Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution

by Michael Denning

Noise Uprising brings to life the moment and sounds of a cultural revolution. Between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern times unfolded in a series of obscure recording sessions, as hundreds of unknown musicians entered makeshift studios to record the melodies and rhythms of urban streets and dancehalls. The musical styles and idioms etched onto shellac disks reverberated around the among them Havana’s son, Rio’s samba, New Orleans’ jazz, Buenos Aires’ tango, Seville’s flamenco, Cairo’s tarab, Johannesburg’s marabi, Jakarta’s kroncong, and Honolulu’s hula. They triggered the first great battle over popular music and became the soundtrack to decolonization.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction, Cultural Studies, Politics

320 pages, Paperback

First published May 5, 2015

About the author

Michael Denning is an American cultural historian and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His work has been influential in shaping the field of American Studies by importing and interpreting the work of British Cultural Studies theorists. Although he received his Ph. D. from Yale University and studied with Fredric Jameson, perhaps the greatest influence on his work is the time he spent at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies working with Stuart Hall.

He is married to the African American Historian Hazel Carby.

Reviews

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a superb piece of social history, describing and examining a short lived boom in the production, recording and sales of popular music by a small number of European and American recording companies, serving local markets around the globe. It is written in accessible and usually entertaining language, supported by a Spotify playlist of the very diverse music recorded in a period of less than ten years; there is nothing intimidating or overly academic about it. The events in the book are concentrated into the years 1925 to 1932, since the boom was born in technological innovation and abruptly terminated by the worldwide depression of the Thirties. There is not a lot of room for development in so short a timeframe and the book does not constitute a story line leading to any particular end point. It is better described as a collection of quite distinct chapters, each unpeeling and examining a different layer of the same phenomenon, and indeed each chapter has its own fascination.

The popular music that was born in this period is today labelled and marketed as “World Music,” though it has been described variously at the time and since then with terms that could be misleading. For example, Adorno wrote about “Jazz” but referred to musics that would not be recognised as jazz today. I don’t think today that one would easily confuse Irish melodies with Samba, or New Orleans blues with the talas of South Asia or Turkish aksak. Even so, Denning patiently unfolds layer after layer of common ground that brings this kaleidoscope of sound together into a single, global phenomenon.

It was all recorded on shellac discs played at 78rpm. This imposed disciplines, not least a three minute time slot, and has to be seen alongside a collection of related electrical equipment, all of it novel and with transformative implications. Singing into a microphone, for example, made the crooning singing style viable, removing the need to project the voice across a distance, and microphones amplified the sounds made by guitars, which were formerly more gentle, almost domestic instruments. The recording process suggested some standardised approaches to instrumentation and, in particular, brought out a contrast of a rhythm section supporting a melodic lead from more prominent instruments or singers, a characteristic of popular music in many seemingly dissimilar genres. The record itself became a commodity for sale, changing the previous organisation of the music market around sheet music, which could be reproduced by almost any competently trained musicians or singers, so that the focus was previously on the song or the music, whereas with records the focus switched to the performance and the performer, and the author’s written directions could be subordinated now to the performer’s idiosyncratic interpretation and improvised deviations. Even the environment in which music could be performed was transformed, and music could be transported across the globe in ways formerly unheard of, liberated from the need to have the performer present, with the result that musical and artistic influences also shaped and could radically alter local musical practice.

The economics of the recording industry shaped the evolution of these popular musics. All the musical genres described here were identified with one or more of the many ports on global steamship routes and this was no accident. The key technologies were the product of capitalist investment in the UK, Germany, France and the USA and their dissemination was shaped by patterns of trade within and between spheres of economic influence – in this period meaning empires and settler colonies. The major companies developing and exploiting these technologies were taking advantage of standard trading methods typical of many other industries - taking raw materials from their colonies and dependents at minimal cost and selling their own materials back to them as manufactured products, often in competition with local producers. In this case, the half dozen firms with their new electrical recording technologies sent engineers far and wide across the trading routes to record whatever music was popular locally, paying absolutely minimal fees and no royalties, taking their recordings back to their homeland factories to transform into 78rpm shellac records which were then sold back to the relevant local markets to be played on the record players and loud speakers which they sold alongside; when your own local music is packaged and sold to you by a firm based in the other end of the world, you know there is something curious going on.

