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
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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