Muse Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes

by Ian Brennan, John Waters (Foreword)

Grammy-winning music producer, Ian Brennan’s seventh book, a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes , acts as a primer on how mass production and commercialization have corrupted the arts. Broken down into a series of core points and actions plans, Muse-Sick is a concise and affordable pocket primer follow-up to Brennan’s two previous music missives, How Music Dies (or Lives): Field Recording and the Battle for Democracy in the arts and Silenced by The Music Meritocracy Myth. Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives, penetrating people’s homes and haunting their psyche through images and earworm hooks. Justice, at most levels, is something that the average citizen might have little influence upon leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where some change can concretely occur—by exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent commercialized and pre-packaged fruit, we begin to re-balance the world, one engaged listener at a time. In fifty-nine concise and clear points, Brennan reveals how corporate media has constricted local culture and individual creativity, leading to a lack of diversity within “diversity.” Muse-Sick’s narrative portions are driven and made corporeal via the author’s ongoing field-recording chronicles with widely disparate groups, such as the Sheltered Workshop Singers. Marilena Umuhoza Delli’s striking photographs accompany and bring to life each tale. As John Waters “I didn’t think it was possible to write a shocking book about music anymore. But Brennan has .”

Genres: Nonfiction, Music

128 pages, Paperback

Published October 19, 2021

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short and sweet primer on the commercialization and homogenization of the music industry.

[Delicia Nugroho · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives enlightenment about how the art industry has transformed nowadays, and not in a good way.

Ian Brennan wrote this manifesto without any sugar coating, he tells it how it is. Short and eye-opening, I would recommend everyone who loves music to read this book, especially those in the music industry.

This will change how you perceive music, how you choose which music you would listen to, and even how you would enjoy music.

Thank you Edelweiss and the Publisher for giving me the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Banana Potato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Required reading - doesn't matter who you are or where you come from. There's something in this for you.

[greggo · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’m trying not to fly off the handle on this because i’m not an outwardly enthusiastic person and i over compensate by going hard in championing things that make me feel like i’m not alone. these things tend to be art that’s difficult but in ways that i’m difficult, or things that articulate noumenal ideas kicking around in my brain, or being artfully transgressive in a way that feels like permission to be my own kind of transgressive. this book blew my mind because it validates these feelings of euphoric enthusiam by offering a kind of reasoning that i always sensed under those feelings but never fully committed to an effort to clarify. it’s combative and reductive, stubbornly poetic, and elliptical to the point of bitterness. it’s also, largely, how i feel. most importantly, it grounds its fiery cynicism about ‘music’ in an aggressively radical belief in the power and value of individual human voices and stories. everyone who makes or listens to music should read it.

[Dana Jerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely and eminently devour-able. It’s my first time reading Mr. B, and he has a very refreshingly peculiar writing style. This volume is a wonderful distillation of thought. Highly quotable, and the John Waters intro does a fine job also of distilling the kernel and spark that I’m sure this book hopes to both instill and create.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely compelling analysis of the state of music nowadays.

[Frank Hoppe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hope he’s a much nicer person in person.