Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica by Norman C. Stolzoff ISBN: 0-8223-2514-4 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: June, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Comprehensive Dancehall Reference!
Comment: This is an excellant book, written by a genuinely knowledgeable scholar of dancehall music and Jamaican popular culture. Dr. Stolzoff has done an incredible amount of research for this book and puts it altogether with Wake The Town. A must for all reggae and dancehall afficionados. This book will be a classic for a long time.
Rating: 5
Summary: Exceptional Research Study
Comment: I would like to commend Mr. Stolzoff for an in depth and enjoyable study of dancehall reggae. Being a dancehall fan for some time now, it's wonderful to see the music and culture being taken seriously. Ready first hand accounts of artists like the great Tenor Saw was an unexpected and exciting part of the book. Mr. Stolzoff goes indept as he discusses the origins of dancehall back to Africa right up to today with the top artists like Buju Banton, Bounty Killer, Beenie Man, Sizzla, etc etc. As Ricky Trooper says in the begining of the book, if you haven't been to the dancehall before, you wouldn't understand it, dancehall it something that you have to experience. Great reading!
Rating: 4
Summary: A Whole New Insight to Jamaican Music!
Comment: As a lover of the creative, colorful and very controversial culture known as Jamaican dancehall, I received this book ecstatically, but I wasn't quite sure of what to expect. I mean, this is a world that changes so rapidly that any attempts to document it have felt outdated even before their ink dried. I thought Stolzoff would play it safe and keep his approach as superficial as possible-a nice coffee table book perhaps, filled with eye-pleasing full-color pix of scantily-dressed dancehall queens, posturing dapper dons, maybe even the occasional text paragraph with amusing tidbits like, "Whatever happened to Wayne 'Sleng Teng' Smith?" Instead, I found a meticulously researched study packed with so much detail that several times I had to "wheel back and come again" (re-read pages) in order to digest it all.
Of course, this isn't the first piece of writing to cast a critical eye on dancehall; but past discussions (helmed mostly by staunch roots reggae apologists who make no bones about expressing their view of the subject as an anti-musical ebola responsible for devouring the innards of upright, "real" reggae as exemplified by the likes of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Burning Spear), irrespective of whether they have been pro- or anti-dancehall, have all revolved to varying degrees around the old dancehall "reggae" vs. "traditional" reggae issue.
Stolzoff distinguishes himself from the pack by sidestepping that stumbling block altogether: In (what I think is) a revolutionary move, he posits ALL Jamaican music, in essence, as dancehall-from the creolized drum and fiddle music of 18th century slave frolics to the thundering amplified bass blaring from contemporary Kingston sound systems. In short, he sees dancehall not as a distinct genre of music, but as an interactive method of experiencing music that might be specifically Jamaican.
Stolzoff's an anthropologist, not a rock critic, so rather than examining the music in isolation, he reconstructs the world that is dancehall's context, starting from the beginning with the sound systems, the cornerstone of the Jamaican music world.( Stolzoff scores a major coup by including extensive interviews with sound system pioneers like Hedley Jones, who provide a lot of insight into the Jamaican music experience prior to the birth of the local music industry-all other books on reggae up until this time have summed the whole era up in a sentence or two). Upon that foundation, Stolzoff layers the various social and ideological trends that have shaped the dancehall: rude boys, Rastafar-I, fashion, technology... You come to see that as chaotic as the dancehall universe appears to be, it is a well-ordered cosmology where everything has its place: sexuality, piety, violence, flamboyance, humility... They can all co-exist.
What I really, really love is the "career trajectory" Stolzoff maps out from his observation of the dancehall field. Using many of the aspiring and established dancehall stars he befriended, Stolzoff illustrates the stages of a career as a performer in the dancehall economy-which is an actual economy that employs millions of Jamaicans in various capacities.
I think this is definitely an important book and a complete must-read not only for fans of Jamaican music, but for anybody interested in the way that music and culture intersect with the daily lives of its participants.
 |
Title: Born Fi' Dead : A Journey Through The Jamaican Posse Underworld by Laurie Gunst ISBN: 0805046984 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 15 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae by David Katz ISBN: 1582341435 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Pub. Date: 17 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
 |
Title: King Jammy's by Beth Lesser, Steve Barrow ISBN: 1550225251 Publisher: ECW Press Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
 |
Title: Inside the Revolution: Everyday Life in Socialist Cuba (Anthropology of Contemporary Issues) by Mona Rosendahl ISBN: 080148412X Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
 |
Title: Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae by Peter Manuel, Michael Largey, Kenneth Bilby ISBN: 1566393396 Publisher: Temple Univ Press Pub. Date: 09 September, 1995 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
