Here are 100 books that Rhythms of Labour fans have personally recommended if you like
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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.
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.
"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…
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.
Whilst not strictly a book about popular music, but rather two separate but related essays on the modern composers Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, Adorno’s study has been utterly formative for how I understand music and its relationship to its social conditions.
I can’t even fathom how I could think about music without Adorno, and this book is by far his most concerted and concise statement on the subject.
An indispensable key to Adorno's influential oeuvre-now in paperback
In 1949, Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of New Music was published, coinciding with the prominent philosopher's return to a devastated Europe after his exile in the United States. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Arnold Schoenberg reviled it.
Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal…
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.
Iton’s book isn’t restricted to popular music but ranges more widely across Black popular cultures.
However, in the ways he understands the historical intersection of popular music and institutional politics (especially in a magisterial chapter on soul music), Iton gave me a way of conceptualizing music as a form of political expression and organization in itself.
*Named one of CHOICE 's "Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009"*
Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, black popular culture was commonly seen as a means of forging community and effecting political change.
But as Richard Iton shows in this provocative and insightful volume, despite the changes brought about by the civil rights movement, and contrary to the wishes of those committed to narrower conceptions of politics, black artists have continued to play a significant role in the making and maintenance of critical social spaces.…
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.
Clover’s book is the first I can remember reading that both takes popular music seriously as a form and understands it as an ideological object. His writing is crisp, and he moves smoothly and convincingly from a world-historical event to a particular riff. I think this is one of those books that teaches us that we can both take our revolutionary commitments seriously and love commercial music, too.
In a tour de force of lyrical theory, Joshua Clover boldly reimagines how we understand both pop music and its social context in a vibrant exploration of a year famously described as 'the end of history'. Amid the historic overturnings of 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, pop music also experienced striking changes. Vividly conjuring cultural sensations and events, Clover tracks the emergence of seemingly disconnected phenomena - from grunge to acid house to gangsta rap - asking if 'perhaps pop had been biding its time until 1989 came along to make sense of its sensibility'. His analysis…
When I started college in 1974 as a young radical feminist I had zero interest in history—it was all wars and men. But in a course about the Russian Revolution I learned the most thrilling thing: historians don’t simply relay facts, they argue with one another. I fell in love, and I never looked back. I am especially fascinated by what societies label “unthinkable,” and how that shapes, contains, and controls radical ideas. I've always been intrigued by what is "out of the question" and then poke at it, see what lies underneath, and try to figure out why things remain, or are kept, invisible.
On one level, this is a book about housework in the pre-Civil War northern United States. Much more profoundly, it shatters ideas about unpaid labor in early industrial capitalism. It completely changed my—and many readers’—ideas of what constitutes “work,” what it means to contribute to a household economy, and how ideas about wages (and, especially, work done by men outside the home) obscured early capitalists’ dependence on women’s unwaged work. After reading this, you’ll never refer to “women who worked” and “women who didn’t” again. It should be essential reading not only for women’s historians, but for anyone interested in ideologies of labor, capitalism, and the history of work.
[Full disclosure: I met Jeanne Boydston on my second day of graduate school and we collaborated closely on our dissertations (later books). She was my best friend and best teacher until her much-too-early death in 2008.]
Over the course of a two hundred year period, women's domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial "goodwife," valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a "dependent" and a "non-producer." This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic…
I have always been fascinated by the relationship between the concept of time, history, and politics. My first publications were in the philosophy of history. I started by translating some Left Hegelians. Then I moved toward Kant and Benjamin. My research background was constituted by the attempt to liberate Marxism from any kind of teleological philosophy of history. Recently, I began digging into concrete historical cases to extract political and legal categories. I’m interested in the reactivation of past possibilities to reconfigure the present and open alternative futures. I am now fortunate to teach courses on Temporalities and History in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC.
I could have mentioned other books written by E.P. Thompson. Each of his books has influenced my work.
Customs and Tradition contains "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism." This brilliant and elegantly written essay shows how capitalism, to impose itself, had to modify the experience of time. This change occurred through numerous conflicts with the traditions and customs of the working classes.
E.P. Thompson teaches us to consider the political importance and emancipatory potential of these struggles and not to leave "tradition" and its energy to the right.
E.P. Thompson taught me to look at these conflicts not just as forms of resistance, but as tensions between mutually incompatible legal systems. A useful corrective to Foucault.
Customs in Common is the remarkable sequel to E.P. Thompson's influential, landmark volume of social history, The Making of the English Working Class. The product of years of research and debate, Customs in Common describes the complex culture from which working class institutions emerged in England a panoply of traditions and customs that the new working class fought to preserve well into Victorian times.
In a text marked by both empathy and erudition, Thompson investigates the gradual disappearance of a range of cultural customs against the backdrop of the great upheavals of the eighteenth century. As villagers were subjected to…
I have been a runner for 50 years and a coach for 30 years. From 2001-2016 I was the coach of Team USA Minnesota Distance Training Center. During that time I coached 24 U.S. National Champions, including an Olympian & 2 USATF Running Circuit Champions, at 1500 meters, 3000 meters, and 10,000 meters on the track; the mile, 10k, 15k, 10 miles, half-marathon, 20k, 25k, and marathon on the road; 4k, 6k, 8k and 10k in cross country. Athletes I coached qualified for 30 U.S. national teams competing in IAAF World Championships in cross country, indoor track, outdoor track, and road, and achieved 73 top-three finishes in U.S. Championships.
