Review by New York Times Review
"TUTTI FRUTTI, GOOD BOOTY," ran the prebowdlerized version of Little Richard's hit song, one of the lyrics the NPR music critic Ann Powers cites to demonstrate the intersection of evocative gibberish and open, transgressive eroticism that, she says, is "at the heart of American popular music." The line encompasses sexual frankness, piratical rapine, the backside in fetish and dance and a wordless endorsement of the pleasure principle. All this through the flamboyant vessel of a performer who himself embodied complexities of sexuality, race and the slippage between the spiritual and the carnal. And "embodiment" is the relevant term for Powers. Her argument, that "we, as a nation, most truly and openly acknowledge sexuality's power through music," is intimately tied to the body: enslaved and objectified black bodies, the erotic sublimation and liberation of dance, the dialogue between charismatic performer and enraptured audience and the problem of "cyborg" singers like Britney Spears. She stresses the primacy of the voice, the flesh and the communion of bodies in a room together over the atomized experience of listening to disembodied sound (while acknowledging new forms of intimacy introduced by the age of recording). Powers connects her early attraction to popular music explicitly to its "erotic pull," the "physicality" of live performance, and the centrality of music to the sexual awakenings of herself and her friends. She decided, she says, "to write a book about American music and American sex, one that would really be about American dreaming, violence, pleasure, hunger, lies and love." It's a self-consciously ambitious program (the jacket copy prepares the reader for a "magnum opus over two decades in the making") befitting one of the rare rock critics with a national audience, and a key female voice in the field. It's also one that Powers admits will be necessarily incomplete: "To talk about what's revealed within the sexiest moments of American music ... is to recast its history in terms that are more inclusive, and less dominated by old ideas of artistic genius or great works.... This retelling of American popular music doesn't always focus on the big stories. It has gaps." Powers does spend time with obscure artists like Florence Mills and Jobriath, and fruitfully explores the colorful, gender-fluid world of early gospel music. However, her story hews to a broadly conventional narrative - the intersection of African-American expression, white curiosity and appropriation, and the dialogue between the spiritual and the secular - that begins in Congo Square ring shouts and leads with inexorable circularity back to the New Orleans of Beyoncé's "Lemonade." Familiar figures like the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison stand in for "the sexual revolution and its discontents," while Madonna and Prince do the same for the MTV '80s. Meanwhile, the centrality of eroticism in Powers's narrative necessitates a de-emphasis on canonical artists without an obvious erotic component to their personas (Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan), and inconclusive glosses on others (Chuck Berry, Michael Jackson) whose sexual and racial stories are more complicated. Powers allows herself the veteran rock critic's slangy informality (Buddy Holly "was ... getting laid on the regular"), which can create a tonal instability when set against historical filler ("By 2000 ... people spent more and more time within the virtual realm made possible by a new phenomenon called the World Wide Web") and quotations from academic sources. She has a zest for bold assertions, and some of them land: Her attention to the physical intimacy between Creole women and their black servants, the domestic eroticism of "gospel mothers," the sensuous intimacy of soft rock, and the puritan sexual disgust of punk are all useful diversifications from the bawdy journey through national puberty that is the book's primary narrative. Some are more debatable : Was Mick Jagger's appropriation of blues "codes of potency" really a result of LSD? Do girl group and doo-wop's "nonsense syllables" and "baby talk" really constitute inarticulate "play preceding full adult sexuality," the "revelatory babble of an emerging generation"? Did Jim Morrison's "sacrifice" of his member "on the altar of silence ... strike like a final blow" to the '60s? The subtitle of "Good Booty" lays claim to "American music," but Powers quickly acknowledges that she means "American popular music," and her central point of reference for the erotic potential of music remains rock (Creole dandies, gospel performers, rappers and music as "a vocabulary of freedom" are all described in terms of rock). Jazz and country music are largely dispensed with in a three-page summary, along with the Great Depression, Great Migration and World War II, in a rush to get to teenagers and rock 'n' roll. (Country music's more ambivalent attitudes toward sex - Dolly Parton and "The Pill" notwithstanding - are inconvenient for the book's whiggish thesis. Books like Nadine Hubbs's "Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music," though, offer intriguing counternarratives of the kind it would've been interesting to find here.) Musical theater, which combines traditional romantic plots with queer and camp appeal, shares a paragraph with the art-music world in a brief consideration of AIDS-related work. AT ITS CORE, this is a story of the exceptional nature of American popular music. But if there is something sui generis about the explosive admixture of race and desire Powers declares essential to that music, arguably its world-conquering power has as much to do with the development of mass commercial culture industries as it does with something inherently liberating in its content. The musical and erotic thrill of miscegenation, of contact with an exoticized other-among-us imbued with projected musical, sexual and possibly criminal power, is hardly unique to the American imagination: Brazil, or the Roma diaspora, comes to mind. (And one can't help noticing that African-American writers on African-American music tend not to underscore its erotic nature: Baraka points to blues as a result of a new black experience of solitude and individualism, Du Bois to sorrow, and Ellison to a kind of existential syncopation.) Unexceptional as well is the sublimation of multifarious desire into music and the "jaunty polyamory" of dance, as Susan McClary and others have argued in feminist readings of the European classical canon. Music has been central to the ritualized sexuality of fertility, circumcision, puberty and wedding ceremonies cross-culturally and from time immemorial. The ultimate novelty in American music is not eros and race-mixing, but technology, capital and global distribution. Powers concludes, "When we think we can't move, the music is always there to say we can." But as Pascal Quignard and a growing number of scholars writing on music, war and torture have pointed out, sound and rhythm can act as much as a tool for control and violation of the body as one for emancipation. Communal noise, wrote Elias Canetti, is crucial to the unity of the bloodthirsty crowd. The experience of dissociation, of disembodiment, is as common a reaction to trauma as it is to the liberating pulse of the dance floor. Music is, indeed, a slippery and complicated force - especially for the optimistic narrative of the pop critic. FRANZ NICOLAY is a writer and musician. His book, "The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground From Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar," was published last year. Powers connects her early attraction to popular music explicitly to its 'erotic pull.'