This was a period in which the populations of port cities on the imperial steamship trading routes were exploding and that population change was accompanied with huge social changes, within which cultural and specifically musical changes were hugely significant. The popular music that emerged was new in many ways. Despite its local characteristics and very powerful local roots, which in later years were intimately connected with local pride and nationalist sentiment, this was never folk music. It was a modern development built on influences that included traditional sounds and practices from the region, but were also strongly influenced by external influences, which included religious music promoted by missionaries and marshal music from military brass bands.. There were influences from the transmission of ideas, the migration of musicians and their audiences and the wide formal or informal distribution of records. This music emerged from a complete intermingling of local and global influences. It was also very intimately tied up with the politics and oppressive ideology of imperialism, colonialism, and associated race and class friction, but at the same time with decolonization and liberation at individual as well as communal levels.

The book is fascinating for its analysis of social and cultural forces at work in this musical phenomenon but it is never restricted to any single facet of the kaleidoscope. It skips through a detailed discussion of the history of percussion, the evolution of the music industry, the attempts made to ban music on political, religious or moral grounds, the nature of the lyrics written within popular music, the contrast and conflicts between formally trained musicians and their defensive guilds, and those who learned to play by ear with a freedom to improvise and a technical mastery that often defeated their educated rivals.

Quotes only from the introduction

As these quotes reflect my own interest in the political aspects of the story, it may deter readers more interested in the musical history. As I said above, fear not, the writer spends much of the book on topics far removed from the political. If I put in more quotes I’d end up typing out the whole book.

I will make four central arguments: first, that these 78rpm shellac discs emerged out of the polyphony of subaltern musical cultures in an archipelago of colonial ports; second that they constituted a musical revolution, at once technological and cultural, that transformed the music industry as well as the musical guild; third that they were fundamental to the extraordinary social, political and cultural revolution that was decolonization; and finally, that they remade our musical ear. [p5,6]

...this noise uprising was prophetic: it not only preceded but prepared the way for the decolonization of legislatures and literatures. These vernacular phonograph musics reverberated across the colonial world, a cultural revolution in sound. Inheriting the harmonies and instruments of colonial musics, they embodied the contradictions of the anticolonial struggles: as “modern dance musics” – a common phrase of the time – they were scarred with the hierarchies of class and spectrums of colour that shaped the dance halls and nightclubs, shebeens and streets they inhabited. But if they prefigured what Fanon called “the trials and tribulations of national consciousness,” they also, with their travelling if untranslatable names – son and samba, tarab and marabi, kroncong and jazz, rumba and hula – prefigured a new world, a “third” world, culturally as well as politically independent. Music did not simply sustain the soul in the struggle; the decolonization of the territory was made possible by the decolonization of the ear. [p9]

If, as the young Marx famously suggested, “the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world”, then the reforming of the five senses is the fundamental labour of any cultural revolution. Marx’s example of the history of the senses was music: “only music awakens in man the sense of music... the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear.” [p9,10]

In this frame [viz the late 1920s and the early 1930s] these musics represented the refusal of deference, the assertion of noise for noise’s sake, the singing of the subaltern, “a premonition of an uprising as a noise in the transmission of some of the more familiar signals of deference.” [P10]

For music is an inherently social and political art... It is not surprising that music is central to conserving and reproducing established social orders: the fundamental rites and spectacles of any social order are “accompanied” by music – from weddings and funerals to street festivals, military parades, and political rallies. Indeed, “accompanied” is too weak a word; it is more accurate to say that these rituals would seem hollow, empty, without their music, not unlike the rough cut of a film before the soundtrack has been added. ... A recognition of music’s role in establishing social order enabled the powerful critiques of the social forms of music under capitalism, of the ways a capitalist culture industry turned music – performed, printed or recorded – into a commodity, an analysis associated first and foremost with the figure of Theodor Adorno... the Adorno who argued that music figures the contradictions of a society, that music is not a sign of community but of the desire for community, “the social alienation of music ... cannot be corrected within music, but only within society; through the change of society.” [p11]