A non-runner begins running in prison and discovers its therapeutic benefits that help him do his time and start him on a journey of self-discovery. Having been an early morning runner for many years, I appreciated the protagonist’s descriptions of frosty early morning runs, which I think are some of the best in literature.
Perhaps one of the most revered works of fiction in the twentieth-century, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is a modern classic about integrity, courage, and bucking the system. Its title story recounts the story of a reform school cross-country runner who seizes the perfect opportunity to defy the authority that governs his life. It is a pure masterpiece. From there the collection expands even further from the touching “On Saturday Afternoon” to the rollicking “The Decline and Fall and Frankie Buller.” Beloved for its lean prose, unforgettable protagonists, and real-life wisdom, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner…
Curious about Ancient Rome and especially about gladiators, I asked myself, who were the backstage team of the Colosseum? The more I searched for the team, the more I realised there was hardly any mention of them. If there were hundreds of animals, dancers, singers, gladiators, criminals, and more about to be shown off to an audience of 60,000, who was planning and managing it all? And so I created the Colosseum’s backstage team – a retired centurion called Marcus and his scribe Althea, along with a motley crew of slaves, a prostitute, a street boy, even a retired Vestal Virgin… they came alive for me while researching and I eventually created a four-book series.
A superb title and an irresistible page-turner. I could have filled whole novels with the jobs described here. Each role was interesting in its own right but also collectively built up really interesting cultural insights. A very strong sense of daily life in all its fun and messiness and a brilliant book to engage not just adults but (with a bit of redaction!) older kids too.
Vicki Le?n, the popular author of the Uppity Women series (more than 335,000 in print), has turned her impressive writing and research skills to the entertaining and unusual array of the peculiar jobs, prized careers and passionate pursuits of ancient Greece and Rome.
From Architect to Vicarius (a deputy or stand-in)-and everything in between-Working IX to V introduces readers to the most unique (dream incubator), most courageous (elephant commander), and even the most ordinary (postal worker) jobs of the ancient world. Vicki Le?n brought a light and thoughtful touch to women's history in her earlier books, and she brings the…
Though I was born in the U.S., I didn’t wind up living here full-time till I was almost 10. The result? I have always been curious about what it means to be an American. In one way or another, the books on my list explore that question. More than that, all (well, nearly all) insist that black history is inextricably intertwined with American history and that American culture is a mulatto culture, a fusion of black and white. After years of making my living as a journalist, editor, and book reviewer, I left newspapers to write fiction and non-fiction, exploring these and other questions.
I still remember reading James Alan McPherson’s book for the first time. I was a senior in high school, one of a handful of black students in what had been an all-white private school. I closed the book, thinking, “Finally. Somebody understands.”
Like me, McPherson had gone from an all-black school, college in his case, to a majority-white school, in his case, Harvard Law. He began to write fiction there. It was the mid-1960s, but instead of hewing to familiar tropes of the time, black student unrest, black self-segregation, and black victimhood, McPherson cast an unflinching eye on blacks and whites interacting for the first time as equals.
He also depicted blacks in their own world lovingly but without sentimentality. I knew these people. McPherson taught me to see and appreciate them afresh.
The classic debut collection from Pulitzer Prize winner James Alan McPherson
Hue and Cry is the remarkably mature and agile debut story collection from James Alan McPherson, one of America’s most venerated and most original writers. McPherson’s characters -- gritty, authentic, and pristinely rendered -- give voice to unheard struggles along the dividing lines of race and poverty in subtle, fluid prose that bears no trace of sentimentality, agenda, or apology.
First published in 1968, this collection includes the Atlantic Prize-winning story “Gold Coast” (selected by John Updike for the collection Best American Short Stories of the Century). Now with…
I’m a sociologist who studies American family life. About 20 years ago, I began to see signs of the weakening of family life (such as more single-parent families) among high-school educated Americans. These are the people we often call the “working class.” It seemed likely that this weakening reflected the decline of factory jobs as globalization and automation have proceeded. So I decided to learn as much as I could about the rise and decline of working-class families. The books I am recommending help us to understand what happened in the past and what’s happening now.
LeMasters hung out at a tavern in Wisconsin from 1967 to 1972, talking to factory workers who held well-paying, unionized jobs in the heyday of American industrial production. Working-class lives are so different now that I wish I could enter a time machine and travel back to the 1960s and talk to working-class men then. LeMasters’s book is as close as one can get to doing that. He describes the outlook of the tavern regulars on their work, their families, and the world around them. Despite their prosperity, they express attitudes about public life that, in some respects, would not sound out of place in a focus group of working-class adults today.
“LeMasters’ book is a valuable and popularly written source of information on the attitudes of working class men and women. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal
Blue-Collar Aristocrats is a major statement about a group of Americans too little understood and too long ignored by by the country's decision- and policy-makers. Thanks to the work of E. E. LeMasters, we now have a rare and human insight into the lives, feelings, attitudes, and problems of America's blue-collar aristocrats—one that has the potential both to add to our knowledge and to contribute toward solutions to some of our nation's broadest social problems.
