Great Book of Fire: Nick Tosches’s Hellfire and Robert Palmer’s Jerry Lee Lewis Rocks!

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments xiii
4. Introduction 1
5. I. Collectibles
6. The Informer: John Leonard’s When the Kissing Had to Stop 11
7. Advertisements for Everybody Else: Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence 14
8. Democratic Vistas: Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar 17
9. II. From Blackface Minstrelsy to Track-and- Hook
10. In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter 23
11. The Old Ethiopians at Home: Ken Emerson’s Doo-Dah! 40
12. Before the Blues: David Wondrich’s Stomp and Swerve 43
13. Rhythms of the Universe: Ned Sublette’s Cuba and Its Music 46
14. Black Melting Pot: David B. Coplan’s In Township Tonight! 49
15. Bwana-Acolyte in the Favor Bank: Banning Eyre’s In Griot Time 56
16. In the Crucible of the Party: Charles and Angeliki Keil’s Bright Balkan Morning 59
17. Defining the Folk: Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk 64
18. Folking Around: David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street 67
19. Punk Lives: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me 70
20. Biography of a Corporation: Nelson George’s Where Did Our Love Go? 72
21. Hip-Hop Faces the World: Steven Hager’s Hip Hop; David Toop’s The Rap Attack; and Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski’s Fresh 75
22. Making Out Like Gangsters: Preston Lauterbach’s The Chitlin’ Circuit, Dan Charnas’s The Big Payback, Ice-T’s Ice, and Tommy James’s Me, the Mob, and Music 80
23. Money Isn’t Everything: Fred Goodman’s The Mansion on the Hill 86
24. Mapping the Earworm’s Genome: John Seabrook’s The Song Machine 89
25. III. Critical Practice
26. Beyond the Symphonic Quest: Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings 97
27. All in the Tune Family: Peter van der Merwe’s Origins of the Popular Style 100
28. Bel Cantos: Henry Pleasants’s The Great American Popular Singers 102
29. The Country and the City: Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City 109
30. Reflections of an Aging Rock Critic: Jon Landau’s It’s Too Late to Stop Now 115
31. Pioneer Days: Kevin Avery’s Everything Is an Afterthought and Nona Willis Aronowitz’s (ed.) Out of the Vinyl Deeps 117
32. Impolite Discourse: Jim DeRogatis’s Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer’s A Whore Just Like the Rest, and Nick Tosches’s The Nick Tosches Reader 123
33. Journalism and/or Criticism and/or Musicology and/or Sociology (and/or Writing): Simon Frith 129
34. Serious Music: Robert Walser’s Running With the Devil 137
35. Fifteen Minutes of . . . : William York’s Who’s Who in Rock Music 139
36. The Fanzine Worldview, Alphabetized: Ira A. Robbins’s (ed.) The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records 140
37. Awesome: Simon Reynolds’s Blissed Out 143
38. Ingenuousness Lost: James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin 147
39. Rock Criticism Lives!: Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic 151
40. Emo Meets Trayvon Martin: Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us 156
41. IV. Lives in Music Inside and Out
42. Great Book of Fire: Nick Tosches’s Hellfire and Robert Palmer’s Jerry Lee Lewis Rocks! 163
43. That Bad Man, Tough Old Huddie Ledbetter: Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell’s The Life and Legend of Leadbelly 169
44. The Impenetrable Heroism of Sam Cooke: Peter Guralnick’s Dream Boogie 171
45. Bobby and Dave: Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One and Dave Van Ronk’s The Mayor of MacDougal Street 178
46. Tell All: Ed Sanders’s Fug You and Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water 180
47. King of the Thrillseekers: Richard Hell’s I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp 185
48. Lives Saved, Lives Lost: Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl and Patti Smith’s M Train 189
49. The Cynic and the Bloke: Rod Stewart’s Rod: The Autobiography and Donald Fagen’s Eminent Hipsters 194
50. His Own Shaman: RJ Smith’s The One 199
51. Spotlight on the Queen: David Ritz’s Respect 201
52. The Realest Thing You’ve Ever Seen: Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run 205
53. V. Fictions
54. Writing for the People: George Orwell’s 1984 213
55. A Classic Illustrated: R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis 217
56. The Hippie Grows Older: Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout 222
57. Comic Gurdjieffianism You Can Masturbate To: Marco Vassi’s Mind Blower 224
58. Porn Yesterday: Walter Kendrick’s The Secret Museum 225
59. What Pretentious White Men Are Good For: Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party 230
60. Impoverished How, Exactly? Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors 236
61. Sustainable Romance: Norman’s Rush’s Mortals 237
62. Derring-Do Scraping By: Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue 240
63. Futures by the Dozen: Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire 245
64. YA Poet of the Massa Woods: Sandra Newman’s The Country of Ice Cream Star 248
65. A Darker Shade of Noir: The Indefatigable Walter Mosley 252
66. VI. Bohemia Meets Hegemony
67. Épatant le Bourgeoisie: Jerrold Seigel’s Bohemian Paris and T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life 263
68. The Village People: Christine Stansell’s American Moderns 278
69. A Slender Hope for Salvation: Charles Reich’s The Greening of America 280
70. The Lumpenhippie Guru: Ed Sanders’s The Family 285
71. Strait Are the Gates: Morris Dickstein’s Gates of Eden 289
72. The Little Counterculture That Could: Carol Brightman’s Sweet Chaos 293
73. The Pop-Boho Connection, Narrativized: Bernard F. Gendron’s Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club 297
74. Cursed and Sainted Seekers of the Sexual Century: John Heidenry’s What Wild Ecstasy 301
75. Bohemias Lost and Found: Ross Wetzsteon’s Republic of Dreams, Richard Kostelanetz’s SoHo, and Richard Lloyd’s Neo-Bohemia 304
76. Autobiography of a Pain in the Neck: Meredith Maran’s What It’s Like to Live Now 309
77. VII. Culture Meets Capital
78. Twentieth Century Limited: Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air 315
79. Dialectical Cricket: C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary 320
80. The Oblique Strategies of a Radical Pluralist: Andrew Ross’s No Respect 323
81. Inside the Prosex Wars: Nadine Strossen’s Defending Pornography, Joanna Frueh’s Erotic Faculties, and Laura Kipnis’s Bound and Gagged 327
82. Growing Up Kept Down: William Finnegan’s Cold New World 331
83. Jesus Plus the Capitalist Order: Jeff Sharlet’s The Family 334
84. Dark Night of the Quants: Ten Books About the Financial Crisis 338
85. They Bet Your Life: Four Books About Hedge Funds 345
86. Living in a Material World: Raymond Williams’s Long Revolution 350
87. With a God on His Side: Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God, Culture, and Materialism 369
88. My Friend Marshall: Marshall Berman’s Modernism in the Streets 374
89. Index 381