Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave Book

For anyone interested in the history of music, especially black music in North America, this book isn't just a must-read, it's a revelation. Not just a history of music, it's a history of music from a Cuban perspective.

Cuban music legend, Mario Bauza, says it all, when in the opening of the Preface he's quoted by critic, Robert Palmer: "The Cubans, we came here and changed your American music from the bottom up! And nobody knows this! He is shouting. 'AND NOBODY WRITES ABOUT THIS!'"

Well, Ned Sublette does. The book's 672 pages start off in prehistory, with the Phoenicians, and tracks its way into the 1950's mambo craze just a Fidel Castro is starting his rise into politics. And he's not just talking about music. He's giving you the social and political history that shapes the music, the economics of slavery, and much more. The amount of research put into this book is staggering. No one has ever tackled history from a black Cuban perspective before and the terrain reveals a topography that's completely different from what white European historians not only write about but what they can even see.

There's revelations every few pages in this book with the research to back it up. Your take on North American music will undergo a sea-change and never be the same again. One of the things that got me reading it in the first place, was a quote from a musician in Ben Ratliff's book, The Jazz Ear, talking about being able to trace the history of the type of blues played in North America by the area of Africa the slaves came from. Sublette makes a pretty good case for his theories and drops a few other bombshells along the way, like: "I tracked the most common bass and saxophone riff in 50's rock 'n' roll back to its originator (Dave Bartholomew) and he told me he'd nicked it from a Cuban rumba record. An interview with Richard Berry, composer of Louie Louie," revealed that immortal song's origin in an obscure Cuban cha-cha record... I began to feel like a guy who's discovered a monument the size of Mt. Rushmore hidden in his own backyard."

If any of the above intrigues you, you owe it to yourself to check this volume out. You won't be disappointed. Not only that, it's the first volume of a two-volume set. I can't wait for the next one, which he's no doubt still researching. Mt. Rushmore indeed. - BH.