Harvard University Press Blog

"The Boston Phoenix Made Me"

The abrupt shuttering of the Boston Phoenix earlier this month left HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters reflecting on the many great writers he came to know during the paper’s glory days. One in particular whom Waters remembers discovering in the Phoenix is Howard Hampton, a collection of whose writings we published in 2007 as Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses. “I was hungry for what Howard might be writing in the Phoenix,” Waters says, “because it was in the pages of the Phoenix, the Twin Cities’ City Pages, the old Voice, and the LA Weekly that the spirit of combative aesthetic critical writing had migrated once a repressive super-professional industrial strength writing had killed most criticism in the academy. What I loved persisted in the writings of Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner and Greil Marcus and Bob Christgau and Pauline Kael, whom I had the great and stinging pleasure of visiting with Howard in 1999 at her home in Great Barrington, Mass. It took me some time to get Howard to pull his writings together, but when we did it made for a book that is a real doozie, one of the ones I love the most.”

Below, Howard Hampton himself looks back on his formative early days writing for the Phoenix.

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I have always been partial to the title of an early Graham Greene novel (later a film): England Made Me. That’s how I felt about a certain recently deceased alternative newspaper—The Boston Phoenix made me.

In January 1982, I received a manila envelope containing a few copies of the weekly’s Arts Section along with a short invitation from their Music (soon to be Arts) Editor Kit Rachlis. By then, his music section (along with Robert Christgau’s at the Village Voice) had displaced Rolling Stone and Creem as the major leagues of rock criticism. I was an unemployed college dropout who had never written a word professionally, but Greil Marcus had forwarded Rachlis a long, opinionated, obsessive letter of mine. Intrigued, he invited me to join the ongoing conversation amongst the twenty-odd writers who covered music for the paper.

Joyce Millman has written a lovely evocation of that era at the Phoenix. What I remember most vividly was the process of getting a piece into shape. Kit was a superb and utterly meticulous editor: we went over every piece line by line on the phone (I live on the other side of the country), and the writer had to be able to justify every comma, every claim, every flight of fancy/nonsense. It was sobering and bracing—Kit gave you a sense your writing mattered, but that to do anything less than full justice to the record at hand was to betray not only the music you loved but yourself as well.

My first feature assignment was a review of Laurie Anderson’s debut album Big Science. Kit pronounced the piece dead on arrival and went through it like a patient coroner, taking me through every lifeless abstraction and stiff locution. I whined one passage was perfectly valid in the stuck-up vein of a now-forgotten mid-level scribe at the Voice; “You’re better than him,” he shot back, and that was that.

I rewrote the review, and as I was doing so, the landscape shifted as well: Lester Bangs died and Greil Marcus published “The Long Walk of the Situationist International.” (If memory serves, the Bangs obits and the Voice Literary Supplement with “Walk” were bundled in the same issue.) I wrote (or at least felt) like Dorothy abandoned in Alphaville, or Lemmy Caution stranded in Oz. (I guess that made Laurie Anderson… Anna Karina.) The piece established a beachhead for me. The Phoenix offered the opportunity to write about everyone from John Berger to Cyndi Lauper—there was a lot of open space there. I bonded with the wonderful Phoenix critic Mark Moses over our boundless love for Tapper Zukie’s Man Ah Warrior and our disdain for the gas-baggage that increasingly attached itself to music like barnacles on the Titanic.

Mark’s death in 1989 was, to my mind, the end of the paper: music editor Milo Miles (Kit’s excellent successor) had been sacked, and it was left to his unctuous replacement to eulogize Mark, a writer whose values (and compatriots) he swept away with the vacuous impunity of a robotic broom. Later, the regime changed again and the paper rebounded, but it never mattered to me; what was done was done. The Phoenix had nurtured the rock dreams of a bygone era: such stuff as Ray Davies and Alex Chilton songs were made of.

