Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music

by George Lipsitz

Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply—often in ways that reflect broader historical and cultural changes.

In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz illuminates these secret meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues, can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when these changes occur outside mainstream white culture.

Using a wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms. Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz as a largely uncritical celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights era’s challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the early 1990s.

Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark puts forth an alternate history of post–cold war America and shows why in an era given to easy answers and clichéd versions of history, pop songs matter more than ever.

George Lipsitz is professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Life in the Struggle, Dangerous Crossroads, and American Studies in a Moment of Danger.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

360 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2007

Reviews

[Maythee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is incredibly well researched and thought provoking. It's also just plain fascinating. It was my American Studies reading group's recent selection and I found myself underlining numerous passages that I'm likely to cite in the future. Some of the best chapters are Lipsitz's take on boy bands and pop stars, the Hip Hop indecency hearings, the fascist underpinnings of Dominican merengue, and the general conclusion that music is always a collective act that cross borders, boundaries, tastes, and purposes. Interesting tidbits include: Freddie Mercury was actually Indian, Dizzy Gillespie once told the State Dept off, one of the most popular merengue singers was a blue collar Irish American cable TV installer, the rap group 2 Live Crew conducted voter registrations for Janet Reno when she was running for office in Florida, and Dionne Warwick was arrested at an airport for carrying 11 marijuana cigarettes in a lipstick container!

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

histories of popular music of various sorts -- I liked his iconoclastic approach and his wide-ranging knowledge of popular (and more academic or elite) culture, because he could discuss Willa Cather's My Antonia along with the New Orleans 'krewes' of African Americans posing as Native American warriors... In some cases, though, he gets a little off the topic of popular music and into more political history. Still, I enjoyed reading it, and I felt like I had attended a series of good lectures.

[Sarah Beaudoin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Footsteps in the Dark focuses on the stories behind music, specifically examining the political and social forces that influence what becomes mainstream and what remains in the fringes. Lipsitz explores issues of racial passing, political oppression, nationalism, violence, and more, while explaining and demonstrating the difficulty of discussing music in any sort of linear fashion. Lipsitz focuses on the commercialization of the music industry, repeatedly demonstrating the ways in which marketing can move a song into the mainstream, causing it to lose any political power that it may have.

This is well written and easily read, with a large amount of anecdotal material from all spectrums of the music industry.

[Veronica]

Advocating for music to be studied and used as an "alternative archive of history" that would have the power to reflect the shared experiences and memories of the songs the listeners participate

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

mad loving it so far...