The Record Men: The Chess Brothers and the Birth of Rock & Roll (Enterprise)

Book Description

"Brilliant…the best book I have ever read about the recording industry…a classic."—Larry King

On the south side of Chicago in the late 1940s, two immigrants—one a Jew born in Russia, the other a black blues singer from Mississippi—met and changed the course of musical history. Muddy Waters electrified the blues, and Leonard Chess recorded it. Soon Bo Diddly and Chuck Berry added a dose of pulsating rhythm, and Chess Records captured that, too. Rock & roll had arrived, and an industry was born.

In a book as vibrantly and exuberantly written as the music and people it portrays, Rich Cohen tells the engrossing story of how Leonard Chess, with the other record men, made this new sound into a multi-billion-dollar business—aggressively acquiring artists, hard-selling distributors, riding the crest of a wave that would crash over a whole generation. 12 illustrations. Originally published in hardcover as Machers and Rockers.

About the series: Enterprise pairs distinguished writers with stories of the economic forces that have shaped the modern world—the institutions, the entrepreneurs, the ideas. Enterprise introduces a new genre—the business book as literature.

Customer Reviews:

Great book about Leonard Chess and the American experience.......2007-09-05

This is a wonderful book--extremely well-written--that profiles Leonard Chess as a symbol of the American-immigrant experience, taking us back to the Chess family roots in Poland and their coming through Ellis Island. While lots of books discuss how rock and roll was born of integration, this one looks specifically at how the Jews, as fellow outsiders, were critical in finding and recording African American artists. It also acknowledges the fortunes Chess made off the musicians and how that affected him and the company as the Civil Rights Movement took hold. I teach American Studies at the college level and will use this in my classes.

Nice, but something's missing.......2007-03-06

This is a nice book about the Chess family. However, it is mostly a short history of American popular music of which there are already so many. The history of Chess is short and not in much depth and you constantly feel you are missing something.
Nice to buy when the price is low, but really not that special.

Book Description

In this powerful and provocative book, Prasenjit Duara uses the intriguing case of Manchukuo--the Japanese puppet state in northeast China from 1932-1945--to explore how such antinomies as imperialism and nationalism, modernity and tradition, and governmentality and exploitation interacted in the post-World War I period. He argues that Manchukuo, as a transparently constructed nation-state, offers a unique historical laboratory for examining the utilization and transformation of circulating global forces mediated by the East Asian modern. With its sweepingly original theoretical and comparative perspectives on nationalism and imperialism, this book will be essential reading for all those interested in contemporary history.

Customer Reviews:

Extensively researched and annotated.......2003-09-15

Sovereignty And Authenticity: Manchukuo And The East Asian Modern by Prasenjit Duara (Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago), is a technical and advanced study of imperialism, nationalism, modernity, tradition, government, and exploitation with an especial and illustrative focus on Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in northeast China that lasted from 1932 to 1945. Extensively researched and annotated, this critical and scholarly discourse delves both into the nuanced intricacies of history and the fascinating mass psychology mechanisms of society and government, Sovereignty And Authenticity is an impressive and strongly recommended work of World War II era history.

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the new left
Nothing but the facts...

The Politics of Authenticity
Doug Rossinow
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0231110561

Book Description

Breaking new ground in cultural, political, and social history, Rossinow tells the story of the new left-wing movement that emerged in the 1960s from an innovative perspective: illustrating the spiritual dimension of student activism and providing the first account "from the bottom up"--as well as linking local developments to the national scene.

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the new left.......2006-12-06

Unlike many histories of the New Left, which emphasize its exceptionalism and separatism, this one emphasizes the Left's continuing conversations with other traditions of American reform-Christian evangelicalism, the Social Gospel, the lyrical Left, mainstream feminism--even liberalism. For example, Rossinow stresses the importance of the populist liberalism of the Lone Star State to the social construction of the Texas New Left. Early leftists were encouraged by liberals like Ronnie Dugger, and later leftists found that they could form some constructive coalitions with liberals. While Rossinow acknowledges the general hostility of the Left to liberalism, he also shows that leftists could be creatively eclectic and inconsistent in forming coalitions.
Like other Sixties analysts, Rossinow shows how, as Kurt Vonnegut said, "America radicalizes Americans." Indeed, non-leftists shaped the late Sixties Left by their intransigence and their attacks. University repression, Black Power, and the Vietnam War also drew leftists away from the optimistic assumptions of the early years. Still, this backlash also led to the richness of "new working class" analysis, which Rossinow explains extraordinarily well. The idea that "alienation isn't restricted to the poor" (p. 194) allowed leftists a wider range for radicalism, interrogating most of the institutions of American society. When the Vietnam War ended, and the national Left disintegrated, this wide-ranging cultural activism was what was left.

By the end of the decade, the emphasis on authenticity, coupled with the intransigence of the political "System" and the factionalism of the Left, led activists to an emphasis on cultural change through counter-cultural living. Instead of overthrowing American government, they would undermine American society by creating a new society in the shell of the old. Like the New Left, the counter-culture emphasized authenticity. Indeed, Rossinow suggests that "starting in 1966, counter-cultural activity became "the new left's most important strategy for fomenting social change in America" (p. 251). Like the lyrical Left of the early twentieth century, this prefigurative politics had its own (usually small, usually local) successes, but it also succeeded in bringing cultural issues into mainstream American politics, most often in the Democratic Party. And as Rossinow points out, it complemented the cultural modernism of the American middle classes. In either case, cultural radicalism became cultural meliorism, and reinforced the liberal individualism of the mainstream culture.

