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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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