Charles Rosen (1927-2012)

After a remarkable life of playing, thinking, and writing, the great pianist and polymath Charles Rosen passed away this week at the age of 85. Our relationship with Rosen stretches back nearly twenty years, and includes the publication just months ago of Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature. The essays and reviews Rosen chose for this last book deal largely with the tension between the freedom of interpretation and the requirements of fidelity, the need to balance the necessity of respect for the “identity” of literary and musical works against our desire to be free from coercive readings. That freedom, he wrote, “provides the basis and the guarantee of the pleasures of reading, listening, and performing that justify the existence of the arts.”

What follows is excerpted from the book’s Introduction.

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We might all agree that a knowledge of the historical and biographical circumstances that saw the production of a work of literature or music or even an analytic study of them may often help us to a greater understanding and to the increase of pleasure that comes with understanding. Nevertheless, one brute fact often overlooked needs to be forced upon our consideration: most works of art are more or less intelligible and give pleasure without any kind of historical, biographical, or structural analysis. There are always some aspects of the work which do not need our critical industry or demand much interpretation. All that is necessary is just some small familiarity, acquired however involuntarily and informally by occasional experience with the stylistic language and tradition of the work.

In the end, we must affirm that no single system of interpretation will ever be able to give us an exhaustive or definitive understanding of why a work of literature or music can hold an enduring interest for us, explain its charm, account for its seduction and our admiration. A recognition of the inadequacy of any system of interpretation is essential to our being able to gain a fresh experience of the work. We need at times to acquire the talent of reading a work of literature or listening to a piece of music with innocent eye and ear, untainted or unblocked by critical studies, a state of objectivity unrealizable in all its purity, but which may be approached. Every fine work has inherent merits easily grasped across the ages and effective in alien cultures, merits that cannot always be convincingly shown to have been imposed by historical, social, or biographical pressures. At the moment of its creation, a work will have different roles to play, different functions to fulfill (some of which we ignore or deliberately set aside), and will develop still new roles and functions as it grows old and passes through history. A piece of Mozart or a poem by Pope for example, both carries and conveys a sense of the age and the society in which it was created, and yet at the same time it can speak directly to the sensibility of a modern listener who has little knowledge of the original historical context. Merely a nodding acquaintance with the style and language of the time will generally be enough, and this acquaintance may be superficial and still effective. A study of the historical conditions in which the art was created can of course deepen our understanding and make it more complex and even increase our delight, as I have remarked at the opening. But the study is rarely absolutely indispensable, the individual interpretation never exhaustive or permanent. Every critical approach is likely to obscure important aspects of a work that will enter into the experience of a naive reading, Any appreciation of the past must acknowledge that several different critical approaches are valid, and that even in the absence of any formal system of interpretation, the work may still speak to us simply through its intrinsic merit or value.

In [Freedom and the Arts], I have tried not only to benefit from a variety of different critical methods, but above all to keep in mind that listening and reading with intensity for pleasure is the one critical activity that can never be dispensed with or superseded. This will allow us to recognize the multiple possibilities of significance, and to avoid appreciating only those elements of an artistic production that are revolutionary; both Theodor Adorno and Glenn Gould, for example, were incapable of seeing that Mozart was sometimes astonishingly effective and superior to most of his contemporaries even when he was extremely conventional, not only when he was most strikingly original. And to recognize that Mallarmé, who permanently altered the nature of poetry, was nevertheless right when he claimed that he was only doing what all poets had done before him. While a study of the sources of Montaigne’s ideas will reveal his debt to the stoic, epicurean, and skeptic philosophers, only a rereading of his essays for the enjoyment of his style and his delight in contradicting himself will tell us that his conclusions are generally provisional and that the interest for the reader lies in the voyage and not in reaching the goal—or, rather, that the voyage (the demonstration of the way the mind works) was the real original goal all the time.

The freedom of interpretation is fundamental to the tradition of music and literature in the West, which continuously demanded innovation, but an innovation that would eventually—often with some difficulty and delay—be assimilated and absorbed by the tradition, which has often, indeed, more influence upon the character of the art works produced than the personal and historical circumstances at the moment of their appearance. Nevertheless, the freedom of interpretation is balanced by a requirement of fidelity—that is, that the identity of the work be preserved and remain coherent.