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 10, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The appropriation of other cultures is nothing new in America. Despite the stigma of racial mixing, white society observed African Americans slaves, white musicians adapted African American musical styles, and, subsequently, Americans commingled on the dance floor hence, the inevitable blending of cultures. The introduction of the hootchy-kootch, an exotic and erotic belly dance (basically a white interpretation of the perceived exoticism of the other) at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, further assisted in the loosening of American hips, aiding in the disruption of propriety and hastening the relaxing of social customs. All of these forces come into play in NPR music critic Powers' informative and entertaining analysis of the roots of sex and race in American popular music. Tracking popular music from New Orleans' Congo Square through the blues queens, early rockers like Elvis and (of course) Little Richard, on through the sixties of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, and all the way to Madonna, Michael, Prince, and Beyoncé, Powers reveals an extraordinary breadth of knowledge and insight and has produced an absolutely essential addition to any pop-culture collection.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her ambitious history of American pop music, NPR critic and correspondent Powers delves into a diverse range of music forms including Creole love songs and tracks to twerk to on MTV. Above all, Powers (Weird like Us) embraces the profound, and often illicit, influence African-American music had on mainstream culture. Beginning her book in early 19th-century New Orleans, Powers examines the exotic appeal of the city's diverse cultures on the divided nation that absorbed it. From there she speeds through two centuries of music including ragtime, gospel, R&B, rock and roll, punk, disco, and hip-hop, focusing on artists and genres that transformed the way people move on the dance floor and in the bedroom. The sweeping themes and expansive time span make for a daunting endeavor, one that Powers further complicates by tackling big related topics such as marriage and the internet. Broad overviews of musical eras highlight important artists, some well-known (Elvis, Hendrix, Madonna, Beyoncé), others less so (Florence Mills, Dorothy Love Coates, Tribe 8). Powers alternates between basic Wikipedia-level historiography and academic theorizing, focusing on the interchanges between song, identity, and the body. Powers's inevitable neglect of dominant genres (swing-era jazz) and essential figures (James Brown) exposes the impossibility of her undertaking. Still, as an introduction to the racially and sexually charged legacy of pop music in the U.S., this book is well worth a spin. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
From Britney Spears's manufactured sex appeal to Jim Morrison's toxic masculinity, NPR music critic Powers (Piece by Piece; Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America) explores the intersection between America's musical landscape and its overwrought cultural views of sex. She opens with a meditation on the interplay between body and sound crystallized in New Orleans' Congo Square in the 19th century. Here, confluences of African and European musical styles blended to create the roots of jazz and what would become rock and roll. As a corollary, popular music became an amalgam of racial tension, sexual expression, and gender expectations that continue to reverberate into the new millennia. From Miley Cyrus's twerking to Beyoncé's "Formation," Powers articulates how artists have manipulated or experimented with each of these threads to forge their own musical identity and sound. VERDICT With precision and wit, and across multiple musical genres, Powers contextualizes the complicated interplay of gender, sex, and race inherent in popular music within and against the backdrop of America's puritanical founding.-Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Forget drugs: sex and rock roll are where it's at in this survey of the devil's music and its carnal dimensions.NPR music critic Powers (Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, 2000, etc.) opens on a political note, observing, "America's erotic drive emerged as inseparable from the fact of its troubled multiculturalism." Take it as a given that nations have "erotic drives" and that any discussion of "American bodies" requires us to acknowledge "the legacy of gross inequality that begins in the enslavement of Africans." The author then settles into her occasionally diffuse narrative that connects Congo Square to Beyonc and bemoans the devolution of Ma Rainey's bawdy to the pornified, auto-tuned hip-hop of today. Where Powers successfully connects the dots, light bulbs flash: it is fascinating to watch her join the gay subculture of disco to the success of the sisters Labelle, nee the Blue Bells, remade in "a previously unexplored space where glam met funk met soul via strictly female interplay." (Well, perhaps not strictly female, since, as Powers notes, the designer of Labelle's outrageously flamboyant costumes went on to invent the costumes of the swaggering cartoon band KISS.) Even where she does not successfully make those connections, as with her notes on the apache ("pronounced A-POSH, not like the Native American tribal name") dance and its not-so-subtle masochism, which never quite caught on in the larger culture, she ventures interesting theses. Mostly, the author strings together bright tidbits of cultural trivia to reconstruct and deconstruct the kinship of dirty blues and gospel, the shared underage girlfriends of now-iconic British rock stars, and other points of prurient interest. A mixed bag, sometimes entertaining, sometimes arid, but full of useful insights; readers won't look at Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj the same way after considering them among the "cartoonish card deck of sexualized female archetypes" that constitutes so much of the present pop scene. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
