Description
Book SynopsisRanging from Los Angeles to Havana to the Bronx to the US-Mexico border and from klezmer to hip hop to Latin rock, this book injects popular music into contemporary debates over American identity. It covers a range of music and listeners to evoke the ways that popular sounds have expanded our idea of American culture and American identity.
Trade Review"With Audiotopia, Kun emerges as a pre-eminent analyst, interpreter, and theorist of inter-ethnic dialogue in US music, literature, and visual art. This book is a guide to how scholarship will look in the future - the first fully realized product of a new generation of scholars thrown forth by tumultuous social ferment and eager to talk about the world that they see emerging around them." - George Lipsitz, author of Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture "The range and depth of Audiotopia is thrilling. It's not only that Josh Kun knows so much-it's that he knows what to make of what he knows." - Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century "The way Josh Kun writes about what he hears, the way he unravels word, sound, and power is breathtaking, provocative, and original. A bold, expansive, and lyrical book, Audiotopia is a record of crossings, textures, tangents, and ideas you will want to play again and again." - Jeff Chang, author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation"
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Strangers among Sounds 1. Against Easy Listening, or, How to Hear America Sing 2. The Yiddish Are Coming 3. Life According to the Beat 4. Basquiat's Ear, Rahsaan's Eye 5. I, Too, Sing America 6. Rock's Reconquista Conclusion: La Misma Cancion Notes Bibliography Discography Index