Plastic People Riot

In fairly predictable sequence, the Western agitation over the trial and conviction of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot has itself become the subject of political scrutiny. Some commentators ask whether foreign sympathizers are aware of the scope of their cause célèbre’s views and behavior. Others denounce the hypocrisy of any Western upset over the band’s fate. The whole affair reminds us of the so-called “trial of the Plastic People” in Czechoslovakia in 1976, an episode in which various members of the underground music scene were convicted for “organized disturbance of the peace.” In the common telling, the persecution of these supposedly apolitical young people inspired the writers, politicians, and philosophers who would coalesce into Charter 77. Only, as Jonathan Bolton explains in the following excerpt from his recent Worlds of Dissent, the common telling gets a lot wrong.

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The standard account goes like this: In September 1976, the trial in Prague of a nonconformist psychedelic rock band, The Plastic People of the Universe, became one of the catalysts for the drafting of Charter 77. The band was accused of “disturbing the peace” and portrayed by the Communist regime as a group of long-haired, foul-mouthed, drug-using delinquents; but many Czech intellectuals, foremost among them Václav Havel, correctly perceived the trial as an attack on freedom of thought and creativity. The band, after all, had no interest in politics and just wanted to be left alone to play their music in their own way; the state’s attack on them, in Havel’s stirring formulation, was “an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom and integrity.” Havel helped mobilize writers, artists, philosophers, and other opposition intellectuals into a strong show of support for the band, and by December 1976, their meetings to protest the trial had evolved into something larger: the drafting of Charter 77, a document calling on Czechoslovakia to recognize the basic human rights it had solemnly (and, of course, hypocritically) agreed to uphold when it signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975. The trial of the Plastic People had galvanized the opposition, convincing everyone of the “indivisibility of freedom” and making it clear that no compromise with the Communist regime was possible.

Is that what really happened?

Well, not exactly. Czech and English sources alike commonly refer to “the trial of the Plastic People,” but in fact there was no such thing. Of the four defendants, only one—Vratislav Brabenec, the saxophonist—actually played for the band. A second, Ivan Martin Jirous, was not a musician at all; he was the Plastic People’s artistic director, but to call him a member of the band does not really capture his importance as an organizer, theorist, and cult hero of underground circles. A third defendant, Pavel Zajíček, belonged to another band, DG 307. DG 307 shared a member with the Plastics, Milan Hlavsa. But Hlavsa was not put on trial. The fourth defendant, Svatopluk Karásek, was associated with the music underground but was not a member of the Plastic People, DG 307, or any other band—he was a Protestant minister and folksinger in his own right, whose spiritual “Say No to the Devil” had given the underground one of its rallying cries.

So “the trial of the Plastic People” was not really a trial of the Plastic People. What’s more, it wasn’t the only trial of the music underground in 1976. Three young men—Karel Havelka, Miroslav Skalický, and František Stárek—had already been put on trial in Plzeň in July 1976. They were prosecuted for organizing a lecture and concert, at which Jirous had spoken and Karásek had played with another folksinger, Karel “Charlie” Soukup, the previous December. They received sentences ranging from eight months to two and a half years, which were later reduced on appeal. Both the July and September trials were the result of a large-scale police raid that had begun on March 17, 1976. During a three-week period, nineteen people were arrested, including all the members of the Plastic People, and many more besides. Only two members of the Plastics, however—only one of them a musician—were actually put on trial.

Contemporary sources did not start calling this event “the trial of the Plastic People” right away. Protests and essays from the summer of 1976 still speak of the “campaign against the Czech underground,” for example. In a July open letter, Věra Jirousová spoke of “the arrest of twenty young musicians.” An Amnesty International report from September 1976 was titled “Trial of Czech Non-Conformist Artists.” As Václav Havel walked out of the courtroom after the trial, he met an acquaintance who asked him how he was doing: “I replied, none too logically, that I had just been at a trial of the Czech underground.” None too logically, but at least, for now, accurately.