For [Jacques] Attali, music not only makes social orders: disruptive music - noise – can break them... If nosie is unwanted sound, interference, sound out of place, it is also a powerful human weapon, a violent breaking of the sonic order. Noise challenges the established musical codes, which had themselves constituted the social order by domesticating and ritualizing the energy and violence of an earlier noise. Indeed, Attali argues that traditional musicology recognizes this dialectic of noise and music when it analyzes musical works as the “organization of controlled panic, the movement from anxiety to joy, from dissonance to harmony.” [p12]

This tradition often conceived of “music” in the abstract, reminding one of the comment the young Karl Marx – in the midst of the “polkamania” of the 1840s – made about a Hegelian critic who spoke”neither of the cancan nor of the polka, but of dancing in general, of the category Dancing, which is not performed anywhere except in his Critical cranium. Let his see a dance at the Chauiere in Paris, and his Christian-German soul would be outraged by the boldness, the frankness, the graceful petulance, and the music of that most sensual movement.” In contrast to Marx’s vivid appreciation of the vernacular dances of his day – the Grand Chaumiere lay on the working-class outskirts of Paris and the polka was often associated with sympathy for the defeated Polish uprising of 1851 – too often those who insisted on the utopian elements of European philharmonic musics have been outraged... “Nothing coarser, nastier, more stupid has ever been seen than the jazz dances since 1930,” Ernest Bloch wrote.” Jitterbug, Boogie-Woogie, this is imbecility gone wild, with a corresponding howling which provides the so to speak musical accompaniment.” ... For decades the Marxist critical theory of music has been dominated by these powerful interpretative models of Adorno, Bloch, and Attali, which have accented the subjection of vernacular music to the commodity form. Without abandoning their insights, I take inspiration from the young Marx’s homage to the polka and the cancan and hope to outline an alternative way of understanding vernacular music... It embodies a prophetic unconscious in its very form, not only disrupting the present order but figuring new orders, new rhythms, and new harmonies. The musics of this noise uprising became the fundamental and inescapable basis for the rich and contradictory developments in music around the world over the next century, as the circulation of recordings broke down the barriers between vernacular musicking, art musics and the vast industry of commercial musics. .. This turnaround began with a series of almost accidental recording sessions... [p13]

[Mills College Library]

781.6309 D4111 2015

[Jonathan Bogart · Rating 4 out of 5]

A minute or two after I came across this book yesterday, I sent an anguished tweet about having been scooped on the book I've been slowly, with lots of interruptions, been trying to write for the last five years. Then I gritted my teeth and bought the Kindle edition. I might as well know the worst.

And? Yeah, there's a lot here that was present, if only in shadowy, half-formed shape, in my head before reading it. It makes a stronger, more explicit, and more thoroughgoing political argument for the value and meaning of much of the music it discusses than any I'd be prepared to. It is the product of metric tons more research, reading, discussion, and nitty-gritty historian's work than I can realistically propose to engage in at this (or any foreseeable) point in my life, career, and resources. I'm deeply grateful for it, and I'm still rather jealous of it, and I'm slightly consoled by the knowledge that no, it's not quite the book I wanted (still want) to write. It's probably a better one politically and certainly a better one academically, but its center of focus is perhaps two inches from where I'd put it.

What the book actually is: Michael Denning, Professor of American Studies at Yale, looks at the short-lived boom in recorded vernacular music between the standardization of the electrical recording process in 1925 and the worldwide financial crash in 1930, which hit the recording industry harder than many others, and sees it as a primary locus of modernity, transforming the social spaces of the port cities where many vernacular musics came into being, transforming the experience and practice of music listening and making, presaging the anticolonial movements of the later twentieth century, and laying the foundation for all the musical revolutions and recapitulations of musical history that would come after. US jazz, blues, and country, Argentine tango, Brazilian samba, Cuban son, Trinidadian calypso, Martinican biguine, Portuguese fado, Spanish flamenco, Greek rebetika, Egyptian tarab, South African marabi, Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian jùjú, Indonesian kroncong, and Hawai'ian hula are the primary examples he draws from, though occasionally Mexican mariachi and bolero, pan-European tzigane, Turkish fasil, Algerian and Tunisian chaabi, Tanzanian taarab, Indian theater song, Chinese shidaiqu (or huangse yinyue), Vietnamese cai luong, and Filipino kundiman get a look-in.

