A savvy, effervescent, and definitive document of a pivotal time in pop.
A close study of the artists and economics that made 1984 a monster year for music.
The year overflowed with chart-topping talent—Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna, Van Halen, and more were at or near their creative and commercial peaks—but veteran critic Matos avoids gooey rhapsodizing about big-name performers, instead honoring their musical brilliance while also exploring the market mechanics that undergirded their success. The watchword of the year was crossover, as rock radio lost listeners and MTV disrupted genre definitions. That allowed Van Halen’s “Jump” to shift the boundaries of both pop and metal, British dance acts like Duran Duran and Culture Club to gain prominence, hip-hop groups like Run-D.M.C. to elbow into the R&B and rock consciousness, and Lionel Richie to own the pop, soft-rock, and country markets. The author organizes the period around signature events, like the launch of the Jacksons’ much-hyped (and price-gouging) Victory tour, a Supreme Court ruling on home taping, the movie premiere of Prince’s Purple Rain, and the recording of the for-better-or-for-worse pioneering charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” But Matos ranges widely within those confines and writes authoritatively and entertainingly about a host of genres, whether it’s R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü presaging the 1990s alternative explosion, the rising visibility of global artists like King Sunny Adé and Rubén Blades, or country acts like the Judds angling for chart dominance. That diversification cleared a path for future corporate sponsorships and genre fragmentation, but at the time it felt like unity: Matos cheats a bit by concluding with 1985’s Live Aid concerts, but no moment better exemplified how the era’s breadth of artists captured the world’s attention. It was a big event for a good cause and a last hurrah for a singular cultural phenomenon. One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
A savvy, effervescent, and definitive document of a pivotal time in pop.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-306-90337-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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 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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