"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"

The death last week of legendary American musician Levon Helm has his music back on the minds of many. Helm was best known as the drummer and sometime-singer for the seminal rock group The Band, which consisted of four Canadians and Helm, an Arkansas-native and the band’s American anchor. Perhaps thanks to the perspective afforded by being eighty percent expat, The Band forged a quintessentially American sound, most apparent on their first two records, 1968’s Music from Big Pink and 1969’s The Band. The latter featured “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” one of the highlights of The Band’s catalog and its best showcase for Helm’s powerful southern voice. Though a dispute over its authorship eventually led Helm to stop playing the song, it’s arguably the signature performance of his career.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is a story of the last days of the American Civil War, told from the perspective of a poor white farmer from Tennessee named Virgil Kane. Though he’s seen the land around him destroyed by Union soldiers, and lost his brother to the conflict, he carries on, living through the “beautiful sadness” of the South that The Band’s Robbie Robertson says inspired the song. 

Like my father before me
I will work the land
And like my brother above me
Who took a rebel stand
He was just 18, proud and brave
But a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
You can't raise a Kane back up
When he's in defeat

In Mystery Train, his classic work of rock criticism and American cultural analysis, Greil Marcus described the song as being less about the Civil War than about “the way each American carries a version of that event within himself.” That description conjures Robert Penn Warren’s claim that the Civil War is America’s only “felt” history, “history lived in our national imagination.” And it rightly situates “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” as an important reflection of popular memory of the Civil War.

More from Marcus’s Mystery Train:

It is hard for me to comprehend how any Northerner, raised on a very different war than Virgil Kane’s, could listen to this song without finding himself changed. You can’t get out from under the singer’s truth—not the whole truth, but his truth—and the little autobiography closes the gap between us. The performance leaves behind a feeling that for all our oppositions, every American still shares this old event; because to this day none of us has escaped its impact, what we share is an ability to respond to a story like this one.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize this as David Blight territory, and that Robert Penn Warren quote above actually opens the Prologue of Blight’s Race and Reunion. His more recent book, American Oracle, picks up the story of civil war memory at the time of the war’s centennial commemoration in the early 1960s, just a handful of years before The Band recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” In American Oracle, written in the run-up to the war’s sesquicentennial, Blight explores how the stories the nation tells itself about the war play a defining role in the country’s self-conception:

 

Forward Into Things That No One's Ever Heard Before

For years Robin D. G. Kelley has been one of the most well respected scholars of American History, especially within the interdisciplinary circles of American Studies. The publication in 2009 of his wonderful biography of Thelonious Monk helped to propel Kelley’s work to a broad audience outside of the academy, and we’re thrilled to have worked with him on a new book that builds on that study. In the excerpt below, and in the accompanying video, Kelley explains the meditation on modernity that he presents in Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times, and how his work helps us to reconsider the origins of jazz itself.

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By exploring the work, conversations, collaborations, and tensions between both African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization, I examine how modern Africa figured in reshaping jazz during the 1950s and early 1960s, how modern jazz figured in the formation of a modern African identity, and how various musical convergences and crossings shaped the political and cultural landscape on both continents. This book is not about the African roots of jazz, nor does it ask how American jazz musicians supported African liberation or “imagined” Africa. Rather, it is about transnational encounters between musicians, or what the ethnomusicologist Jason Stanyek calls “intercultural collaboration,” and encounters between musicians and particular locations (such as Lagos, Chicago, New York, or Cape Town). In other words, it hopes to explain how encounters with specific places, people, movements, cultures, provided fertile ground for new music and musical practices.

