It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track - Softcover

Penman, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910695874 ISBN 13: 9781910695876

Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

When all else fails, when our compass is broken, there is one thing some of us have come to rely on: music really can give us a sense of something like home. With It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, legendary music critic Ian Penman reaches for a vanished moment in musical history when cultures collided and a certain kind of cross-generational and ‘cross-colour’ awareness was born. His cast of characters includes the Mods, James Brown, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, John Fahey, Steely Dan and Prince – black artists who were innovators, and white musicians who copied them for the mainstream. In ‘prose that glides and shimmies and pivots on risky metaphors, low puns and highbrow reference points’ (Brian Dillon, frieze), Ian Penman’s first book in twenty years is cause for celebration.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career as at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the LRB, and City Journal. He is the author of Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent’s Tail, 1998).

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James Brown’s legendary reputation as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business was part virile boast and part canny PR. Had a bad week at work? The Man will give you a show to raise your spirits and cancel out the pain. He put as much work into his act as his audience put into their low-end jobs. Showbiz was man’s work, hard labor, as much sweat of his brow as swish of his cape. The audience got its money’s worth; and if Brown understood one thing above all else, it was the many uses and values, financial and symbolic, of money. He never went on tour without a big bag of ready cash—to grease wheels, ameliorate tensions, make obstacles disappear. After he died, people found boxes of dollar bills stashed in the walls of his house, or buried out back on his land. Born in 1933, Brown learned his hard-headed ways in a 1950s music business that was a rough twine of Mafia hegemony and outta-sight profits. He believed in the redemptive power of hard work as others believed in the blood of the lamb. A true believer in the do-it-yourself ethos of the American Dream, he didn’t see why race should be a barrier to getting the good things in life. Hard work was how he shaped his destiny in a sectarian world, his eventual success the product of near tyrannical drive and will. He could be hard work personally, too. He rarely took no for an answer, whether it was a question of getting an encore, sleeping with him, or signing away your royalties. In his music as in his wiles, Brown was no suave pinkie-ring seducer. He had none of the snake-charmer sweetness of a later generation of soul men. If the key to musical seduction is hiding all artifice behind a carefully disheveled front of natural élan, Brown took another road, emphasizing all the stuff other artists tucked away. Listening to Brown’s classic hits—'Cold Sweat,’ ‘Out of Sight,’ ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine’—you could be eavesdropping on some 11th-hour rehearsal, the air jumpy with back chat, barked instructions, and flip, musicianly code.

You can all but hear the effort that goes into summoning up the bumpy and volatile groove.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1910695874
• ISBN 13: 9781910695876
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 182
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY; n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com ; ; Via Bruno Buozzi, 24/26,; Granarolo dell'Emilia BO,; 40057; Italien