Fear of Music - Brossura

Lethem, Jonathan

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1441121005 ISBN 13: 9781441121004

Casa editrice: Continuum Intl Pub Group, 2012

Riassunto

It's the summer of 1979. A fifteen-year-old boy listens to WNEW on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (it's the singer's) announces into dead air in between songs "The Talking Heads have a new album, it's called Fear of Music" - and everything spins outward from that one moment.

Jonathan Lethem treats Fear of Music (the third album by the Talking Heads, and the first produced by Brian Eno) as a masterpiece - edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky and fun. He scratches obsessively at the album's songs, guitars, rhythms, lyrics, packaging, downtown origins, and legacy, showing how Fear of Music hints at the directions (positive and negative) the band would take in the future. Lethem transports us again to the New York City of another time - tackling one of his great adolescent obsessions and illuminating the ways in which we fall in and out of love with works of art.

Su questo libro

Recensione

His achievement in Fear  of Music is to let his personal passion for the album inform his thoughts  on it with a vital urgency, without ever allowing those feelings to run rampant  and obscure the work at hand. ...[It is] a powerful piece of scholarship on a  band that deserves, and whose work holds up to, close examination of the  serious kind Lethem does here. [Lethem] revels in Fear of Music's  strain, the way it encompasses punk and disco, aggression and passivity,  paranoia and resolve, gleefully dancing its way off the brink. This ain't no  party, indeed.""- -- - The Atlantic

A single-minded investigation ... Lethem's book demonstrates what happens when the twin beams of passionate fandom and slicing critical intelligence intersect to illuminate a record you only thought you knew. -- - The Guardian

L'autore

Jonathan Lethem is one of the most acclaimed American novelists of his generation. His books include Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City. His essays about James Brown and Bob Dylan have appeared in Rolling Stone. He is Roy Edward Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College, US.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Continuum Intl Pub Group
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1441121005
• ISBN 13: 9781441121004
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 141