A "Kirkus Reviews" Best Nonfiction of 2011 title
In the late 1960s, with popular culture hurtling forward on the
sounds of rock music, some brave musicians looked back instead,
trying to recover the lost treasures of English roots music and
update them for the new age. The records of Fairport Convention,
Pentangle, Steeleye Span, and Nick Drake are known as "folk rock"
today, but Rob Young's epic, electrifying book makes clear that
those musicians led a decades-long quest to recover English
music--and with it, the ancient ardor for mysticism and paganism,
for craftsmanship and communal living.
It is a commonplace that rock and R&B came out of the folk and
blues revivals of the early 1960s, and Young shows, through
enchanting storytelling and brilliant commentary, that a similar
revival in England inspired the Beatles and Pink Floyd, Led
Zeppelin and Traffic, Kate Bush and Talk Talk. Folklorists notated
old songs and dances. Marxists put folk music forward as the true
voice of the people. Composers like Benjamin Britten and Ralph
Vaughan Williams devised rich neo-traditional pageantry. Today, the
pioneers of the "acid folk" movement see this music as a model for
their own.
""
"Electric Eden "is that rare book which has something truly new
to say about popular music, and like Greil Marcus's
"Lipstick""Traces," it uses music to connect the dots in a
thrilling story of art and society, of tradition and wild,
idiosyncratic creativity.
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