Exotica [Paperback]

David Toop (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 1999

"Exotica" takes a look at the music and people behind some of the world's most witty, experimental and adventurous sound recordings. Since the invention of the microphone, people have experimented with sound, putting everything from thunderstorms and dolphin sounds, medical operations, native jungle drums and junkyard trash down on vinyl. Notions of the exotic have inspired popular music and musicians in all fields from classical, through "easy listening" to rap - from Stravinsky to the Boo-Yah T.R.I.B.E David Toop takes the reader through the 20th century's fascination with exotica, its icons and practitioners, taking in the work of Les Baxter, the meaning of Carmen Miranda, leopard skin leotards and pink fluffy cubicles, elevator music and more. Included are interviews with Burt Bacharach, Ornette Coleman, Bill Laswell, YMO's Haroumi Hosono, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail (June 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852425954
• ISBN-13: 978-1852425951
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,646,682 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Arguably the most intelligent music critic writing, August 17, 1999

By 

JEREMY REED c/o [e-mail] (London, GB) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Exotica (Paperback)

Exotica by David Toop

David Toop is arguably the most intelligent music critic writing today, his range of interests prospecting across an avant garde canvas coloured by the 20th century's foremost writers, thinkers and musicians.

Although Toop's subject is predominantly that of fabricated soundscapes in a real world, a music which has come to be categorised as exotica, his roots are literary and extend to novelistic cosmographers like Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and William Burroughs. Toop is erudite, but refreshingly unacademic in the way his texts are interspersed with autobiography, anecdote, interviews and fiction. Bringing imaginative criticism to bear on a range of subjects from the beginnings of ethnic music to Josephine Baker and Yma Sumac, Les Baxter and Martin Denny, Toop succeeds in aligning the concept of the exotic with world music. In a century in which we have grown to be increasingly interiorised, television often providing our point of contact with the external world, so music has come to assume the role of transporting geography into our rooms. In this respect Les Baxter's floridly contrived soundscapes prove central to Toop's thesis, for Baxter was throughout the 1950's to offer his listeners package tours in sound. According to Toop Baxter's music provided 'running excursions for sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboo urges before lunch, view a pagan ceremony through gaps in the bamboo, go wild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home stereo comforts in the whitebread suburbs.' Baxter's albums carried titles such as Caribbean moonlight, Jewels of the Sea, Ritual of the Savage and Ports of Pleasure, and by hinting at sexual licentiousness in exotic landscapes, the music was to prove irresistible to a 1950's record buying public.

Toop is particularly good on inventive vocalists like Josephine Baker and Yma Sumac. When Baker arrived in Paris in 1925 as a dancer with La Revue Négre, she caused a sensation by exposing her breasts when she danced. Aspiring to chanson, she injected the medium with her atavistic African roots, so as to create an exotic vocal genre.

Yma Sumac noted for her collaboration with Les Baxter on Voice of the Xtabay, was an extraordinarily volatile singer of South American ancestry noted for her multi-octave range and freakishly histrionic tone. Sumac shared with Baxter and Denny the ability to transpose a spuriously sourced primitivism to the contrived medium of the Western recording studio.

David Toop is a marvellous guide to the curious, the bizarre, the culted and the durable in 20th century music. His book includes interviews with the eclectic likes of Burt Bacharach, Ornette Coleman, Bill Laswell, Maroumi Hosno and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the renowned Pakistani popular singer.

More than just a vibrantly maverick musician and musicologist David Toop writes with the exciting inventiveness of a fine prose stylist. This is a book to be ingested slowly and with careful attention paid to the originality of the author's metaphors. Exotica is a rich text in the best sense of contemporary writing.

JEREMY REED