American Recordings (Continuum), by Tony Tost

Sometimes labored in his effort to mix academia with the street, Tony Tost veers from profound to crass in his analysis of Johnny Cash's persona-shaping CD, American Recordings. The latest contributor to the “33 1/3” series, which offers close readings of particular and significant albums, Tost makes many excellent points about the value of myth, mocking our era's prosaic search for factual “truth” when larger stories can connect us to meanings that transcend the jots and details of everyday existence. But then there's Tost's odd interest in Cash's “mythic genitalia” when an analysis of the singer's granite vocal cords is the only necessary dissection of his anatomy. Tost is like a foster son of Greil Marcus, beating his own path into old, weird America through the life of the Man in Black.