Each of the following recently released music books is informative and entertaining by turns, but only the first is an unqualified success.
In his appealingly irreverent new book David Wondrich (who writes about cocktails for Esquire) goes looking for the roots of the primordial American sound he calls hot music: music that combines a Celtic-derived foursquare stomp with the swerving melodic and rhythmic impulses (read: blue notes and syncopation) of Africa. Starting in the earliest days of the minstrel era (and confronting its utter racism head-on), he follows the intertwining of these two crucial elements in ragtime, march, and other idioms, and profiles pivotal figures. Most of these are white folks, from popular minstrels to John Philip Sousa himself, who (deliberately or unconsciously) stole ideas from blacks, but three African-Americans–vaudevillian Bert Williams, bandleader James Reese Europe, and composer and blues progenitor W.C. Handy–emerge as heroes. Their hard-won crossover success in the white entertainment world made black contributions to popular music impossible to ignore, and paved the way for later black superstars, including Louis Armstrong.
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Ed Morales has written frequently and well in the Village Voice and elsewhere about the mainstream emergence of Latin pop performers–Ricky Martin, Shakira, the Buena Vista Social Club–but in this book he fails to place such developments in a coherent historical context. As he writes in the introduction, “Trying to define Latin music is like trying to define Latinos in the United States….There may be more styles and variations of being Latino than there are different Latin American countries.” Unfortunately that awesome variety overwhelms Morales: his discussion of the advent of Afro-Caribbean music bogs down in stale, quasi-academic language, and he displays major gaps in his grasp of Portuguese-language material. His one-sentence remark on the development of Portugal’s fado scene seems to equate the importance of newcomer Mariza (whose debut was in 2001) with that of the late matriarch Amalia Rodrigues (who personified the genre for over half a century), and his chapter on Brazilian music is strewn with errors: he writes that Alcione, Clara Nunes, and Beth Carvalho were the country’s most popular performers of the 50s, but none of them began recording before the mid-60s and all achieved their greatest fame in the 70s.
Originally published ten years ago but newly revised to include a chapter covering the 90s, this intensely researched 600-page book doesn’t quite accomplish its goal of demonstrating how female country performers have reflected the experience of women in America, but it does a great job of creating a historical context for the music. The title is a bit misleading: country music didn’t exist as such until after the advent of radio and the first “hillbilly” records of the 20s–the first two chapters deal with the women who collected and preserved folk songs in the 1800s and with minstrel and vaudeville artists.
Kool Mo (he used to spell it “Moe”) Dee first emerged as a member of the Treacherous Three back in the early 80s, waxing some of old-school hip-hop’s biggest hits (“Body Rock,” “Feel the Heartbeat”), then reinvented himself as a solo act; he waged a famous multirecord battle against LL Cool J beginning with “How Ya Like Me Now” in 1987. By the early 90s he was more or less finished.
