October's best-written recent releases in nonfiction II
October's best-written recent releases in nonfiction II
Read the opening pages of our picks below
COMING SOON:
—Booker shortlistee and author of the best-written work on this year’s Ursula K. Le Guin Prize shortlist, Samantha Harvey has answered, brilliantly, our new set of questions on prose style. We’ll be publishing her responses on the 29th of October.
—Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes will be joining me on the 16th of November for a live video discussion of what we mean by the term ‘literary’. All of you are welcome to join us, and you can find more information here.
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—‘How did pop music, which was once supposed to be exclusively about the shock of the new, come to have such a comfortable relationship with its past?’: our next pick from the recent releases in nonfiction. Our previous pick is here, along with the the full list of books considered.
—’Maybe something would happen that would indicate the arrival of a new historical epoch, a sign that we were living in an era of meaning and purpose that would be remembered for many decades to come’: and our next pick.
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Introduction: Rock’s Third Act
On the evening of 13 July 1985, when Paul McCartney was brought before the crowd at London’s Wembley Stadium in order to close the British end of the Live Aid fundraiser to help relieve famine in Ethiopia by singing his sixteen-year-old anthem ‘Let It Be’, he was greeted in the manner of a venerable ancient briefly stepping down from rock’s notional Mount Rushmore in order to bestow his blessing on the kids who were gathered that day, largely for old times’ sake. At the time it seemed faintly ridiculous to regard a veteran like McCartney as being in the same bracket as the relative youngsters who had planned the day. In fact he had only recently celebrated his forty-third birthday.
On 25 June 2022, when the same Paul McCartney was introduced to an even larger crowd at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset and simultaneously to the watching millions on TV, an occasion he instigated by singing his fifty-eight-year-old composition ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ – or at least singing along with the crowd, who seemed wholly familiar with the words despite the fact that only a minority of them had been born when it was released – he was seized on as one of the few things a twenty-first-century festival audience, who had grown up in a wilderness of specialisms and sub-cultures, could possibly be expected to agree upon. This occasion took place only a week after he had celebrated his eightieth birthday. This time there was no thought of apologizing for the years. This time the years were the point.
How did pop music, which was once supposed to be exclusively about the shock of the new, come to have such a comfortable relationship with its past? What happened between the two dates in the paragraphs above to make such a thing possible? This is what this book sets out to explore. How did the likes of McCartney and hundreds of lesser lights manage to maintain and grow their mystique into their Second and Third ages? How did we end up with rock gods in their eighties? How did they keep it up? There are thousands of volumes devoted to the subject of how your favourite artists got their big break. This one’s about how some of them managed to keep on working longer than the rest of us for the simple reason that they wanted to, and the more important reason that we wanted them to. It turned out they would be addicted to providing what we turned out to be addicted to consuming. They liked to feel young and we liked to feel that they still were. This was a two-way street. The pull was every bit as important as the push.
As he continued profitably to ply the trade he had taken up as a teenager into his seventies, Keith Richards was wont to greet audiences with the words ‘It’s good to be here – it’s good to be anywhere’ as though he recognized that his continued employment was a privilege not always available to other performers, particularly those who became famous in their youth. Keeping on keeping on is nothing like as easy for actors, and for athletes it is clearly impossible. Even the bewigged judge in London’s ancient courts, which had once been cited as an example of a job you could continue to perform well into your dotage, is now compelled to retire at the age of seventy-five. Hence it is one of the richer ironies with which this subject is ringed that the oiks who were once arraigned before such justices for relieving themselves on garage doors or misappropriating copyrighted chord sequences gaily sailed past all the mandatory retirement ages like the bunnies who advertise batteries and continued hoovering up the cash and gliding on the thermals of acclaim long after their lordships had handed in their gavels. It turned out that there was no such statute of limitations for these formerly snake-hipped glory boys. Of all the jobs that would turn out to last a lifetime, that of rock star was by some distance the least likely.
