Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (W.W. Norton), by Dale Cockrell
Jazz and blues emerged from the intersection of liquor, dancing and sex—often commercialized sex when considering the role of brothels in New Orleans. But what were the thrill seekers of that northern metropolis, New York, hearing when they stepped out before 1917, the year jazz reached the city?
As Dale Cockrell profoundly observes in Everybody’s Doin’ It, “dance is music made manifest” and dancing occurred in hundreds (thousands?) of steamy joints in New York where drink and sex were proffered. The challenge Cockrell faced in reconstructing the early vernacular musical history of the Big Apple is that everybody at the time was writing about the dance steps—most of them considered shocking—while descriptions of the music were often vague. The situation became clearer by the end of the 19th century when ragtime was all the rage—we know what that sounded like—but before then it’s guesswork.
Educated guesswork in Cockrell’s case. The earlier music of New York’s demimonde seems derived from jigs and reels; the blackface acts of some performers drew from a notion of African American culture; the surviving sheet music gives us some idea of the barroom repertoire but not how it was performed. Some accounts of small combos pounding away on piano, string bass and a motley assortment of percussion—and references to the players’ “vigorous execution”—suggest something like rock ’n’ roll.
Everybody’s Doin’ It is also a lively social history of race mixing and segregation, the barrooms of Old New York and the changing milieu of the sex trade. Crackdowns on bordellos and cheap hotels forced prostitution into the streets, and technology—the advent of the telephone—opened new possibilities. Cockrell doesn’t romanticize the lives of sex workers, pointing out that the profession was sustained by poverty and lack of opportunity.
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Bowie: An Illustrated Life (University of Texas Press), by María Hesse and Fran Ruiz
David Bowie made artifice artful over the course of his career. He was as much an actor as a musician, playing a sequence of self-invented roles. María Hesse and Fran Ruiz composed a beautifully illustrated book of his life—not a “graphic biography” but something more imaginative. Written from Bowie’s perspective, the narrative begins with his arrival on “Planet Earth” and includes fantastical elements. Hit in the eye by a meteorite at age 15? Well, Bowie often played with science-fiction themes. Finally, in 2016, “My stay in this world reaches its end. I became dust and stars once again.” In between, as the writers aptly have Bowie say, “By the time you think you’ve glimpsed what’s hiding behind my silhouette, I’ll have transformed into something else.”
Cruel to be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe (Da Capo), by Will Birch
British writer-musician Will Birch isn’t the first to make the argument that Nick Lowe is the only rock star who is better in his 60s than he was in his 20s. He “celebrates advancing age with style and panache,” his range continually shifting without aping contemporary trends, relying instead on his already eclectic roots in American music for guidance. Although Lowe isn’t recognized beyond the cognoscenti in America (but the cognoscenti includes many musicians), he is something of a local hero in the U.K. Birch’s claims are modest, yet his entertaining semi-authorized biography makes a case for exploring the discography of an artist who holds his own in a triangle defined by rock, country and soul. But as Lowe says, “As you get older, it’s more fun to sing the blues. It cheers you up.”
Ruffhouse: From the Streets of Philly to the Top of the ’90s Hip-hop Charts (Diversion), by Chris Schwartz
Sometime in the mid-1980s, Chris Schwartz discovered the future. “I felt I knew something a lot of people had yet to realize: you could sell hip-hop to white kids.” Schwartz got into the music business when he discerned the affinity for his music, early German electronica, with the beat-driven backing tracks of hip-hop. As founder of Ruffhouse Records, Schwartz helped launch the success of the Fugees, Nas and Cypress Hill. Ruffhouse is his memoir, a collection of entertaining streetwise stories from the ’90s—back when the music industry sold physical product, indie labels were on the rise and a smart young guy with an ear for new music and a head for business could charge onto the Billboard charts.
