Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution

Description

In a handful of years between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern music unfolded in a series of relatively unnoticed recording sessions around the world. These included the recording of tango in Buenos Aires, son in Havana, and samba in Rio; of hula in Honolulu, shidaiqu in Shanghai, and kroncong in Jakarta; and of taraab in East Africa and marabi in Johannesburg. In this ground breaking study, Michael Denning draws a global map of a musical revolution that had more profound consequences than the "modern" musics of the European avant-garde.

Michael Denning teaches American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Mechanic Accents, Cover Stories, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, and The Cultural Front.

"An instant classic. It utterly revises the history and geography of modern music." - Vijay Prashad "An ambitious record of a revolution in sound in the late 1920s that erupted in port towns everywhere, from Cape Town to Shanghai-local guilds operating autonomously but in global unison like a cosmic fugue." - Timothy Brennan, author of Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz "I suspect it will be the most important book released on music this year." - Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon, Flavorwire "Which of the senses was decolonized first? In making a case for the ear, Denning has given us a brilliant, audacious guidebook to the sly but unruly insurgencies of sound that coursed through the port cities of the Black Atlantic, the Polynesian Pacific, and the Gypsy Mediterranean." - Andrew Ross "A monumental rewriting of the global history of recorded music. Every future attempt to analyze the sounds and politics of the international music industry will need to reckon with this powerful book." - Josh Kun, University of Southern California "The scope of Denning's book-dozens of genres across five continents-is impressive ... Noise Uprising offers an ambitious map of the connections between them." Tim Barker, The New Republic "Noise Uprising's year zero is 1925, when electrical recording techniques allowed vinyl to conquer the world. Record companies hunted new sounds: Argentine tango singers, Cuban son musicians, Egyptian taarab vocalists. Denning links the explosion of vernacular recordings to an emergent age of decolonisation." Financial Times Books of the Year "A cultural historian, Denning offers a brilliant book that serves as a time line of modern music and musical styles and, more important, a history of the evolution and influence of vinyl recordings of modern music." - Choice Connect "In great detail and with an impressive sense for origins and outcome of local musical styles, this book is an eye-opener." - Alexander Ebert, Pop Culture Shelf