Music : a subversive history
Edition
First trade paperback edition.
Publication Information
New York : Basic Books, 2021.
Physical Description
xii, 513 pages ; 21 cm
Summary
Gioia tells a 4,000-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval. He shows how social outcasts have repeatedly become trailblazers of musical expression.
Notes
Originally published in hardcover by Basic Books in 2019.
Contents
- Introduction
- The origin of music as a force of creative destruction
- Carnivores at the Philharmonic
- In search of a universal music
- Music history as a battle between magic and mathematics
- Bulls and sex toys
- The storyteller
- The invention of the singer
- The shame of music
- Unmanly music
- The devil's songs
- Oppression and musical innovation
- Not all wizards carry wands
- The invention of the audience
- Musicians behaving badly
- The origins of the music business
- Culture wars
- Subversives in wigs
- You say you want a revolution?
- The great flip-flop
- The aesthetics of diaspora
- Black music and the great American lifestyle crisis
- Rebellion goes mainstream
- Funky butt
- The origins of country music in the neolithic era
- Where did our love go?
- The sacrificial ritual
- Rappers and technocrats
- Welcome our new overlords
- Epilogue: This is not a manifesto.