A rich, insightful account of how rock music catalyzed a new world.
Exuberant music infused jolts of sex, drugs, and rebellion into civilization, according to this intricate history of rock music’s Golden Age.
Music writer Cosby surveys rock’s high-water era of the late 1950s through the 1970s, when it reigned as the world’s dominant genre of popular music and gained a new artistic depth and prestige. His interpretive narrative moves from Elvis Presley’s fusion of Black bluesman, white hillbilly, and matinee idol to Bob Dylan’s amalgamation of visionary folk prophecy and electric rock to Motown, the Grateful Dead and the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene, the Velvet Underground’s proto-punk evocations of narcotic squalor, and the 1970s reign of heavy-metal deities Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Ted Nugent. Presiding over the book are the Beatles, whose singular songwriting genius, capacious humanism, and avid embodiment of trends—from hand-holding to pot-smoking, beards, psychedelia, and meditation—made them all things to all men and all shrieking girls. Cosby gives comparable weight to the Rolling Stones; in his telling, they’re the dark, bad-boy yin to the Beatles’ bright yang, and the originators of the rock-star ethos of heedless, entitled debauchery. (“We are not worried about petty morals,” Cosby quotes Stones guitarist Keith Richards sniffing at his 1967 marijuana possession trial.) Cosby entwines his sketches of rock’s evolution and the musicians who crafted it with smart commentary on contemporary social upheavals and cultural artifacts, from the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War to the sitcom The Brady Bunch (the bland, wholesome antithesis of rock); he argues that, by undermining parental, religious, and sexual restraints, and celebrating Dionysian emotional freedom and individual authenticity, rock became an essential lens through which we understand “the ongoing arc of Western civilization.” Cosby’s vivid, perceptive prose captures the visceral impact of rock music while unearthing its roots in intense experiences and novel ways of life. The result is a compelling look at why, how, and where rock ’n’ roll has moved us.
A rich, insightful account of how rock music catalyzed a new world.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476693699
Page Count: 296
Publisher: McFarland
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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