33 Revolutions Per Minute
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Why 33? Partly because that's the number of rotations performed by a vinyl album in one minute, and partly because it takes a lot of songs to tell a story which spans seven decades and five continents - to capture the colour and variety of this shape-shifting genre. This is not a list book, rather each of the 33 songs offers a way into a subject, an artist, an era or an idea.
The book feels vital, in both senses of the word: necessary and alive. It captures some of the energy that is generated when musicians take risks, and even when they fail, those endeavours leave the popular culture a little richer and more challenging. Contrary to the frequently voiced idea that pop and politics are awkward bedfellows, it argues that protest music is pop, in all its blazing, cussed glory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The protest song reached its zenith in 1960s America when Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, Country Joe and the Fish, Jimi Hendrix, and Joan Baez wrote popular songs to protest American involvement in the Vietnam War and the mistreatment of social and economic groups. In some cases Dylan's "Masters of War," P.F. Sloan's "Eve of Destruction," Country Joe McDonald's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" the songs became anthems that defined a generation, confirming the idea that popular music could indeed bring people together to promote a common cause for the common good. Sadly, British music critic Lynskey doesn't capture the deep significance of the protest song or the cultural moments that created them. Although he admirably attempts to isolate the personal and cultural contexts of 33 protest songs, from Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and James Brown's "Say It Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud" to the Clash's "White Riot," Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," and Steve Earle's "John Walker's Blues," Lynskey doesn't fully demonstrate the reasons that each song qualifies as a protest song in the first place, or why the songs he gathered provide the best examples of a protest song.
