Description
Book SynopsisDig argues that in hip culture it is sound itself, and the faculty of hearing, that is the privileged part of the sensory experience. Through a string of lucid and illuminating examples, author Phil Ford shows why and how music became a central facet of hipness and the counterculture.
Trade ReviewWhat Dig offers to scholars of U.S. music is its indispensable modeling of a nimble, oblique, and resonant approach to cultural critique. Fords work reminds us of the galvanizing interchange that always tacitly binds music to ideas: it reads the intellectual discourse of an era as something with the properties of music, something mobile, volatile, and alive. For this reason alone, Fords Dig promises to become a canonical entry in the field of early twenty-first century musicology. * Dale Chapman, Journal of the Society for American Music *
[Ford's] conclusions on the Beats, popular music in American culture and the ever-continuing onrush of (blindfold consuming) square culture, nemesis of those who âdigâ things, are unquestionably worth reading. * Dr. A. Ebert, Jive Talk *
Table of ContentsTable of Contents ; Introduction: Dig ; Chapter 1: Koan (What Is Hip?) ; 1. What is Hip? ; 2. The Suzuki Rhythm Boys ; 3. The Devil's Staircase ; 4. The Black Spot ; Chapter 2: Somewhere/Nowhere ; 1. Precambrian ; 2. Game Ideology ; 3. 1948: Smart Goes Crazy ; 4. Miles and Monk ; 5. Somewhere/Nowhere ; Chapter 3: Sound Become Holy (The Beats) ; 1. Sound Become Holy ; 2. The Sadness of It All ; 3. Digging What They Dig ; 4. Astounding and Prophetic ; 5. Stenciled off the Real ; Chapter 4: Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture ; 1. Right On, Mr. Horowitz ; 2. The Square ; 3. Asymmetrical Consciousness ; 4. Elitism ; 5. Mass Culture Critique ; 6. The Decline of Midcentury Modernism and the Birth of Postmodernism ; 7. Sound Museum ; Chapter 5: Mailer's Sound ; 1. The Sound is the Thing, Man ; 2. Abstraction ; 3. Whiteness ; 4. Mailer's Sound ; 5. Enantiodromia ; Chapter 6: "Let's Say That We're New, Every Minute" (John Benson Brooks) ; 1. Off-Minor ; 2. Music of the Isms ; 3. DJology ; 4. Cipher ; 5. Magical Hermeneutics ; 6. Technologies of Experience ; 7. Practice
