Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they
catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again
into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply--often in ways
that reflect broader historical and cultural changes.
In Footsteps in the Dark," George Lipsitz illuminates these secret
meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of
popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes
that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues,
can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when
these changes occur outside mainstream white culture. Using a
wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the
emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit
as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of
banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of
changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms.
Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he
analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz "as a largely uncritical
celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights
era's challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous
campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the
early 1990s.
Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race
and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their
connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark" puts forth an
alternate history of post-cold war America and shows why in an era
given to easy answers and cliched versions of history, pop songs
matter more than ever.
George Lipsitz is professor of blackstudies and sociology at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are
Life in the Struggle," Dangerous Crossroads," and American Studies
in a Moment of Danger" (Minnesota, 2001).
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