Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music
by Ann Powers
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NPR Best Books of 2017 In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR's acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race. In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America's primary erotic art form. Powers takes us from nineteenth-century New Orleans through dance-crazed Jazz Age New show more York to the teen scream years of mid-twentieth century rock-and-roll to the cutting-edge adventures of today's web-based pop stars. Drawing on her deep knowledge and insights on gender and sexuality, Powers recounts stories of forbidden lovers, wild shimmy-shakers, orgasmic gospel singers, countercultural perverts, soft-rock sensitivos, punk Puritans, and the cyborg known as Britney Spears to illuminate how eroticism--not merely sex, but love, bodily freedom, and liberating joy--became entwined within the rhythms and melodies of American song. This cohesion, she reveals, touches the heart of America's anxieties and hopes about race, feminism, marriage, youth, and freedom. In a survey that spans more than a century of music, Powers both heralds little known artists such as Florence Mills, a contemporary of Josephine Baker, and gospel queen Dorothy Love Coates, and sheds new light on artists we think we know well, from the Beatles and Jim Morrison to Madonna and Beyoncé. In telling the history of how American popular music and sexuality intersect--a magnum opus over two decades in the making--Powers offers new insights into our nation psyche and our soul. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
I think this was too broad a topic to cover in one book. It felt uneven and scattered--especially toward the end--and I'm not sure exactly who the audience was supposed to be apart from somebody who is completely unfamiliar with American pop culture. (I just got exhausted of the explanations of every single artist and genre.) I'm also pretty sure the reader for the audio had never heard many of the songs or artists discussed for all the flat delivery and mispronunciation...yeesh.
That said, I did enjoy it as an overview and my general fondness for 101-type of approaches.
That said, I did enjoy it as an overview and my general fondness for 101-type of approaches.
The title describes the book accurately. I might not always agree or understand the choices of what to include and the interpretations, I did agree with most and found it a very interesting sociological analysis of American sex and race.
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Author Information
10+ Works 1,169 Members
Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. She began her career at San Francisco Weekly, and has held positions at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, Blender and the Experience Music Project. Her previous books include Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America; Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, which she cowrote with Amos; show more and Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop, which she coedited with Evelyn McDonnell. She was also the editor of Best Music Writing 2010. show less
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Common Knowledge
- First words
- I think I was around nine years old when I realized music is sexy. From the first time I heard the songs that moved me to distraction in childhood, by the Beatles and the Jackson 5, I loved them because they affected my whole... (show all) body, making me think hard and respond deeply and jump like a jelly bean. -Preface
American music originates in the bodies of its people, in the pull of a moan from the throat and a spine-loosening roll of the hips. From the beginning, it scandalized those who didn't understand it, or maybe felt its impact ... (show all)all too well. -Introduction
Popular music gives shape, in time, to desire; and desire always crosses boundaries. In the United States, one line underlies all the rest: the artificial one separating citizens who came to be called "white" from all the oth... (show all)er people who inhabited the soil and shaped the nation. -Chapter 1, The Taboo Baby, New Orleans, 1800-1900 - Canonical DDC/MDS
- 781.640973
- Canonical LCC
- ML3477.P69
Classifications
- Genres
- Music, Nonfiction, History, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 781.640973 — Arts & recreation Music General principles and musical forms Traditions of music Western popular music {equally instrumental and vocal} Biography And History North America
- LCC
- ML3477 .P69 — Music Literature on music Literature on music History and criticism Popular music
- BISAC
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- 102
- Popularity
- 309,780
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.42)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 8
- ASINs
- 2
