A01=Josh Kun
america
american culture
american identity
american studies
art and music
artists
Author_Josh Kun
bronx
Category=AVLP
Category=JBCC1
Category=JBSL
critical analysis
cultural studies
discussion books
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic demographic studies
ethnic differences
ethnic minorities
havana
hip hop
klezmer
latin rock
literary movements
los angeles
modern history
music
music and culture
music historians
music history
music lovers
music studies
nonfiction
popular music
race issues
racial history
racial issues
retrospective
us borders
Product details
- ISBN 9780520244245
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2005
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 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, Cafe 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.
