For someone who has spent many years writing about music and compiling quite a list of heroes along the way, a collection of the best music journalists and essayists is a true gift. And Shake It Up delivers. Having read many of these articles and essays before, it is nice to have these seminal pieces available in a single volume. There isn’t one key music writer form the past half century missing. Editors Johnathan Lethem and Keven Dettmar uncover some real gems too. The main voices from gender to race from hip hop to rockabilly are featured.
Reading some of my favorites, Paul Nelson, Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, and the self-proclaimed dean of all rock writers, Robert Christgau is quite illuminating when they are all there back to back to back. The way the book is arranged, it provides a wonderful chronological sense of where the rock world began all the way to today through the voices of those who lived it, expressed it, turned it from a teenage fad into a serious consideration as a legitimate artform.
Stand-outs include “The Memphis Soul Sound” by Stanley Booth – I loved his book on the Stones 1969 tour and his observations on Altamont, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones that I may or may not have reviewed here –an excerpt from acclaimed poet, Amiri Baraka’s The Changing Same (R & B and New Black Music), which I plan on reviewing here in the near future, “The Cars’ Power Steering”, chronicling the formation and incredible success of The Cars in the late-seventies by NY Times entertainment critic, Jon Pareles, a piece that I read mere days before their founder and main songwriter, Ric Ocasek died, and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s in-depth reporting on the weirdly wonderful and equally repellent lead singer of Guns N’ Roses, “The Final Comeback of Axl Rose”.
Volumes such as these are important guides to our understanding of how the music was digested during its times and how they altered the landscape of the future. These are the voices who were there to describe the view and put it into perspective.