06/12/2017
In her ambitious history of American pop music, NPR critic and correspondent Powers delves into a diverse range of music forms including Creole love songs and tracks to twerk to on MTV. Above all, Powers (Weird like Us) embraces the profound, and often illicit, influence African-American music had on mainstream culture. Beginning her book in early 19th-century New Orleans, Powers examines the exotic appeal of the city’s diverse cultures on the divided nation that absorbed it. From there she speeds through two centuries of music including ragtime, gospel, R&B, rock and roll, punk, disco, and hip-hop, focusing on artists and genres that transformed the way people move on the dance floor and in the bedroom. The sweeping themes and expansive time span make for a daunting endeavor, one that Powers further complicates by tackling big related topics such as marriage and the internet. Broad overviews of musical eras highlight important artists, some well-known (Elvis, Hendrix, Madonna, Beyoncé), others less so (Florence Mills, Dorothy Love Coates, Tribe 8). Powers alternates between basic Wikipedia-level historiography and academic theorizing, focusing on the interchanges between song, identity, and the body. Powers’s inevitable neglect of dominant genres (swing-era jazz) and essential figures (James Brown) exposes the impossibility of her undertaking. Still, as an introduction to the racially and sexually charged legacy of pop music in the U.S., this book is well worth a spin. (Aug.)
Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music
Narrated by Teri Schnaubelt
Ann PowersUnabridged — 13 hours, 22 minutes
Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music
Narrated by Teri Schnaubelt
Ann PowersUnabridged — 13 hours, 22 minutes
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Overview
In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR's acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race.
In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America's primary erotic art form. Powers takes us from nineteenth-century New Orleans through dance-crazed Jazz Age New York to the teen scream years of mid-twentieth century rock-and-roll to the cutting-edge adventures of today's web-based pop stars. Drawing on her deep knowledge and insights on gender and sexuality, Powers recounts stories of forbidden lovers, wild shimmy-shakers, orgasmic gospel singers, countercultural perverts, soft-rock sensitivos, punk Puritans, and the cyborg known as Britney Spears to illuminate how eroticism-not merely sex, but love, bodily freedom, and liberating joy-became entwined within the rhythms and melodies of American song. This cohesion, she reveals, touches the heart of America's anxieties and hopes about race, feminism, marriage, youth, and freedom.
In a survey that spans more than a century of music, Powers both heralds little known artists such as Florence Mills, a contemporary of Josephine Baker, and gospel queen Dorothy Love Coates, and sheds new light on artists we think we know well, from the Beatles and Jim Morrison to Madonna and Beyoncé. In telling the history of how American popular music and sexuality intersect-a magnum opus over two decades in the making-Powers offers new insights into our nation psyche and our soul.
Editorial Reviews
No writer is better equipped than Ann Powers to clarify and dissect the fundamental American myths that power our popular music. Good Booty is an expansive, electrifying, and important book. It changed the way I listen.” — Amanda Petrusich, author of Do Not Sell At Any Price
“No writer on music has as keen a mind or as great a heart as Ann Powers. Sex is the subject, but Good Booty is really a tour-de-force history of an entire century of pop, rich in feeling and fierce in insight. It’s a dazzling achievement.” — Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise
“A revelatory road trip through the erotic fever dreams of American culture . . . tells the whole epic saga of how music became the confessional where we go to share our deepest secrets and desires . . . Only Ann Powers could make this story so head-spinning—and often heartbreaking.” — Rob Sheffield, author of Dreaming the Beatles
“A fearless and often funny, feminist work. I feel like I have been waiting my whole life for this book—Good Booty is glorious!” — Jessica Hopper, author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
“An instant, indispensable classic, for a culture that always needs sexual healing.” — Carl Wilson, author of Let’s Talk About Love
“A major, original, comprehensive piece of rock history and analysis.” — Robert Christgau, author of Going Into the City
“With precision and wit, and across multiple musical genres, Powers contextualizes the complicated interplay of gender, sex, and race inherent in popular music within and against the backdrop of America’s puritanical founding.” — Library Journal, starred review
“Fascinating. . . . readers won’t look at Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj the same way.” — Kirkus
“Informative and entertaining ... Powers reveals an extraordinary breadth of knowledge and insight and has produced an absolutely essential addition to any pop-culture collection.” — Booklist, starred review
“NPR music critic Ann Powers explores themes of gender, sexuality, race and identity in this sweeping survey of popular music.” — Chicago Tribune, Summer Reading Round Up
“Stirring.” — O, the Oprah Magazine
“Both an indispensable guide to American pop music and a damned fine read . . . The best thing about Good Booty is that it reminds us that the right song shows us how to be somebody in a way that’s not possible with any other art form.” — Wall Street Journal
“A fascinating history of popular music.” — Bustle, “Best Nonfiction of the Month”
“If for no other reason—though there are lots of other reasons—the book is worth a read for its mapping of the way hope and joy are present even in the darkest times. . . Powers’ writing is deeply compassionate and nuanced.” — Chapter 16
“A fascinating history of popular music.” — Bustle, Best Nonfiction Books of August 2017
Informative and entertaining ... Powers reveals an extraordinary breadth of knowledge and insight and has produced an absolutely essential addition to any pop-culture collection.