As a nod to the great critic and poet A. B. Spellman, whose Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966) serves as a model for this book, I focus on four artists and the various groups they led during the age of African decolonization (roughly 1954–1963). Two of these artists, pianist Randy Weston and bassist and oudist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, hail from the United States (or, more precisely, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn); drummer Guy Warren is Ghanaian; and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin is South African. Each of these artists was propelled by the upheavals of the 1950s to seek new musical forms, new collaborations, new fusions across time and space. They shared neither a common agenda nor a common culture, though they recognized and often embraced cultural commonalities, “jazz” being one. Nor did they always succeed. On the contrary, they occasionally clashed with fellow artists, or bumped up against prevailing assumptions, the intransigence of the market, an oppressive state that viewed their music as a threat to order, or consumers whose own stereotypes made them incapable of hearing and appreciating the work.

Yet they all shared a vision of jazz as a path to the future, a vehicle for both Africans and African Americans to articulate and realize their own distinctive modernity while critiquing its Western variant. And, from their vantage point, standing at what appeared to be the precipice of freedom for Africa and black America, the continent represented a beacon of modernity blazing a new path for the rest of the world, but one tempered by deeply spiritual, antimaterialist values. Indeed, I suggest that African American musicians were seeking new spiritual and ideological alternatives to what they saw as a declining West that led them to a deeper exploration of African music and culture. Likewise, African musicians who were drawn to jazz as a particular idiomatic expression of black modernity also saw the need to infuse it with the music of their homeland. Echoing the late poet Aimé Césaire, in the atomic age, when colonialism and the Holocaust left the West spiritually wanting, Africa represented both an ancient, pristine past possessing a higher spiritual order and a modernizing force able to maintain its humanity precisely because it presumably would not relinquish the best elements of its traditional values. This sort of Janus-faced modernism is key to understanding the nexus of jazz and Africa in the age of decolonization. As Veit Erlmann warns, we have to resist the easy binary of modernity and tradition, especially when the subject is music. “Modernity and tradition,” he writes, “are not only the two most significant historical fictions here but also the tropes whose role in the Western discourse about itself and the others is reflected and configured in the very grammar of musical performance itself.”

 

Darker than Blue, from Curtis Mayfield to Paul Gilroy

New this month is a paperback edition of Paul Gilroy’s W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures. Entitled Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture, the lectures and book present Gilroy’s call for a revitalization of Black Atlantic studies. He uses a discussion of the fading political voice of African American music, once represented by such outspoken talents as Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Curtis Mayfield, as an entrée to a wider examination of the state of black intellectualism in America. Gilroy suggests that black thinkers should open a new dialogue to address the problems arising from an unsustainable consumer culture in which African American cultural output now circulates as generic Americana.

Gilroy, a DJ and music journalist on top of being an academic, uses music to trace a shift in Black Atlantic culture from group consciousness to individualism. From that analysis, he provides a roadmap to the shifting terrain of identity politics in the “Age of Obama,” critiquing the urban chic championed by Jay-Z and 50 Cent, and the commodification of black politicians and statespersons such as Condi Rice as “diplomatic assets.”

The musicians Gilroy highlights from the 1960s and ’70s appealed to him as a young man in the UK by offering “the traveling truths of a people who were now even darker than an Ellisonian shade of blue.” For Gilroy, the music of that era endures:

Extraordinary things can still be heard in the enduring music of that uniquely soulful era. The live recordings made by Aretha, Curtis Mayfield, and Donny Hathaway have proved particularly durable. As they established new aesthetic criteria for African American popular music, they seemed to invite even their most distant listeners into a collective that felt intimate in spite of its attenuated, outernational character. Eager crowds had been dynamic collaborators in those epoch-making performances. Perhaps that surprising possibility should be recalled, now that the art of live recording has shrunk to fit the hyper-real, pseudo-classical niche in which we are told authentic jazz performances still dwell.