This book is valuable, not just for its own original and nuanced interpretation of Sixties politics, but for its historiographical insights. Rossinow knows virtually all of the literature on Sixties politics, and, both in the text and in the footnotes, he sets his interpretation in conversation with other Sixties analysts. The result is not just a first-rate monograph that complexifies the Sixties, but a guided tour of important scholarly thinking about that decisive decade.

Nothing but the facts..........2001-11-20

Rossinow paints a detailed picture at the activist life of the University of Texas during the days of the SDS and SNCC. It is amazing that someone like himself, who wasn't there and is much younger than the participants, can create such a tale. I'm too young to have been there also, but I've had the opportunity to meet some of these incredible people in my time here at UT-Austin. The activist blood still runs warm here, and will for years to come, and it is because of the people Rossinow has chronicled in this book. Want to know how things happened? Here it is. Want to be inspired toward change? Here it is.

Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

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Smart, Readable and Extremely Important

Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
E. Patrick Johnson
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0822331918

Book Description

Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performedâtoward widely divergent endsâboth within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identityâavowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.

Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performancesâranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black communityâJohnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.

Customer Reviews:

Smart, Readable and Extremely Important.......2004-06-24

APPROPRIATING BLACKNESS demonstrates a mastery of the field of performance studies and of the shifts and turns it has taken in its evolution. This fact makes Johnson's own observations about "performance" as trope all the more convincing and authoritative. This is the through-line that unites these essays into what a strong, rich, and important book to scholars working in performance studies, cultural studies, gender studies, American studies, and African American studies to name but a few areas. This broad appeal and significance represents Johnson's real success as an inter-disciplinarian where so many authors published today with such aspirations fall short. This is a very timely and impressively readable book presented with the air and authority of a scholar's expertise, but written in a style that is extremely approachable by general readers.

Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate (Berg French Studies Series)

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Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate (Berg French Studies Series)
David L. Looseley
Manufacturer: Berg Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

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Book Description

While music lovers from all over the world have tried to recreate the ambience of French cafés by playing music from stars such as Piaf, Trénet and Chevalier, intellectuals, sociologists and policy makers in France have been embroiled in passionate debate about just what constitutes 'real' French music. In the late 1950s and 1960s a wave of Anglo-American rock 'n' roll and pop hit Europe and disrupted French popular music forever. The cherished sounds of the chanson were sidelined, fragmented or merged with pop styles and instrumentation. From this point on, French music and music culture have been splintered into cultural divides - pop culture vs high culture; mass culture vs 'authentic' popular culture; national culture vs Americanization. This book investigates the exciting and innovative segmentation of the French music scene and the debates it has spawned. From an analysis of the chanson as national myth, to pop, rap, techno and the State, this book is the first full-length study to make sense of the complexity behind the history of French popular music and its relation to 'authentic' cultural identity.

The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures

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The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures
Jeff Karem
Manufacturer: University of Virginia Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Book Description

To what extent has the growing popular demand for a vicarious experience of other cultures fueled the expectation that the most important task for regional and ethnic writers is to capture and convey authentic cultural material to their readers? In 'The Romance of Authenticity,' Jeff Karem argues that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions that authenticity should be prized as a goal of regional and ethnic literatures, it is in fact a dangerously restrictive category of literary judgment. He draws on a large body of archival evidence to show how intense political and economic interests have determined what literary representations are deemed authentic, not only constraining what such writers can publish but also limiting the ways in which their works are interpreted.

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Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics

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Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics
David Kyuman Kim
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Consciousness & Thought | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0195319826

Book Description

Why does agency--the capacity to make choices and to act in the world--matter to us? Why is it meaningful that our intentions have effects in the world, that they reflect our sense of identity, that they embody what we value? What kinds of motivations are available for political agency and judgment in an age that lacks the enthusiasm associated with the great emancipatory movements for civil rights and gender equality? What are the conditions for the possibility of being an effective agent when the meaning of democracy has become less transparent? David Kyuman Kim addresses these crucial questions by uncovering the political, moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions of human agency. Kim treats agency as a form of religious experience that reflects implicit and explicit notions of the good. Of particular concern are the moral, political, and religious motivations that underpin an understanding of agency as meaningful action. Through a critical engagement with the work of theorists such as Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, and Stanley Cavell, Kim argues that late modern and postmodern agency is found most effectively at work in what he calls "projects of regenerating agency" or critical and strategic responses to loss. Agency as melancholic freedom begins and endures, Kim maintains, through the moral and psychic losses associated with a broad range of experiences, including the moral identities shaped by secularized modernity and the multifold forms of alienation experienced by those who suffer the indignities of racial, gender, class, and sexuality discrimination and oppression. Kim calls for renewing the sense of urgency in our political and moral engagements by seeing agency as a vocation, where the aspiration for self-transformation and the human need for hope are fundamental concerns.

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