Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (American Crossroads, 18)
A critical study that rethinks the relationship between race and American culture through popular music. Moving from Los Angeles to Havana, the Bronx, and the U.S.-Mexico border, it asks how music shapes community and belonging.
Work Information
Music is not a backdrop for a single America; it becomes the place where multiple stories resonate.
Using klezmer, hip hop, Latin rock, and other popular forms as entry points, the book reads American culture as plural and contested. It is a critical work that also draws connections to painting and literature.
Review Summaries
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Readers value its sharp connection between music and identity. Although the book is theoretical, its many concrete examples make it feel grounded and substantial.
Book Information
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Published
- 2005-11-01
- Pages
- 322 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.99 x 2.06 x 22.35 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780520244245
- ISBN-10
- 0520244249
- Price
- 6122 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Arts & Photography/Music/Musical Genres/Popular
Ranging from Los Angeles to Havana to the Bronx to the U.S.-Mexico border and from klezmer to hip hop to Latin rock, this groundbreaking book injects popular music into contemporary debates over American identity. Josh Kun, a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, insists that America is not a single chorus of many voices folded into one, but rather various republics of sound that represent multiple stories of racial and ethnic difference. To this end he covers a range of music and listeners to evoke the ways that popular sounds have expanded our idea of American culture and American identity. Artists as diverse as The Weavers, Café Tacuba, Mickey Katz, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bessie Smith, and Ozomatli reveal that the song of America is endlessly hybrid, heterogeneous, and enriching—a source of comfort and strength for populations who have been taught that their lives do not matter. Kun melds studies of individual musicians with studies of painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and of writers such as Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes. There is no history of race in the Americas that is not a history of popular music, Kun claims. Inviting readers to listen closely and critically, Audiotopia forges a new understanding of sound that will stoke debates about music, race, identity, and culture for many years to come.
Josh Kun is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine, the Village Voice, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Boston Phoenix. He has recently co-founded Reboot Stereophonic, a non-profit record label dedicated to excavating lost treasures of Jewish-American music. In 2016, he was the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.
Reviews
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an illuminating discussion of race and popular music
*Audiotopia* takes on a difficult question: if we tell the history of America through its popular music, what does the country look like (or, should we say, sound like)? Kun's answer is that music is one of the most multicultural parts of American culture, able to evoke 'audiotopias' through the clash and fusion of different musical idioms. The audiotopia of Ozomatli, for instance, suggests that the various communities that produced salsa, ranchera, reggae, ska, and funk might not be so far apart in the end -- a hopeful vision that contrasts with the real-life segregation of communities in America. While some parts of the book (e.g., the section on James Baldwin) do have a more academic ring, the sections on music are written with verve and a canny sense of the *sound* of the music. For my money, Kun is more alive to the beautiful strangeness of Roland Kirk's music than anyone else I've read on the saxophonist. And his affectionate reconsideration of the career of Mickey Katz -- a clarinetist who mixed Spike Jones absurdities, klezmer tunes, and Catskills-like Jewish humor -- is wonderful too. On a final note, I would add that I teach the history of popular music on the college level and have recommended the book to undergraduates doing research papers on various kinds of contemporary music. In several cases, the students have told me that the book helped them think in new ways about the special cultural space that music can create -- that it helped them understand why they felt so attached to some kinds of music and the worlds they felt invited into.
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Brilliant & very perceptive