Curtis Mayfield’s concert recordings captured the kernel of this magic. After his shamanic January 1972 shows at the Rainbow Theatre in London’s Finsbury Park, an imaginary line linking him to James Brown (then becoming known as the Godfather) constituted one axis of my own nascent, “uk blak” mindset. The contemporary contrast between Kanye West’s ironic appetite for branded finery and 50 Cent’s scarred, muscular, Republican frame prompts us to ask: Where can Mayfield’s dignity and bespectacled seriousness have gone? Not, surely, into the global business enterprise that has been built up so skillfully by brand Jay-Z?

Listening to Louie on St. Patrick’s Day

George Bornstein’s The Colors of Zion is a challenge to the story told by the often-chronicled fissures in the relationships between Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years from the Irish Famine until the end of World War II. In this revelatory transatlantic study, Bornstein shows that the sympathies and cooperative efforts between these three oppressed groups were far greater than generally acknowledged. In the piece below, Bornstein takes the occasion of St. Patrick’s Day to reflect on Louis Armstrong, who embodied the interethnic, cross-cultural affinity that The Colors of Zion documents.

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When making his breakthrough recordings with his Hot Five in 1926, young Louis Armstrong took care to include a new song on which he had collaborated with Percy Venable. Sandwiched between the better-known “You Made Me Love You” and “Willie the Weeper,” came “Irish Black Bottom,” a Celtic take on the original New Orleans jazz classic “Black Bottom.” With Armstrong breaking into raucous laughter at the line “And I was born in Ireland,” the tune ends with the lines, “All over Ireland you can see / The people dancin’ in / Cause Ireland’s gone Black Bottom Crazy now.”

The playful racial masquerade, a reversal of more traditional Irish contributions to blackface minstrelsy, signaled Armstrong’s lifelong artistic devotion to racial and cultural hybridity. “It’s no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow,” he once remarked. “Race-conscious jazz musicians? Nobody could be who really knew their horns and loved the music.”

Such boundary crossing started early for Satchmo. In an interview with Life magazine he listed among his early influences the all-white “Original Dixieland Jazz Band,” the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso and sopranos Amelita Galli-Curci and Luisa Tetrazzini (for whom the dish turkey tetrazzini is named), and especially “the Irish tenor, John McCormack—beautiful phrasing.” Later Armstrong became one of the first jazz musicians to play to large audiences in Ireland, with his wildly successful Belfast concert of 1962 and two shows in Dublin five years later attended by 4,000 people.

Armstrong’s connection to other groups than his own didn’t stop with the Irish. Perhaps most important among the others were Jews, beginning with the Karnovsky family who hired, mentored, and looked after him as a boy after he left the Colored Waif’s Home in New Orleans. According to his moving late memoir Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans they fed him regular meals and staked him to his first horn. In tribute to them he wore a Star of David around his neck regularly after that. The jazz photographer Herb Snitzer created a famous photo of Louis on bus tour in 1960 with striped white shirt open, cigarette in hand, and the necklace clearly visible. “He wore the Star his entire life,” recalled Snitzer. “He was the least prejudiced musician I ever knew.”

Satchmo practiced what he preached, welcoming musicians of all backgrounds into a majority African American enterprise. He even dedicated Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family to his Jewish manager Joe Glaser, calling him “the best friend that I've ever had.” Similarly, he featured in concerts and recorded numerous hits by white composers, including Irving Berlin's early “Alexander's Ragtime Band.” Louis recorded duets with Ella Fitzgerald of celebrated Berlin classics like “Cheek to Cheek,” “Isn't This a Lovely Day,” and “I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.” He liked Jewish-themed songs, too, such as his “Shadrach” retelling of the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the Book of Daniel.

Such crossovers pervade the history of jazz and of popular music. The African American stride pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith born four years before Satchmo described his own ancestry as French, Spanish, Negro, and Mohawk Indian, calling himself “an American pianist” in the subtitle of his autobiography. After discovering that he had a Jewish ancestor too, he converted to Judaism, had a Bar Mitzvah, and even served as a cantor between jazz stints. Reciprocally, the Jewish-born clarinetist and saxophonist Mezz Mezrow, who briefly became Armstrong's manager, did his best to be as Black as possible. He moved to Harlem, married a Black woman, and even insisted in prison on being housed with African American inmates. Like Armstrong, he believed that jazz transcended color and brought one of the first mixed-race bands to Broadway. Mezzrow wrote of Jewish religious music that “when I add Negro inflections to it they fit so perfect, it thrills me.”