No writer on music has as keen a mind or as great a heart as Ann Powers. Sex is the subject, but Good Booty is really a tour-de-force history of an entire century of pop, rich in feeling and fierce in insight. It’s a dazzling achievement.
A revelatory road trip through the erotic fever dreams of American culture . . . tells the whole epic saga of how music became the confessional where we go to share our deepest secrets and desires . . . Only Ann Powers could make this story so head-spinning—and often heartbreaking.
No writer is better equipped than Ann Powers to clarify and dissect the fundamental American myths that power our popular music. Good Booty is an expansive, electrifying, and important book. It changed the way I listen.
An instant, indispensable classic, for a culture that always needs sexual healing.
A fearless and often funny, feminist work. I feel like I have been waiting my whole life for this book—Good Booty is glorious!
NPR music critic Ann Powers explores themes of gender, sexuality, race and identity in this sweeping survey of popular music.
A major, original, comprehensive piece of rock history and analysis.
Stirring.
A fascinating history of popular music.
Both an indispensable guide to American pop music and a damned fine read . . . The best thing about Good Booty is that it reminds us that the right song shows us how to be somebody in a way that’s not possible with any other art form.
A fascinating history of popular music.
If for no other reason—though there are lots of other reasons—the book is worth a read for its mapping of the way hope and joy are present even in the darkest times. . . Powers’ writing is deeply compassionate and nuanced.
Both an indispensable guide to American pop music and a damned fine read . . . The best thing about Good Booty is that it reminds us that the right song shows us how to be somebody in a way that’s not possible with any other art form.
NPR music critic Ann Powers explores themes of gender, sexuality, race and identity in this sweeping survey of popular music.
Stirring.
★ 06/15/2017
From Britney Spears's manufactured sex appeal to Jim Morrison's toxic masculinity, NPR music critic Powers (Piece by Piece; Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America) explores the intersection between America's musical landscape and its overwrought cultural views of sex. She opens with a meditation on the interplay between body and sound crystallized in New Orleans' Congo Square in the 19th century. Here, confluences of African and European musical styles blended to create the roots of jazz and what would become rock and roll. As a corollary, popular music became an amalgam of racial tension, sexual expression, and gender expectations that continue to reverberate into the new millennia. From Miley Cyrus's twerking to Beyoncé's "Formation," Powers articulates how artists have manipulated or experimented with each of these threads to forge their own musical identity and sound. VERDICT With precision and wit, and across multiple musical genres, Powers contextualizes the complicated interplay of gender, sex, and race inherent in popular music within and against the backdrop of America's puritanical founding.—Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM
How did the suggestive rhythm and blues phrase “good booty” morph into Little Richard’s 1956 smash teenage anthem “Tutti Frutti,” with its veiled and nonsensical innuendo? Combining a sly sense of humor, the energy of a true fan, and the all-in attitude of a seasoned journalist, narrator Teri Schnaubelt takes the listener back to early-nineteenth-century New Orleans. There a very American stew of African, European, Caribbean, church, and secular musical influences was brewing. Through the decades, romance, dance, longing, and love had always had a soundtrack, but it was rock and roll that brought our changing views of love and sex to the fore. From the lindy hop to disco, from Elvis to Beyoncé, Schnaubelt’s voice reflects that rock and roll is serious stuff, and that’s what makes it all so much fun. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
2017-05-16
Forget drugs: sex and rock & roll are where it's at in this survey of the devil's music and its carnal dimensions.NPR music critic Powers (Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, 2000, etc.) opens on a political note, observing, "America's erotic drive emerged as inseparable from the fact of its troubled multiculturalism." Take it as a given that nations have "erotic drives" and that any discussion of "American bodies" requires us to acknowledge "the legacy of gross inequality that begins in the enslavement of Africans." The author then settles into her occasionally diffuse narrative that connects Congo Square to Beyoncé and bemoans the devolution of Ma Rainey's bawdy to the pornified, auto-tuned hip-hop of today. Where Powers successfully connects the dots, light bulbs flash: it is fascinating to watch her join the gay subculture of disco to the success of the sisters Labelle, nee the Blue Bells, remade in "a previously unexplored space where glam met funk met soul via strictly female interplay." (Well, perhaps not strictly female, since, as Powers notes, the designer of Labelle's outrageously flamboyant costumes went on to invent the costumes of the swaggering cartoon band KISS.) Even where she does not successfully make those connections, as with her notes on the apache ("pronounced A-POSH, not like the Native American tribal name") dance and its not-so-subtle masochism, which never quite caught on in the larger culture, she ventures interesting theses. Mostly, the author strings together bright tidbits of cultural trivia to reconstruct and deconstruct the kinship of dirty blues and gospel, the shared underage girlfriends of now-iconic British rock stars, and other points of prurient interest. A mixed bag, sometimes entertaining, sometimes arid, but full of useful insights; readers won't look at Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj the same way after considering them among the "cartoonish card deck of sexualized female archetypes" that constitutes so much of the present pop scene.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940173488473 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2017 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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