IASPM Woody Guthrie Prize
[Last updated: 01.03.2006 22:49]
I've never been particularly interested in the outcome of awards and
prize ceremonies, which are normally occasions for excessive
backslapping and shameless marketing. Yesterday, though, I was told
that my book, Love Saves the Day,
has been given an "honourable mention" by the International Association
for the Study of Popular Music, so I've completely changed my mind.
Prizes and award ceremonies are the best thing ever.
The award ⎯ the Woody Guthrie Award ⎯ is IASPM's annual competition for "the year’s most distinguished monograph in popular music studies". I was put forward by my publisher, Duke University Press, and they must have nominated Bryan McCann's Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil as well because HHB was the winner. HHB chronicles the proliferation of Brazilian music between the 1920s and 1950s and uncovers a myriad of previously unseen documentation about this furtive period. The previous winner was Guthrie Ramsey's instant classic, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (there were no honourable mentions that year…). I'm naturally delighted to be within shoe-polishing distance of such great writers. For more info on the prize, visit http://www.iaspm-us.net/aboutiaspm/book_award.php.
This being a virtual award ceremony, and you being maybe the only person to receive my acceptance speech, I would like to take this opportunity to thank… But seriously, hats off (and dancing shoes on) to the team at Duke University Press in North Carolina. Working with Ken Wissoker (editor-in-chief and my own editor), Patty Van Norman (production manager), Amy Ruth Buchanan (designer), Michael McCullough (sales), Laura Sell (media and publicity… and what a great surname for the job) and Tom Robinson (subsidiary rights) has been a pleasure and an education. Together, and with the work of many others, they have turned Duke into a stylish beacon of ethical, intelligent and lively writing that sticks the boot in when necessary ⎯ which it so often is. As the journal Foreign Affairs put it, “It is one of the glories of American democracy that North Carolina is home to both Jesse Helms and the Duke University Press.”
When I was developing the idea for Love Saves the Day, my supervisors were unanimous in recommending that I try to go with Duke. "Why not write a quick book on dance culture?" suggested my friend and tutor at Columbia University, Rob Nixon, before he scribbled Ken's phone number on the back of a magnolia folder. "Ken was a hip hop DJ in Chicago in the mid-eighties," he added. I wasn't shy about making phone calls ⎯ I mean, I'd just spent four years working as a journalist ⎯ and I got lucky. Ken answered and more or less told me he was on the lookout for a book about dance, having considered and eventually refused the opportunity to publish Sarah Thornton's rather nasty account of the culture.
A flick through Duke's stylish, intelligent and engaged back catalogue combined with Ken's status as a collector-connoisseur and editor-extraordinaire made the decision to go with Duke an easy one. “Duke University Press’s shrink-wrapped books probably enclose more fetish value per pound than those of any of their competitors," commented the New York Times Book Review. How appropriate that the Italian publishers of LSD have just produced a limited edition of the book that comes in… a black PVC skin.
I suppose a good reason to have said "no" might have been Duke's lack of muscle in the ultra-competitive books market in comparison to the big trade houses. Sales of LSD have been excellent, especially for an academic publication, but there's a decent chance it would have shifted more copies if had been published by a big player with promotional clout and lots of contacts in the big media outlets. The book received generous reviews in many high-profile magazines and newspapers ⎯ the Voice, New York magazine, Time Out New York, i-D, the Onion etc. ⎯ but I've been struck by the way in which Turn the Beat Around, Peter Shapiro's book on disco, which in many respects treads similar ground and came out eighteen months after my own, has received a lot more reviews. TTBA has been covered by just about every major publication, from the New York Times to the New Yorker, the Guardian to the Sunday Times, and few of its reviewers seem to have been aware of LSD's existence. I was also able to pop into Books Etc. and pick up a copy of TTBA off the shelf, something that I could only do briefly with LSD in Waterstones alone. That, I suppose, is what comes when you have Faber and Faber behind you. Yes, I'm jealous.
But even Faber, one of the finest trade publishers around, isn't perfect. Much as I respect Peter Shapiro's journalism, and much as TTBA contains good material, the book is a bit of a mare on the design and editing front. The US and UK editions are totally different, yet both use garish covers that portray and market disco as a shiny, fluorescent phenomenon in which gaudy reflection (evoking mirrors and glitter) and colour (suggesting lasers, neon and fluorescent fashion) replace the mysterious dark of Nightworld's most compelling venues. There's no doubt that Faber's front covers will help shift extra books, just as a peacock's multicoloured tail wins it lovers. Of course the bright colours worked the same magic for disco in the late 1970s ⎯ the flashy phenomenon of Saturday Night Fever and Studio 54, which represented the crooked, commercial culmination of the dance scene that was born in downtown New York at the beginning of the 1970s, are proof of that ⎯ and Faber are canny enough to know that this is the version of disco that most people will recognise and buy. But what writer or reader could want a serious history of disco to be framed by this cheesy, showbiz packaging? I'm sure Peter Shapiro didn't like Faber's design, just as I'm sure that I couldn't have lived with LSD if it had been required to live its life in TTBA's jacket-and-sleeve clothing. Luckily, Duke are grassroots enough and guerilla enough to produce books that you want to touch.
The award ⎯ the Woody Guthrie Award ⎯ is IASPM's annual competition for "the year’s most distinguished monograph in popular music studies". I was put forward by my publisher, Duke University Press, and they must have nominated Bryan McCann's Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil as well because HHB was the winner. HHB chronicles the proliferation of Brazilian music between the 1920s and 1950s and uncovers a myriad of previously unseen documentation about this furtive period. The previous winner was Guthrie Ramsey's instant classic, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (there were no honourable mentions that year…). I'm naturally delighted to be within shoe-polishing distance of such great writers. For more info on the prize, visit http://www.iaspm-us.net/aboutiaspm/book_award.php.
This being a virtual award ceremony, and you being maybe the only person to receive my acceptance speech, I would like to take this opportunity to thank… But seriously, hats off (and dancing shoes on) to the team at Duke University Press in North Carolina. Working with Ken Wissoker (editor-in-chief and my own editor), Patty Van Norman (production manager), Amy Ruth Buchanan (designer), Michael McCullough (sales), Laura Sell (media and publicity… and what a great surname for the job) and Tom Robinson (subsidiary rights) has been a pleasure and an education. Together, and with the work of many others, they have turned Duke into a stylish beacon of ethical, intelligent and lively writing that sticks the boot in when necessary ⎯ which it so often is. As the journal Foreign Affairs put it, “It is one of the glories of American democracy that North Carolina is home to both Jesse Helms and the Duke University Press.”
When I was developing the idea for Love Saves the Day, my supervisors were unanimous in recommending that I try to go with Duke. "Why not write a quick book on dance culture?" suggested my friend and tutor at Columbia University, Rob Nixon, before he scribbled Ken's phone number on the back of a magnolia folder. "Ken was a hip hop DJ in Chicago in the mid-eighties," he added. I wasn't shy about making phone calls ⎯ I mean, I'd just spent four years working as a journalist ⎯ and I got lucky. Ken answered and more or less told me he was on the lookout for a book about dance, having considered and eventually refused the opportunity to publish Sarah Thornton's rather nasty account of the culture.
A flick through Duke's stylish, intelligent and engaged back catalogue combined with Ken's status as a collector-connoisseur and editor-extraordinaire made the decision to go with Duke an easy one. “Duke University Press’s shrink-wrapped books probably enclose more fetish value per pound than those of any of their competitors," commented the New York Times Book Review. How appropriate that the Italian publishers of LSD have just produced a limited edition of the book that comes in… a black PVC skin.
I suppose a good reason to have said "no" might have been Duke's lack of muscle in the ultra-competitive books market in comparison to the big trade houses. Sales of LSD have been excellent, especially for an academic publication, but there's a decent chance it would have shifted more copies if had been published by a big player with promotional clout and lots of contacts in the big media outlets. The book received generous reviews in many high-profile magazines and newspapers ⎯ the Voice, New York magazine, Time Out New York, i-D, the Onion etc. ⎯ but I've been struck by the way in which Turn the Beat Around, Peter Shapiro's book on disco, which in many respects treads similar ground and came out eighteen months after my own, has received a lot more reviews. TTBA has been covered by just about every major publication, from the New York Times to the New Yorker, the Guardian to the Sunday Times, and few of its reviewers seem to have been aware of LSD's existence. I was also able to pop into Books Etc. and pick up a copy of TTBA off the shelf, something that I could only do briefly with LSD in Waterstones alone. That, I suppose, is what comes when you have Faber and Faber behind you. Yes, I'm jealous.
But even Faber, one of the finest trade publishers around, isn't perfect. Much as I respect Peter Shapiro's journalism, and much as TTBA contains good material, the book is a bit of a mare on the design and editing front. The US and UK editions are totally different, yet both use garish covers that portray and market disco as a shiny, fluorescent phenomenon in which gaudy reflection (evoking mirrors and glitter) and colour (suggesting lasers, neon and fluorescent fashion) replace the mysterious dark of Nightworld's most compelling venues. There's no doubt that Faber's front covers will help shift extra books, just as a peacock's multicoloured tail wins it lovers. Of course the bright colours worked the same magic for disco in the late 1970s ⎯ the flashy phenomenon of Saturday Night Fever and Studio 54, which represented the crooked, commercial culmination of the dance scene that was born in downtown New York at the beginning of the 1970s, are proof of that ⎯ and Faber are canny enough to know that this is the version of disco that most people will recognise and buy. But what writer or reader could want a serious history of disco to be framed by this cheesy, showbiz packaging? I'm sure Peter Shapiro didn't like Faber's design, just as I'm sure that I couldn't have lived with LSD if it had been required to live its life in TTBA's jacket-and-sleeve clothing. Luckily, Duke are grassroots enough and guerilla enough to produce books that you want to touch.