The linkages and mixtures favored by Armstrong and the others pervade our past. A son of Irish immigrants, mayor John Hynes of Boston slyly undercut fantasies of purity half a century ago in introducing at a rally the first Jew to become mayor of Dublin. “We have here with us two fine fellows—an Irishman and a Jew,” he told the crowd. “I give him to you now, Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe.” Satchmo would have agreed in his consistent opposition to barriers that divide us into separate categories. As he told a group of journalists who challenged his including Israel on a tour of the Mideast with his All Stars, “Let me tell you something, man. That horn. You see that horn? That horn ain't prejudiced. A note's a note in any language.”

Greil Marcus - "Lipstick Traces Live" @ Columbia November 19

See Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, released this year in a new twentieth anniversary edition, as well as The Dustbin of History, In the Fascist Bathroom, The Shape of Things to Come, The Old, Weird America, Mystery Train, and other books, not to mention co-editor of A New Literary History of America, out and making the rounds presently, deliver a "lecture as performance" live at Columbia University. "Lipstick Traces Live" is based on material from the book and will take place November 19 at 6pm, with a signing to follow.

click on flyer for full-sized image

More details here.

Lipstick Traces gets a new look

Greil Marcus's seminal Lipstick Traces is getting a twentieth-anniversary edition later this year. Poster art legend Chuck Sperry has designed a new cover for this treasured tome; the poster version will debut at Book Expo in May, where you can get a silkscreened edition:

Meanwhile, the new edition of Lipstick Traces (link is to the current, "old" -- but still nice! -- edition) hits a shelf near you in November.

(UPDATE: here's the new one!)

Sales rep playlist - April 2008

Being a university press sales rep means a lot of hours on the road. When you're driving from Milwaukee to Dayton to Pittsburgh to Ithaca to Buffalo to Cleveland to Chicago and then back to Milwaukee, as our dear friend John Eklund has just done, you're bound to burn through a CD or two (or fifty). To that end, we asked him for a selection of 2008's best and brightest to help you prepare for the next insane road trip in your future.

INSANE ROAD TRIP MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS, APRIL 2008 EDITION

Erykah Badu - The Healer"
My most obsessively replayed cut from her amazing new album "New Amerykah Part One" - I’m not always sure what she’s talking about but it’s irresistible.

Hawksley Workman - "Piano Blink"
Possibly the perfect pop song, by the criminally under-known (in the US anyway) Canadian singer-songwriter.

The Roches - "No Shoes"
Maggie, Terre and Suzzy are back, and this whimsical ode to being thankful for what you’ve got is in their signature goofball folk vein.

Massive Attack - "Be Thankful for What You’ve Got"
For a somewhat alternative spin on the same sentiment, this one just never gets old.

Istanbul’s Secrets with Sevval Sam & Ufuk - "Yol Turkusu"
A lovely contemporary Turkish pop melody from a fabulous compilation album. I wonder what it’s about?

M.I.A. - "Mango Pickle Down River"
I can’t believe I’m still obsessed with this - the 2007 album of the year in my book.

The Consecos - "Raised by Wolves"
A Toronto quartet that I first heard on the wonderful CBC Radio 3 podcast with Grant Lawrence.

New Order - "Bizarre Love Triangle (Shep Pettibone remix)"
I pretty much replayed this cut all the way across the Indiana Toll Road- seems like it was written for screaming along in one’s car across boring midwest interstates.

Mavis Staples - "Turn Me Around"
Hard to pick a standout cut, they are all so good.  Marching off to freedom land.

Billy Bragg - "Some Days I See the Point"
Achingly beautiful, but probably not the safest road tune because I’m inevitably in tears by the end.

Lovely picks--stay tuned for the next edition ...