Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (American Crossroads, 18)
人気音楽を通して、人種とアメリカ文化の関係を読み直す批評書。ロサンゼルスからハバナ、ブロンクス、米墨国境までを横断しながら、音楽が共同体や帰属意識をどう形づくるかを考える。
作品情報
音楽は、アメリカをひとつにまとめるための背景ではなく、複数の物語が響き合う場になる。
クレズマー、ヒップホップ、ラテンロックなどのポピュラー音楽を手がかりに、アメリカ文化の複数性を読み解く。音楽だけでなく、絵画や文学との関係まで視野に入れた批評的な一冊。
レビュー要約
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音楽とアイデンティティをつなぐ視点の鋭さが評価されている。理論的ではあるが、具体的な事例が多く、読み応えのある分析として受け止められている。
書籍情報
- 出版社
- University of California Press
- 発売日
- 2005-11-01
- ページ数
- 322ページ
- 言語
- 英語
- サイズ
- 14.99 x 2.06 x 22.35 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780520244245
- ISBN-10
- 0520244249
- 価格
- 6122 JPY
- カテゴリ
- 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.
レビュー
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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
関連する文学賞
- アメリカン・ブック・アワード 第27回（2006年） ・Winner