About the Book
Music industry insiders on the nature of fame
Our cultural darlings make music; we make them mythic. Every musical genre begets a community of listeners, performers, and critics, and quite often those categories are blurred. From the principled punk refusal of celebrity to hip-hop's celebration of its power, the music world is self-obsessed.
Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky assembles scholars, music writers, industry workers, and musicians, who offer a range of opinions and experience of the nature of fame. The collection focuses on commerce, the crowd, performance and image, history and memory, and romance. Contributors discuss black women icons, love-songs, the legacy of the blues, the image of the tortured rock star, MTV, the politics of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the joy of line-dancing, and more.
The contributors are James Bernard, Anthony DeCurtis, Katherine Dieckmann, Chuck Eddy, Paul Gilroy, Daniel Glass, Lawrence Grossberg, Jessica Hagedorn, Kathleen Hanna, James Hannaham, Dave Hickey, Jon Langford, Greil Marcus, Angela McRobbie, Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), Barbara O'Dair, Ann Powers, Toshi Reagon, Simon Reynolds, Robert Santelli, Jon Savage, Danyel Smith, Arlene Stein, Deena Weinstein, and Ellen Willis.
About the Author :
Karen Kelly is Director of Publications and Special Projects at Dia Center for the Arts.
Until recently the music editor at the Village Voice, Evelyn McDonnell is the coeditor of Rock She Wrote, and author of a history of the musical Rent.
Review :
"Luskey combines the methods of cultural and social history to accomplish a tricky feat: he maps out, on the one hand, the structural impediments to clerks' quest for "economic capital," and on the other hand, the hazardous discursive field in which they pursued "cultural capital." Making use of diaries, credit reports, manuscript census schedules, and a variety of print media, he skillfully documents the clerk's many travails."-,
"On the Make is essential reading not only for the history of clerks, but as well for the history of manhood, urban life, and class development in antebellum America."-Sharon Ann Murphy, "The Historian"
"In this fascinating portrait of American striving, Luskey locates the origins of white-collar culture in the precarious world of the antebellum clerk. Luskey's clerks are the forerunners of the men in the gray flannel suits, the ancestors of today's corporate managers, and his examination of their search for success in the uncertain markets of the nineteenth century expands our understanding of how the middle-class was made. Broadly interdisciplinary in scope and eloquent in the telling, On the Make is a valuable addition to the growing list of books that illuminate the cultural and social history of American business."
-Timothy B. Spears, author of "Chicago Dreaming"
"More clearly than any previous scholar, Luskey has answered the question 'What, exactly, was a clerk?' Forced to do a wide variety of manual labor, they wore white collars, but in Luskey's clever turn of phrase, the collars often weren't all that white. Nor were all clerks created equal. As both clerks and their employers were well aware, many had limited opportunities for upward mobility. This is not just first rate social history that makes an important contribution to our understanding of the consolidation of class in the nineteenth century, but also first rate cultural history that skillfully teases out the ambiguities of the clerk's place in nineteenth-century popular culture."
-Amy Greenberg, author of "Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire"