What the book isn't: any kind of deep reading of the actual records. The most valuable part of the book, for me, is the playlist of 81 records in the back. Some I knew, some I didn't (though few of the performers' names were new to me), but aside from some generalized musicological descriptors and the occasional lyrical excerpt, none of them get any sustained analysis; they're used as supporting evidence in the various arguments about music-vernacular topoi, systems of capitalist exchange, and anticolonial struggle that Denning is making throughout. Which is fine. He's an academic writing a cultural studies book; if he tried to go all Lester Bangs swimming around in Astral Weeks, he'd be doing both himself and his readers a disservice.

But I, as a pop-trained listener (not to say poptimist), am primarily concerned with the immediate sensual experience of the records, and with the ways that individual, more than structural, personalities, identities, and social meanings are transmitted through their sounds. I am perhaps unusual as a pop listener for wanting to start pop history further back and with a wider scope than most pop listeners do, but I am also unusual as a listener of music released on 78s for caring as much about the common music of the period as I do about the rare, since both are now vanished; if anything, Paul Whiteman is now less heard than Robert Johnson, and more alien to the average music listener.

Which is to say that my theoretical book, while it would also take in all of the musics listed above (plus a few more, including Puerto Rican plena, French chanson réaliste and musette, German and Austrian kabarett, Russian romans, Turkish kanto, Iranian tasnif, Indian filmi, Malay stambul, Quebecois turlutte, Texan tejano, and Jewish-American klezmer), would be much more about the (well, my) experience of the music as pop, including the sensuous experience of it, the gossipy, scandalous, and possibly apocryphal stories about its makers, the imagery with which it was sold, and the escapist and utopian fantasies which it in turn sold its audience. My provisional title has always been Vernacular Pop, and while my claims for the importance of the music are more modest than Denning's (I am skeptical that any capitalist product contains the seeds of revolution), my basic premise, that the sophisticated glamour and modernist posturing which characterized the work of high-status imperial-power music stars of the period like the Gershwins, Noël Coward, Jean Sablon, or Marlene Dietrich, was not separate world, cloaked in a rarefied air, from that of global vernacular pop, but was a part of it, part of a reshaping of the world that had existed before World War I and would be transformed still further after World War II, is if anything a far more radical position to take among the shellac collectors and ethnomusicologists who dominate the discussion about the vast majority of this music.

Still, there's a lot here to chew on, and I haven't even properly started. Check in with me in a month, and we'll see where I've gotten to.

[Neil Rogall · Rating 5 out of 5]

The invention of electric recording in 1925 led, in the years before the Great Depression, to recording engineers journeying across the world seeking out music to record – to Buenos Aires, Jakarta, Bombay, Havana, Hawaii, Shanghai – and to the ports of west and north Africa. Here in the ports of the Black Atlantic, the Gypsy Mediterranean and the Polynesian Pacific new musics were emerging – tango, marabi, fado, highlife, rebetika, beguine, son, hula, kroncong and many more. These were not folk musics, nor were they imports from their colonial masters. They were new sounds, reflecting the working-class barrios of the colonial ports “and their relations to the migrations and movements, unsettlings and uprisings in the wake of the Great War” (chapter 6) that brought together sailors from around the world and attracted rural migrants looking not just for work and a new form of life.

New instruments and old were brought together, adapted, and improvised. The mass importation of Western musical instruments, especially the guitar, combined with instruments from local traditions. Some of the musical forms became crazes in the West, for example, Cuban and Hawaiian music, but others failed to take root. And, of course, the music from the rest of the world was heard as horrid dissonant noise by established Western musical writers and audiences.

Marxist cultural historian Michael Denning in Noise Uprising argues these vernacular musics of the late 1920s were a precondition for the anti-colonial movements and decolonisation. Decolonisation of the ears came before decolonisation of the territory. That wasn’t because the musics were political; some were, some weren’t. Some musicians were involved in anti-colonial struggles; some weren’t. But all reflected the lives of ordinary people, the rhythms of daily life, the search for food, a roof and love. They were the music of the streets. And the fact that they made the objects of colonialism, the colonial masses, subjects rather than objects, was crucial for imagining a world without colonial bosses, without the white man’s whip.

This is a really exciting book but you do have to get past chapter 1, which is a bit of a shopping listing necessarily of the musics and the dates at which they were first recorded and where. Once you get past this list, this book is truly inspiring and makes me want to discover the musics I still don’t know.

The second chapter, ‘The Polyphony of Colonial Ports’ crucially looks at steamship routes and the dramatic growth of port cities in the global South in the years between 1910 and 1930, which provided the spatial geography and the population for these new vernacular musics. Following Franz Fanon, Denning argues that these cities were always divided into native towns and settler towns and inter-districts dominated by diaspora communities. This was the seed-bed for the new sounds that emerged from below.

In later chapters, Denning charts the vital role the phonograph played in allowing the music to be disseminated in streets, bars, and dancehalls. What surprised me was the relatively low cost of them, which made them obtainable for workers with a regular income. He also discusses the development of jazz as one of these vernacular musics. In fact, one of the highlights of the book is the way he can move from Louis Armstrong to Umm Kulthum, a singer who broke with Egyptian royals to back the Egyptian nationalist movement in the 1940s, in the same sentence.

The chapter ‘”A Noisy Heaven and a Syncopated Earth”: Remaking the Musical Ear’ is as revelatory a piece of writing as I have ever read. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of what ‘improvisation’ actually is and the way it was seen as ‘cheating’ by Western music critics in the 1920s and 1930s.

His final chapter discusses first the way these musics were re-imagined as ‘national musics’ by the post-colonial states, as symbols of national culture when they had originally been denounced as foreign and alien imports. Denning finally looks at the way that these same vernacular musics were repackaged again this time as ‘world music’ in the 1980s aimed at the global north at the beginning of the current wave of globalization.

All in all this is a truly wonderful book and it was entertaining as well, especially in the way he engages in dialogue with all those who hated these musics, especially Adorno. I have got so much pleasure from it and learned so much.

[Anastasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The content doesn’t quite live up to the title. It’s a sweeping and ambitious project, yet coming from Verso, I was expecting much more in-depth examination of music as an integral part of people’s struggles. In fact, there is hardly any analysis of that aspect. Instead, this is most valuable as an encyclopedia and glossary of a wealth of colonial port music from the early 20th century and a brief history of the origins of the recording industry. Denning packs it all in, mixing together musical history and citations from so many different places and other scholars, it’s nearly impossible to keep it all straight. In short, it’s very much an academic and factual take on the topic, and I was put off by the repeated use of the word ‘vernacular,’ which could have been simplified to popular or another term. 2.5 stars for readability, but finally I look forward to digging into lots of music presented here and the sources for more in-depth looks at the particular times and places from which it arose.

[Aris Setyawan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Denning defines vernacular music as a music that emerged and was played outside the aristocratic tradition. On its breakthrough, the aristocrats labeled vernacular as noise, the unwanted frequency. The vernacular music being disseminated was heard as noise by the established and cultivated elites: it was unrespectable and disrespected. Moreover, Denning argues that the vernacular music revolution emerged from the soundscape of working-class daily life in an archipelago of colonial ports.

[Mark Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

a fascinating read,about the history and politics of recorded music across genres 1925-30,how the colonial ports became a catalyst for all genres of 'popular music’.Good on how genres such as early jazz,samba,calyspo,blues,marabi,hula etc challenged the prevailing musical culture of deference - though a bit weak on musical analysis,still a commanding read,with a Spotify playlist to spark further interest..

[Carolyn Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book concentrates on the technological revolution of the 1920s and 1930s, and how the advent of shellac records helped local and ethnic music be preserved. It is a very dry and academic read - I wish that someone would make a pop history version. But it is a well-sourced look at an era in music history that is often overlooked.

[Charles Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent work on the colonization and decolonization of the ear. Denning is a master Marxist.

[Alessandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential history of recorded music.

[Jakob Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

The conjunction of a lot of things I'm interested in (colonial shipping networks, old third world musics, the origin of music culture). This was a great read.

[Paula Carvalho · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 estrelas porque não tem como dar 50 !!

