaspora.” Similarly, Clayton examines how a Brooklyn entrepreneur became a promoter and archivist of the music he’d collected off discarded Saharan cellphones, while controversial self-taught “cut and paste” rapper M.I.A. “sliced across style lines to become [a] must-hear secret.” The author occasionally delves into his own wry tales of incongruous experiences as a globe-trotting DJ, but he minimizes such personalization by focusing on the nitty-gritty of musicianship, showing off the gearhead obsessiveness and deep playlists essential to his career. Clayton writes adeptly about more forms of music than his DJ identity might suggest, contrasting the communities developed by underground rock ensembles like The Ex and Fugazi with the alienating experiences of obscure acts abruptly “discovered” by the hipster hype machine—e.g., Konono No. 1 or Omar Souleyman. “Musical innovation and excitement,” he writes, “emerge from a community experience, wherein the most groundbreaking or influential artists are rarely the most lauded.”
An engrossing tour of the global cutting edge, balanced between memoir, musicology, and technology.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-53342-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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