Reviews for The Contemporary Hand Drummer

The average rating for The Contemporary Hand Drummer based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-27 00:00:00 Raul Rubio I'm a sucker for academic inquiries into pop music, and this book is one of the best, giving explicitly close readings of single recordings by Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello, with shorter readings of "This Diamond Ring" by Gary Lewis and the Playboys and "Mayor of Simpleton" by XTC. Brackett is masterful at investigating the relationship between form and function both in the actual record under consideration and in the records role within the artists career and the specific milieu of its time. He's got me paying closer attention to what I'm hearing (even if, once again, I had to kind of gloss over the extremely technical bits about pitches and harmony which I understand vicariously more than completely). It's a shame he hasn't updated it to realize that within a short time of the books release in 1996, teen idols would come back in a big way, and that over the next 20 years, country music would change significantly. But that's just me being greedy - I would actually love to read more of this guy just talking about music.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-01 00:00:00 Liz Abbott I highly recommend the chapter on James Brown, from which I learnt a great deal.