When the eighty-year-old McCartney headlined Glastonbury he further armoured himself against any charges of being old and in the way by ensuring he was backed up by representatives of more than one generation of relative youngsters, the seventy-two-year-old Bruce Springsteen and the fifty-three-year-old spring chicken Dave Grohl. None of these veterans were having to fight for attention. They were taking advantage of the fact that their stocks appeared to have risen once again. One of the biggest music stories of July 2023 was the unexpected return to live performance of seventy-nine-year-old Joni Mitchell, who appeared to sing and play at what was supposed to be a tribute to her legacy and then promptly announced that she was so bucked by the experience she now had a taste for doing more. The eighty-two-year-old Bob Dylan had no need to return because he had clearly never gone away. Touring was now his natural condition. Tendinitis might mean that he had long since stopped playing the guitar, the keyboard behind which he was stationed on stage was making no audible contribution to the band’s sound, and he appeared to employ the microphone as much for stability as audibility, but he clearly intended to be up there on stage as long as he possibly could. As the old saying goes, being a musician is not a job, it’s an incurable disease.
‘Hepworth is a genuinely great writer, with a winning turn of phrase’ Guardian
'Reads like a series of rich, fast-paced and immensely funny short stories' The Oldie
'The book is destined to become the go-to text on a subject we never thought we'd have to survey' Literary Review
From the author of Abbey Road comes the story of how enduring rock icons like Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen and many more have remained in the ever changing music game.
When Paul McCartney closed Live Aid in July 1985 we thought he was rock's Grand Old Man. He was forty-three years old.
As the forty years since have shown he - and many others of his generation - were just getting started.
This was the time when live performance took over from records. The big names of the 60s and 70s exploited the age of spectacle that Live Aid had ushered in to enjoy the longest lap of honour in the history of humanity, continuing to go strong long after everyone else had retired.
Hence this is a story without precedent, a story in which Elton John plays a royal funeral, Mick Jagger gets a knighthood, Bob Dylan picks up the Nobel Prize, the Beatles become, if anything, bigger than the Beatles and it's beginning to look as though all of the above will, thanks to the march of technology, be playing Las Vegas for ever.
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1
I remember a date: the first of July, 2016. That afternoon I came home after a few days on Fire Island, back to Brooklyn, to the brick building off the intersection of Myrtle and Broadway. The air was humid and the streets smelled of trash. The steel door of my apartment fell shut. The bed, the table, and the chairs were all where I had left them. I had a suntan that I wanted to show to someone, but there was no one to see it. I lived alone.
The apartment was a studio. It had brick walls, exposed pipes, and wood floors marked with paint. It had my teakettle, my pots and pans, and a table that was also my desk. It had my solitude. The studio was on the third floor, in a corner of the building. I had moved here a few months before, in winter, when the heat blew from a giant vent like a desert wind. Now it was summer, and the city’s noise poured in through windows that were taller than I was. On one side they looked out on a white-painted warehouse next door, and in the afternoon the room would illuminate with flashbulbs from a photo studio there. On the other side I had a view of rooftops and a redbrick housing complex on Bushwick Avenue. In the evenings, the complex’s walls would turn pink for an hour in the setting sun. The unencumbered sky rose up above it, impervious to the city and everything humans had ruined below. Pigeons and seagulls flapped in slow orbits. The jets flew north to LaGuardia in a steady, unceasing line. The colors of dusk would make a gradient of orange and lavender, the rooftops would turn gray and dowdy, and my private domain, my apartment, would be bathed in soft evening light.
The day before, lying on the beach on Fire Island, I had been looking out at the Atlantic Ocean and wondering what would happen next. Maybe I would be invited to a party. Maybe a relative would die. Maybe an unexpected writing assignment would arrive. Maybe there would be another mass shooting. Maybe something would happen that would indicate the arrival of a new historical epoch, a sign that we were living in an era of meaning and purpose that would be remembered for many decades to come.
I lay in sunlight that had traveled through the vacuum of space. I sensed I was on the cusp of a change. I pictured each cycle of life—friendships, relationships, phases of experience—as an arc that emerged from a horizontal line. At any point along the line, a tangle of arcs hovered above like the ribbed vault of a cathedral. Some curves were in the process of rising, and some in the process of falling.
"The first great book about what it was like to live through the Trump presidency"—Emily Gould, The Cut
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF 2024 (SO FAR)
From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex comes a memoir about drugs, techno, and New York City
In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.
Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.