Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.
|
|||||||||||||
Better Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Unsung Heroes Of Rock 'n' Roll: The Birth Of Rock In The Wild Years Before Elvis by Nick Tosches  (4)
$14.85
|
Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story by Nick Tosches  (19)
$10.40
|
The Last Opium Den by Nick Tosches (13)
|
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams by Nick Tosches  (42)
$10.20
|
The Devil and Sonny Liston by Nick Tosches  (61)
$22.40
|
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Nick Tosches's new book is aptly titled. On the surface a biography of obscure Southern minstrel singer and blackface comedian Emmett Miller (1900-62), his passionate text at its core is another installment in Tosches's lifelong inquiry into the nature of American popular music. It's a place, in his view, "where dead voices gather" as artists chaotically and indiscriminately pluck tunes out of sources ranging from English ballads to slave spirituals and fashion lyrics from half-remembered commercial releases heard once on the radio or archetypal stories told so often that no one knows who first gave them voice. Miller was a "yodeling blues singer" who performed in blackface, adhering to the minstrelsy tradition that was in its death throes by the time he had his brief moment of fame in the 1920s. Tosches, who first heard a Miller recording in 1974, characterizes him as "one of the strangest and most stunning stylists ever to record ... the last mutant mongrel emanation of old and dead and dying styles, the first mutant mongrel emanation of a style far more reckless and free than the cool of scat." As this sentence suggests, Tosches's prose has calmed down hardly at all since his first book, Country, was published in 1977; you either love his freeform approach or it drives you nuts. Admirers will relish his marvelously dense and detailed portrait of pop music's crazy-quilt complexity, enriched by Tosches's encyclopedic knowledge of American culture. And he boldly stares the race question in the face, though not everyone will be convinced by his assertion that "it is the shared umbilicus of fantasy that sustains and unites ... the polar temperaments of minstrelsy and rap." This is another genre-smashing work from a writer as eccentric, provoking, and wholly original as the music he loves. --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
Beyond a handful of recordings revealing early jazz-era blackface minstrel Emmett Miller as "one of the strangest and most stunning stylists," some good press in the late 1920s and a few scattered recollections of a pleasant fellow who liked his whiskey, Miller has virtually escaped memory. But Tosches (Dino), a bestselling author and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, unearths this forgotten yodeling gem and excavates further still the creation, impact and demise of minstrel music. Neither tsk-tsking nor snickering at minstrelsy's racial humor, Tosches uses Miller to examine this period of "musical miscegenation and cultural pollinations" and the folks who provided its soundtrack. In his race to get down the facts play dates, names, etc. some of the author's characteristic fearlessness and quick humor is lost. But he was clearly wrong to call his obsessive venture a "mad labor for which no audience exists... grown now into... a book so bereft of commercial potential that not even I, who can skin a snake without its knowing it, can hope to con the most benighted and gullible of publishers into paying a decent dollar for it." On the contrary, Tosches's quest is irresistible, and many will, like the author, fall under the elusive yodeler's spell. (Aug. 21)Forecast: Despite its obscure subject, the book to be advertised in Time, the New York Times Book Review and the Village Voice will be widely reviewed and will reach an audience far beyond jazz aficionados. Tosches's wide-ranging pop-cultural subjects (e.g., country music, rock 'n' roll, Dean Martin, Sonny Liston) have made him popular, as evidenced by The Nick Tosches Reader (Da Capo), culled from his 30-year career.
See all Editorial Reviews
Nick Tosches's new book is aptly titled. On the surface a biography of obscure Southern minstrel singer and blackface comedian Emmett Miller (1900-62), his passionate text at its core is another installment in Tosches's lifelong inquiry into the nature of American popular music. It's a place, in his view, "where dead voices gather" as artists chaotically and indiscriminately pluck tunes out of sources ranging from English ballads to slave spirituals and fashion lyrics from half-remembered commercial releases heard once on the radio or archetypal stories told so often that no one knows who first gave them voice. Miller was a "yodeling blues singer" who performed in blackface, adhering to the minstrelsy tradition that was in its death throes by the time he had his brief moment of fame in the 1920s. Tosches, who first heard a Miller recording in 1974, characterizes him as "one of the strangest and most stunning stylists ever to record ... the last mutant mongrel emanation of old and dead and dying styles, the first mutant mongrel emanation of a style far more reckless and free than the cool of scat." As this sentence suggests, Tosches's prose has calmed down hardly at all since his first book, Country, was published in 1977; you either love his freeform approach or it drives you nuts. Admirers will relish his marvelously dense and detailed portrait of pop music's crazy-quilt complexity, enriched by Tosches's encyclopedic knowledge of American culture. And he boldly stares the race question in the face, though not everyone will be convinced by his assertion that "it is the shared umbilicus of fantasy that sustains and unites ... the polar temperaments of minstrelsy and rap." This is another genre-smashing work from a writer as eccentric, provoking, and wholly original as the music he loves. --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
Beyond a handful of recordings revealing early jazz-era blackface minstrel Emmett Miller as "one of the strangest and most stunning stylists," some good press in the late 1920s and a few scattered recollections of a pleasant fellow who liked his whiskey, Miller has virtually escaped memory. But Tosches (Dino), a bestselling author and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, unearths this forgotten yodeling gem and excavates further still the creation, impact and demise of minstrel music. Neither tsk-tsking nor snickering at minstrelsy's racial humor, Tosches uses Miller to examine this period of "musical miscegenation and cultural pollinations" and the folks who provided its soundtrack. In his race to get down the facts play dates, names, etc. some of the author's characteristic fearlessness and quick humor is lost. But he was clearly wrong to call his obsessive venture a "mad labor for which no audience exists... grown now into... a book so bereft of commercial potential that not even I, who can skin a snake without its knowing it, can hope to con the most benighted and gullible of publishers into paying a decent dollar for it." On the contrary, Tosches's quest is irresistible, and many will, like the author, fall under the elusive yodeler's spell. (Aug. 21)Forecast: Despite its obscure subject, the book to be advertised in Time, the New York Times Book Review and the Village Voice will be widely reviewed and will reach an audience far beyond jazz aficionados. Tosches's wide-ranging pop-cultural subjects (e.g., country music, rock 'n' roll, Dean Martin, Sonny Liston) have made him popular, as evidenced by The Nick Tosches Reader (Da Capo), culled from his 30-year career.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|