Why am I passionate about this?
I am a lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. I write regularly on popular music and culture in scholarly form and as a critic in various publications. I am convinced that popular music can gesture at utopia despite its emergence from within a capitalist market society.
Paul's book list on popular music and capitalism
Why did Paul love this book?
This book was actually written before Baraka’s turn to Marxism, but as a social history of African American music, it is more than exemplary of a style of writing that takes the relationship of cultural form to its conditions seriously.
How Baraka moves between the music and the social conditions of Black musicians changed what I thought engaged musical analysis could be.
2 authors picked Blues People as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
"A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music." — Langston Hughes
"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."
So says Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) in the Introduction to Blues…
- Coming soon!