Book Review

[kenjari]

Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde
by Bernard Gendron

This fascinating and extremely well-written book examines the relationship between art, the avant-garde, and popular music from the late 19th century Parisian cabaret scene through the late 20th century New York punk and new wave scene. Along the way, Gendron follows the post-WWI European avant-garde's fascination with jazz and the mechanisms through which rock music gained cultural capital and critical approbation in the late 1960s. I kind of wish Gendron had given a little more attention to the ways race and gender intersected with all of this, but perhaps that really needs a separate book to cover adequately. Nonetheless, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club does a wonderful job of looking at the relationships and tensions between avante-garde art and popular music. I especially enjoyed the exploration of the New York new wave scene, since I am a fan of a lot of music that came out of it.

Comments

[sovay]

This fascinating and extremely well-written book examines the relationship between art, the avant-garde, and popular music from the late 19th century Parisian cabaret scene through the late 20th century New York punk and new wave scene.

This sounds great. I've read (and heard) Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989) which follows similar lines from Dada and the Situationists, but Gendron sounds like he can find even earlier antecedents. Thank you for alerting me to its existence!

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

Lipstick Traces is one of my favorite books - reading it in high school was a life-changing experience. Alas, I find Marcus' other writings a bit uneven.