Noise Uprising - by Michael Denning (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A radically new reading of the origins of recorded music

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 globe: 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.

Review Quotes

"An instant classic. It utterly revises the history and geography of modern music."
--Vijay Prashad

"I suspect it will be the most important book released on music this year."
--Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon, Flavorwire

One of the "Best Books of 2015."
--Financial Times

"The scope of Denning's book--dozens of genres across five continents--is impressive ... Noise Uprising offers an ambitious map of the connections between them."
--Tim Barker, The New Republic

"An ambitious record of a revolution in sound in the late 1920s that erupted in port towns everywhere, from Cape Town to Shanghai--local guilds operating autonomously but in global unison like a cosmic fugue."
--Timothy Brennan, author of Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz

"Which of the senses was decolonized first? In making a case for the ear, Denning has given us a brilliant, audacious guidebook to the sly but unruly insurgencies of sound that coursed through the port cities of the Black Atlantic, the Polynesian Pacific, and the Gypsy Mediterranean."
--Andrew Ross

"A monumental rewriting of the global history of recorded music. Every future attempt to analyze the sounds and politics of the international music industry will need to reckon with this powerful book."
--Josh Kun, University of Southern California

"Deeply researched and densely fascinating ... the book is a necessary chronicle."
--Robert Ham, Portland Mercury

"A cultural historian, Denning offers a brilliant book that serves as a time line of modern music and musical styles and, more important, a history of the evolution and influence of vinyl recordings of modern music."
--Choice Connect

"In great detail and with an impressive sense for origins and outcome of local musical styles, this book is an eye-opener."
--Alexander Ebert, Pop Culture Shelf

About the Author

Michael Denning is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and the co-director of Yale's Initiative on Labor and Culture. He is the author of Culture in the Age of Three Worlds; The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century; Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America; and Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller. He coordinates the Working Group on Globalization and Culture, whose collective work includes "Going into Debt," published online in Social Text's Periscope, and "Spaces and Times of Occupation," published in Transforming Anthropology. In 2014, he received the Bode-Pearson lifetime achievement award from the American Studies Association.