Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels - Softcover

MacPhee, Josh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942173113 ISBN 13: 9781942173113

Verlag: Common Notions, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

“Every entry opens a window onto a different story of creativity and resistance and I couldn’t stop hopscotching around from page to page, each one sparking off vectors for further thought and exploration. A totally mind-blowing accomplishment.”
—Guy Picciotto, Fugazi

An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels is a compendium of information about political music and radical cultural production. Focusing on vinyl records and the labels that released them, this groundbreaking book traces the parallel rise of social movements in the second half of the twentieth century and the vinyl record as the dominant form of music distribution.

Just as the Civil Rights Movement leaps onto mainstream headlines in the early 1960s, the 33rpm “Long Player” and 45rpm single invade people’s stereos. All the major Civil Rights organizations release vinyl records of speeches, movement songs, and field recordings—setting the pace for the intertwining of social movements and easily distributed sound recordings. This relationship continues through the end of the twentieth century, which marked both the end of apartheid in South Africa and the dominance of the vinyl format.

From A-Disc (the record label of the Swedish Labor Movement) to Zulu Records (the label of free jazz pioneer Phil Choran), An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels is a compelling panorama of political sound and action, including over 750 record labels that produced political music. Each entry features the logo of the label, a brief synopsis of its history, and additional interesting information. Truly international in scope, over two dozen countries and territories are represented, as well as a myriad of musical styles and forms.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements based in Brooklyn, NY. MacPhee is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now and Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He has organized the Celebrate People's History poster series since 1998 and has been designing book covers for many publishers for the past decade.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

In the title of this book, the name “encyclopedia” might be a slight misnomer. Instead of making a formal claim to historical fact, what I present is my research, very much in process. Much is drawn directly from the records (including 95 percent of the logos), with large amounts of help from the websites Discogs, Wikipedia, and Google Translate. Even though I’ve expanded the entries from 142 (first edition) to 230 (second edition) to 789 (the third edition you are reading now), this list is still by no means complete, nor likely 100 percent correct. It’s pieced together from clues on the backs of record covers and in the footnotes of websites, tips from friends, advertisements in Sing Out! (a quarterly journal of folk music), flyers slipped into album sleeves, and my own extrapolation from music-related Wikipedia entries in a dozen different languages.

That said, it is organized as a reference book. It’s not intended to be read from cover to cover, but to be bounced around in; each time you pick it up, I hope it provides a new nugget of useful or fascinating information. There were infinite ways that this book could have been organized, but I eventually decided on alphabetical order as the most simple and straightforward. There is an alphabet guide on the far right of each page spread to help you get around. While in the English language we tend to put modifiers after nouns (i.e., Cobblestone Records), in other languages the modifiers come first (i.e., Disques Pavé). I’ve alphabetized based on how the label is written in its own language; so in the previous example, Disques Pavé is under D. If a label didn’t tend to use the modifier, I didn’t either. For instance, Discos Pentagrama was a small Mexican folk label active in the eighties, but its name is almost always written simply as “Pentagrama,” so I’ve placed it under P. I’ve used the same logic for acronyms. If a label is primarily known by its acronym—such as EGREM from Cuba— I’ve left it as such. If not, I’ve written out the full name. Lastly, just as in English the articles “the” and “a” are ignored when alphabetizing things, I’ve done the same with foreign-language articles (e.g., “el/la” and “un/una” in Spanish).

While not intended to be read front to back, this book should still be interesting to read in chunks, where you can really start to see patterns and overlapping information. If you simply use it as a reference, you might not get to see just how many European Communist parties released records to support electoral campaigns, or how many labels across the globe released Chilean music as an act of solidarity after the fascist coup in the country in 1973. It is through this macro lens that some really compelling political ideas take shape, which is why the index (new to this edition) is so important. Give it a skim to see just how many people, movements, and ideas overlap and are connected to multiple labels. 

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Common Notions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1942173113
• ISBN 13: 9781942173113
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar