Highly recommend White Tears by Hari Kunzru. It’s fiction but its’s about two white guys who are obsessed with black culture (rare Delta blues records in particular) and the appropriation of the culture that inevitably goes along with such an obsession. Kunzru does not hold back on the punches on this.
On a lighter note, the audio of the Beastie Boys book is amazing, they’ve a whole crew of people reading chapters (Steve Buscemi, Kim Gordon, Snoop Dogg, Bette Midler, etc). Perfect for that long car journey.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading a couple of titles that may seem quite specific to Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand), but some of you might find them interesting.
Wind up bird , probably fave also , murakami got a great skill of reintroducing / reycling characters between novels, always drawn into his sipping beer , cooking in the apartment scenes, usualy some nice jazz playing
I have heard so many good things about the War of Art - I don’t have a copy but you’ve inspired me to use the Audible voucher I was given at Xmas to download it.
Agreed, I like his "Winter of Frankie Machine’, was optioned by DeNiro I think but never got made into a movie, think Josh Brolin would be perfect now…
Chris Frantz ‘Remain In Love’ - rather odd in so much as he comes out of it quite badly, IMO, but interesting to read a different perspective on Talking Heads
Dave Haslam ‘Life After Dark’ - pretty detailed exploration of the history of UK music venues and clubs. The London mod era stuff was particularly interesting.
I would dispute this characterization- I think he came off as a guy who wanted to defend his role in a band that a lot of people don’t realize he founded and as a fundamentally middle class human from a military family who maybe just isn’t quite as transgressive or weird as we would all want him to be.
No, will look it out when I get my ‘reading’ mojo back, this whole pandemic has messed with my head something rotten, not felt like doing anything much… video games been my saviour, mindless escape’ism!
Hear you on the point about him being unashamedly unweird. Just found the attacks on Byrne pretty clumsy and unsupported. Not helped when Byrne is on record as saying he’s on the autistic spectrum, struggles with social situations etc. But hey, still worth a read
I will keep my scant personal interactions with Mr. Byrne out of this as well as some of the things that I know secondhand and I will simply state the following truism – nine out of 10 successful bands fall apart because the people in them just don’t like each other. A musical group is about the most intimate thing that you can be involved in short of a marriage
Tons and tons of new records to check out courtesy of this tome and at the same time I’m battling with Snowboy’s need to re-write music history. The idea for instance that Lonnie Liston Smith “Expansions” didn’t get massive club play in the US is absurd and he’s gotta know it. It gets really tired hearing again and again how us Americans don’t appreciate our own culture and is rendered further absurd when you think about how many jazz artists had their most fertile periods commercially during the jazz-funk era. Still, a thousand records I didn’t know about yesterday is a treasure.