[Timothy Dymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m old enough to remember some record players having a 78 rpm setting along with the 33 and 45. 78 appeared to serve no purpose aside from allowing my brother and I to make every record sound like it was being sung by the Chipmunks. However thanks to ‘Noise uprising’ I understand the significance of that technical hangover from the original electric phonograph industry. The 78 rpm Shellac record, according to Michael Denning, brought about the ‘vernacular phonograph revolution’; a worldwide musical explosion that lasted roughly from 1925 to 1930 - when it was halted by the Great Depression. The new record industry was the technical basis for this revolution, and its social basis was working class life in the archipelago of colonial ports in what we now call the global south. Port cities were a worldwide network through which working class neighbourhoods had their music recorded and circulated. Those neighbourhoods in return heard and were influenced by other musical styles.

Denning calls this style ‘vernacular’ to distinguish it from ‘commercial’ - although these were certainly commercial recordings. These were often colonised peoples hearing their own, and others, colonised languages for the first time. The ‘vernacular revolution’s’ music included Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans hot jazz, Ismael Silvas’ Brazilian Samba, and Umm Kulthumm’s Egyptian tarab. There are hundreds of others from Cuba, Hawaii, Indonesia etc. Denning’s publisher Verso provides a useful Spotify list of songs.

The vernacular revolution is important, Denning argues, because colonisation was a ‘musical event’. Imperialism is a colonisation of the ear as much as a colonisation of territory, as the conquering West brought missionary hymns, choral singing and brass bands. The latter arrived with colonial military forces and police. These musical styles begat a kind of body discipline on the colonised: new ways of singing, dancing, marching and playing instruments. One writer calls it ‘the violence of imposed harmony’.

Denning tells the story of how Gandhi’s early life attempts to be an ‘English Gentleman’ involved learning to play the violin, and to carefully sing the national anthem. These were the first things to jar with him as he formed his nationalist ideas. This story reminded me of how, in Australia, school children were required to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ each day, long after it ceased to be compulsory in British schools. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the Christian Missions, with their strong emphasis on choral hymning, were both oppressive and ‘hearts of a heartless world’.

The vernacular revolution for Denning is therefore a worldwide cultural revolution - not simply nationalistic, but as important to anti-colonialism as any political ideology. And despite the revolution's collapse in the 1930s, it laid the basis for subsequent waves of musical mass culture.

‘Noise Uprising’ is very densely written, with lots of information crammed into every paragraph. It is very theoretically informed with names such as Adorno, Fanon, Bloch and Benjamin spread around the text. Because of the vast musical canvas Denning paints on there is very little about individual artists themselves. So while it is not a difficult read it is quite academic in its approach. However as a guide to the early wave of ‘world music’ before that unfortunate term was coined, it is a great starting point.

[Ollie · Rating 2 out of 5]

A blurb on the back of Noise Uprising states “Any future attempt to analyze the sounds and politics of international music industry will need to reckon with this powerful book.” I think someone’s jumping the gun here.

There is no doubt that Noise Uprising deals with some interesting and important aspects regarding the birth of recorded music, but at the same time it’s almost like Denning is daring us to make sense of this book, or figure out exactly what direction it’s taking. Even though it says it deals with “audiopolitics” and “musical revolution” very little of Noise Uprising actually does that. Instead, it reads like fragmented excerpts of music being recorded for the first time around the world. As a music fan, this of course is very exciting stuff, and there is tremendous value in this knowledge. Also, there is the occasional discussion of how cultures were affected by music’s ability to migrate across ports, and how music was used as a political weapon to instigate dissent, but these exciting bits are few and far in between.

Also, no discussion of punk rock. So there’s that.

Not helping this book is just how damn academic and difficult Denning has made it. It’s just so hard to read, often with long dry and dull sentences. And I can’t help but roll my eyes at his insistence on using the term “vernacular phonograph musics.” He means pop records, folks.

I can see the value of what’s inside Noise Uprising, but you have to look hard for it. It’s almost like Denning is trying to hide it from us.

2.5 stars.

[nikkia neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks verso books and netgalley for arc.

Awesome book, learned so much and who doesn't love music and learning more about music!

[Johnny]

It seems like a fantastic read, but I should revisit it when I can more conveniently listen along with highlighted songs.