utilitymonstergirl

Um, shoutout to Big Freedia,
New Orleans bounce music,
Every bitch track ever made for NYC drag balls in the 90s before RuPaul made being gay uncool,

—Black Dresses, GAY UGLY AND HARD TO UNDERSTAND


“Genius" and "auteur" and similar labels frustrate me for a range of reasons: they shut off serious engagement with art, they enable the worst abuses of superstardom, and they obscure all the close and distant collaborators that make art what it is. However, it's hard to push back on this without a good understanding of those partners, so I'd like to recommend some books that give great context on a range of art cultures.

Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer who Reinvented Rhythm (Dan Charnas)

In many artist biographies, The Public is some vast inscrutable force that makes and breaks careers semi-randomly. This is an interesting change of pace, because while J Dilla worked with plenty of huge stars, he himself was mostly known to other musicians and music-production nerds during his lifetime. Thus, the book can spend plenty of time on his circle of non-famous friends and family (and some in the middle; Eminem is briefly mentioned as just another guy in the Detroit music scene, and Dilla is cagey with his girlfriend about the details of his job until she demands to know why he has a voicemail from Q-Tip.)

Honestly, Dilla's music that I've heard hasn't sounded that rhythmically strange to me, and I'm not sure if that's because I just don't have a trained enough ear for this or because I've lived my whole life in the era shaped by his production style. Regardless, the book has helpful graphs to lay out his innovations in microrhythm, along with technical details of how he achieved them. I appreciate how it rejects the easy narrative of Dilla ~soulfully transcending technology~; his machines' capabilities are inseparable from his own innovations.

From the Streets of Shaolin: The Wu-Tang Saga (S. H. Fernando Jr.)

We open with the socioeconomic history of New York, various Nation of Islam splinter groups, and everyone's childhoods before getting to any of the Wu-Tang's actual music. Yes, they're clearly huge nerds about martial-arts movies; it is also crucial that they're huge nerds about Nation of Islam-derived numerology. There are great accounts of the creation of their first wave of albums - the Shogun Assassin samples on Liquid Swords were a last-minute addition, and RZA insisted on watching the whole movie in the studio to find the most fitting lines.

This is also a fascinating look at the state of music promotion right before the internet, when it was crucial to get physical media into the right peoples' hands. In addition to electronics nerds, wordplay nerds, music-history nerds, and so on, I love the recognition of how hip-hop has depended on business nerds to end-run traditional channels of sales and advertising.
 

It's Life As I See It: Black Cartoonists In Chicago, 1940-1980 (Dan Nadel et al.)

This book can directly showcase its subject matter in a way the others can't, and it highlights artists across a range of genres: editorial cartoons, slice-of-life, gag strips, sci-fi serials, Afrofuturist sagas. Each artist is also given a writeup of how they entered the job, the publications they worked for, their clashes with editors. Some of them are even still drawing today!

Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical (Laurie Winer)

Hammerstein was active in the theater world from 1920 to 1960, spanning massive changes in the politics, culture, and economics of show business. The book demonstrates well how cultural ethics are a moving target - it has even-handed descriptions of his plays that were groundbreaking at the time, but require very different staging to be remotely palatable in the 21st century. (Or even to make sense at all; there's plenty to criticize in Carousel's gender politics, and Billy's striped shirt and neckerchief stopped conveying raw working-class masculinity pretty fast.)

I like how well the book shows the volatility of theater, where a show is only as good as the people who have to bring it to life night after night. Hammerstein had plenty of flops even during his most acclaimed years, but his work has endured on the strength of his note-perfect earnestness. (The author also has a delightful pet theory as to why The Sound of Music became such a classic even as his style fell out of favor, which I won't spoil.)
 

We Had A Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy (Kliph Nesteroff)

I love the spiral structure of this book, returning to the same people and locations years apart to track a century of influence and collaboration. It spans from Will Rogers' family history to the 1491s mocking Twilight, with plenty of artists frequently quoted at length.

Much like It's Life As I See It, the comedy ranges from community in-jokes to searing indictments to generally fucking around. It pushes back on ideas of who can make 'universal' art and whose work is always tied to their identities, inviting the reader to engage with these works as more than Very Special Episodes.


Honorable Mentions:

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (Hanif Abdurraqib)

This is far more personal than the more systematic books above, but it's a gorgeous set of reflections on a wide range of topics: how both World Wars shaped Josephine Baker's career, regional variations of Spades, the life of Sun Ra, grimacing through the homophobia of the only decent barber in town. Even beyond the poetic interludes, Abdurraqib's prose is clearly the work of a poet. I finished this in a day and return to it often.


Major Labels: A History Of Popular Music In Seven Genres (Kelefa Sanneh)

A delightful tour of the schisms, identity crises, and exploitations that made music what it is today. There's just the right amount of autobiography woven through it, grounding all the industry lore in the lifetime of a passionate music nerd. I've only ever lived in the era when litigating "real rock and roll" feels patently absurd, and I'm glad to have this guide to the era when that could make or break careers.

Porpentine's novel Serious Weakness is hard to summarize without making it sound softer or darker than it is. It brims with love for everyone shut out from the world of power and capital and neurotypical etiquette. Its near-future world is defined by vacuous trash and escalating environmental ruin. It follows Insul, a school-shooter-turned-art-vandal, grooming and torturing Trianon, an art restorer barely hanging on to that world of normalcy. It’s about trading an icy, impersonal Hell for one built on perverse devotion.

( It's going to get really dark now )