MEDIA & MUSIC
Clockwise from top left:
1. Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope
by Ayanna Dozier
2. Judy at Carnegie Hall by
Manuel Betancourt
3. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by
Matthew Frye Jacobson
4. Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On
Bach by Roshanak Kheshti
5. Why Karen Carpenter Matters
by Karen Tongson
6. Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood
Babylon
7. The Bakersfield Sound by
Robert E. Price
8. Lament from Epirus by
Christopher C. King
9. Her Stories: Daytime Soap
Opera & US Television History
by Elana Levine
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9.
This book examines
Jackson's continuation
of her quest for control
as heard in her sixth
album, The Velvet Rope
[which] stands out as a
revelatory expression of
emotional vulnerability
by the singer, one that
many other artists have
followed in the 20-plus
years since its release.
By looking at
[Garland’s] song
choices, her stage
banter, the album's
cultural impact, and
her place in the gay
pantheon, this book
argues that Judy's
palpable connection
with her fans is
precisely what her
Capitol Records' two-
disc album captured.
When 20-year-old Odetta
Holmes-classically trained
as a vocalist veered away
from both opera and
musical theater in favor of
performing politically
charged field hollers,
prison songs, work songs,
and folk tunes, she was
making one of the most
portentous decisions in the
history of both American
music and Civil Rights.
Through a postcolonial
lens of feminist science
and technology studies,
Roshanak Kheshti
engages in a reading of
Carlos's music within this
gendered context. By
focusing on Switched-On
Bach (the highest selling
classical music recording
of all time), this book
explores the significance
of gender to the album's
phenomenal success.
In Why Karen Carpenter
Matters, Karen Tongson
(whose Filipino musician
parents named her after
the pop icon) interweaves
the story of the singer's
rise to fame with her own
trans-Pacific journey
between the Philippines
and Karen Carpenter's
home ground of
Southern California. This
hybrid of memoir and
biography excavates the
destructive
perfectionism at the root
of the Carpenters' sound,
while finding the beauty
in the singer's all too
brief life.
Kenneth Anger is a
former child movie
actor who grew up to
become one of
America’s leading
underground
filmmakers.
Hollywood Babylon was
originally published
in Paris, and quickly
became an
underground legend.
Not a word has been
changed. Not a story
omitted. Here is the
hot, luscious plum of
sizzling scandal that
continues to shock
the world.
In California's Central
Valley, two thousand
miles away from
country music's hit
machine, the hard edge
of the Bakersfield
Sound transformed
American music in the
latter half of the
twentieth century. The
Bakersfield Sound
immerses us in the
unique cultural
convergence that gave
rise to a visceral and
distinctly California
country music.
In a gramophone shop in
Istanbul, renowned record
collector Christopher C. King
uncovered some of the
strangest—and most hypnotic—
sounds he had ever heard. The
78s were immensely moving,
seeming to tap into a primal well
of emotion inaccessible through
contemporary music. The songs,
King learned, were from Epirus,
an area straddling southern
Albania and northwestern
Greece and boasting a folk
tradition extending back to the
pre-Homeric era. To hear this
music is to hear the past.
Elana Levine draws on
archival research and her
experience as a longtime
soap fan to provide an in-
depth history of the daytime
television soap opera as a
uniquely gendered cultural
form and a central force in
the economic and social
influence of network
television… AKA a book
absolutely tailor made for
me!
