Musicians strive to “keep it real”; listeners condemn “fakes”; ... but does great music really need to be authentic? Did Elvis sing from the heart, or was he just acting? Were the Sex Pistols more real than disco? Why do so many musicians base their approach on being authentic, and why do music buffs fall for it every time? By investigating this obsession in the last century through the stories of John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Jimmie Rodgers, Donna Summer, Leadbelly, Neil Young, Moby, and others, Faking It rethinks what makes popular music work. Along the way, the authors discuss the segregation of music in the South, investigate the predominance of self-absorption in modern pop, reassess the rebellious ridiculousness of rockabilly and disco, and delineate how the quest for authenticity has not only made some music great and some music terrible but also shaped in a fundamental way the development of popular music in our time.

Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music

Arts & Photography

Taylor, Yuval

Barker, Hugh

Music

W.W.Norton&Company

An exploration and celebration of a controversial tradition that, contrary to popular opinion, is alive and active after more than 150 years. Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen investigate the complex history of black minstrelsy, adopted in the mid-nineteenth century by African American performers who played the grinning blackface fool to entertain black and white audiences. We now consider minstrelsy an embarrassing relic, but once blacks and whites alike saw it as a black art form―and embraced it as such. And, as the authors reveal, black minstrelsy remains deeply relevant to popular black entertainment, particularly in the work of contemporary artists like Dave Chappelle, Flavor Flav, Spike Lee, and Lil Wayne. Darkest America explores the origins, heyday, and present-day manifestations of this tradition, exploding the myth that it was a form of entertainment that whites foisted on blacks, and shining a sure-to-be controversial light on how these incendiary performances can be not only demeaning but also, paradoxically, liberating. 12 illustrations

Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop

Austen, Jake

A Finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography Zora and Langston is the dramatic and moving story of one of the most influential friendships in literature.
They were best friends. They were collaborators, literary gadflies, and champions of the common people. They were the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston, the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Langston Hughes, the author of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Let America Be America Again,” first met in 1925, at a great gathering of black and white literati, and they fascinated each other. They traveled together in Hurston’s dilapidated car through the rural South collecting folklore, worked on the play Mule Bone, and wrote scores of loving letters. They even had the same patron: Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white woman who insisted on being called “Godmother.”
Paying them lavishly while trying to control their work, Mason may have been the spark for their bitter and passionate falling-out. Was the split inevitable when Hughes decided to be financially independent of his patron? Was Hurston jealous of the young woman employed as their typist? Or was the rupture over the authorship of Mule Bone? Yuval Taylor answers these questions while illuminating Hurston’s and Hughes’s lives, work, competitiveness, and ambition, uncovering little-known details. 9 black and white photographs

Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

A Finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography\n“A complete pleasure to read.” ―Lisa Page, Washington Post 
Novelist Zora Neale Hurston and poet Langston Hughes, two of America’s greatest writers, first met in New York City in 1925. Drawn to each other, they helped launch a radical journal, Fire!! Later, meeting by accident in Alabama, they became close as they traveled together―Hurston interviewing African Americans for folk stories, Hughes getting his first taste of the deep South. By illuminating their lives, work, competitiveness, and ambitions, Yuval Taylor savvily details how their friendship and literary collaborations dead-ended in acrimonious accusations. 9 black-and-white photographs

I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives (The Library of Black America, Volume I: 1772-1849)

Lawrence Hill Books

Ten slaves—all under the age of 19—tell stories of enslavement, brutality, and dreams of freedom in this collection culled from full-length autobiographies. These accounts, selected to help teenagers relate to the horrific experiences of slaves their own age living in the not-so-distant past, include stories of young slaves torn from their mothers and families, suffering from starvation, and being whipped and tortured. But these are not all tales of deprivation and violence; teenagers will relate to accounts of slaves challenging authority, playing games, telling jokes, and falling in love. These stories cover the range of the slave experience, from the passage in slave ships across the Atlantic—and daily life as a slave both on large plantations and in small-city dwellings—to escaping slavery and fighting in the Civil War. The writings of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, and other lesser-known slaves are included.

Growing Up in Slavery: Stories of Young Slaves as Told by Themselves

History

Chicago Review Press

HighBridge Audio

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Taylor, Yuval. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Taylor, Yuval

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Taylor, Yuval. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music

Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop

Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal

Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal

I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives (The Library of Black America, Volume I: 1772-1849)

Growing Up in Slavery: Stories of Young Slaves as Told by Themselves

Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal