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Shake It Up:
Great American Writing on Rock and Pop
From Elvis to Jay Z

Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar, eds.

(New York: Library of America, 2017)
Pp. 601. $40.00, hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-59853-531-0

Review by Dr. Kirk Bane

April 2 , 2018

"On stage I make love to 25,000 people, and then I go home alone." So asserted Janis Joplin, Port Arthur native and rock' n' roll icon. "Ball and Chain." "Piece of My Heart." "Me and Bobby McGee." A truly incredible performer but a troubled, tragic figure. Joplin is just one of the musicians expertly profiled in this impressive anthology. Deftly edited by Lethem and Dettmar and published by the esteemed Library of America, Shake It Up deserves a prominent place on the bookshelf of any serious music fan.

This commendable anthology features many giants of rock and pop criticism, including Gina Arnold, Lester Bangs, Stanley Booth, Robert Christgau, Anthony DeCurtis, Peter Guralnick, Dave Marsh, Richard Meltzer, Paul Nelson, Robert Palmer, Ann Powers, Lillian Roxon, Ellen Sander, Greg Tate, Nick Tosches, Paul Williams, and Ellen Willis. Most of the legendary artists appear in this extraordinary compilation: the Beach Boys, the Beatles, David Bowie, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, Joplin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, Prince, the Ramones, Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones, Axl Rose, and numerous others. Among the genres analyzed are R&B, disco, heavy metal, and emo. The selections cover half a century of rock and pop; Shake It Up opens with Nat Hentoff's 1963 liner notes for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan LP and concludes with Greil Marcus's 2014 essay, "Guitar Drag."

To obtain a feeling for these insightful, opinionated and splendidly written pieces (which, in my view, certainly qualify as literature) consider the following three excerpts:

Jules Siegel, "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!" (1967): Earlier in the summer, Brian [Wilson] had hired Van Dyke Parks, a super-sophisticated young songwriter and composer, to collaborate with him on the lyrics for Smile. With Van Dyke working for him, he had a fighting chance against John Lennon, whose literary skill and Liverpudlian wit had been one of the most important factors in making the Beatles the darlings of the hip intelligentsia…As 1967 opened it seemed as though Brian and the Beach Boys were assured of a new world of success; yet something was going wrong. As the corporate activity reached a peak of intensity, Brian was becoming less and less productive and more and more erratic. Smile, which was to have been released for the Christmas season, remained unfinished.

Chuck Eddy, "The Ramones" (1990): So was punk rock really new? Who knows! The Ramones combined old stuff, mainly power chords and bubblegum-surfboard harmonies, but they did it in a brand new way…In Ramones rock, there was no respite, no let-up; the slightest change-a hand clap, a falsetto, an echo, a three-second Farfisa or a twenty-second guitar solo-felt cataclysmic.

Devin McKinney, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (2003): Like most Americans, Charles Manson discovered the Beatles in the spring of 1964. Unlike most Americans, he was in prison-specifically the U. S. Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington State, where he'd been incarcerated since June 1961. He may have seen the Beatles' picture in Life magazine, or heard their voices coming from a transistor radio. Instantly, he was excited by them. Some said obsessed. One of his friends, the legendary Alvin "Creepy" Karpis-in the '30s a member of Ma Barker's gang, now the fellow inmate who taught Manson guitar-said later, "He was constantly telling people he could come on like the Beatles, if he got the chance."

In short, the fifty selections in Shake It Up represent rock and pop criticism at its absolute finest. To quote Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, "I love rock' n' roll, so put another dime in the juke box, baby."

Dr. Kirk Bane,
Book Review Editor,
Central Texas Studies


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