Listening Guide

A chapter-by-chapter selection of audio/video clips featuring the music referenced in Uproot, with endnotes and links to explore further!


Chapter Five Red Bull Gives You Wings

Lots of ink was spilled in response to the Sonic Youth Starbucks CD. At the beginning of the chapter I quote Thurston Moore interviews from Billboard and the Boston Globe.

Footage from my set in Lima, Peru at Fundación Telefónica!

"The blues voices that loop inside Moby's pop-friendly arrangements remind us that the central fact of black authenticity in America is dispossession. Which makes Play a profoundly American album..." (p.127)

Fugazi

The Fugazi Live Series contains over 800 live recordings available for pay-what-you-wish download, along with photos, flyers, and other ephemera. Their dedication to self-organizing continues into the archive.

Filmmaker Jem Cohen went to high school with Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye and filmed the band over the course of ten years. Together they edited the material into an incredible film, Instrument:

Distributional Aesthetics

A sad note about Kanye West’s “New Slaves” premiere – the wealth of fan YouTube videos of his projections have been taken down or muted. The only clips I was able to find had low back-of-crowd audio, such as these. Distributional aesthetics indeed.

Don't Smile, It's Postmodern

Keep Going!

For further reading, I recommend Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity although in a pinch, anything Anne writes will do. Pamela Lu’s first-person plural novel Ambient Parking Lot about the critical and commercial struggles of an ambient band is relevant, not to mention funny, hypnotic, and criminally overlooked.

Welcome to the Listening Guide, a chapter-by-chapter selection of audio/video clips featuring the music referenced in the book, with endnotes and links to explore further!

Order now!!

Available August 16, 2016 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux