Music: The Rebel Art Form
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.8 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Music critic and historian Ted Gioia joins City Journal editor Brian Anderson to discuss the 4,000-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval—topics explored in his new book, Music: A Subversive History.
The music business is a $10 billion industry today. But according to Gioia, innovative songs have always come from outsiders—the poor, the unruly, and the marginalized. The culmination of his decades of writing about music, Gioia's new book is a celebration of the social outcasts who continue to define this art form.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. |
| 0:05.5 | Coming up on today's show, music critic and historian Ted Joya. We'll join us to talk about his |
| 0:11.4 | fascinating new book, Music, a subversive history. It's published by basic books. You can find a link |
| 0:17.2 | in the description, or you can find it on Amazon, or wherever books are sold. |
| 0:23.1 | Ted's written nearly a dozen other books on music, especially on jazz, and he's published two |
| 0:28.8 | wonderful essays for City Journal, including Jazz Central, about how New York City became the focal |
| 0:34.3 | point of that American art form and the West Coast Jazz Revival about California's |
| 0:39.4 | jazz resurgence right now. The conversation is a little bit different from what we usually |
| 0:45.1 | talk about on 10 blocks, but it's a great book, and I know our listeners will enjoy it. We'll take a |
| 0:50.8 | quick break and be back with Ted Joya after the music. |
| 1:06.4 | Music We'll take a quick break and be back with Ted Joya after the music. Hello again, everyone. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. On the phone with us is Ted Joya. You can follow him on Twitter at Ted Joya, and that's spelled G-I-O-I-A. His latest book is called Music, a Subversive History. We'll link to it in the description, and you can find it on Amazon or wherever books are sold. |
| 1:30.0 | Ted, thanks very much for joining us. |
| 1:32.5 | Well, thank you, Brian, for inviting me. |
| 1:34.4 | You've written a number of great books on music, including How to Listen to Jazz, |
| 1:40.4 | which for me was the best introduction to jazz music I've ever come across. But this new |
| 1:47.3 | book, which you've been writing, as you note in the introduction, for 25 years, has a scope |
| 1:53.3 | that goes beyond anything you've done before. It ranges from the Neolithic era to hip-hop by way |
| 1:58.9 | of medieval madrigals and the blues. A recurring theme in this |
| 2:04.1 | 4,000-year history, which gives you your subtitle, A Subversive History, is that music has always |
| 2:10.1 | been tied to deep connections with love and violence. So let's start at the beginning. What do you |
| 2:16.3 | mean when you see the origin of music as a force of creative destruction? |
| 2:22.2 | Well, many of us tend to think of music as a kind of entertainment or diversion. |
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