Reviews for Oh Boy

The average rating for Oh Boy based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-17 00:00:00 Murilo Correa This is a book of articles on masculinity and rock written by a wide variety of authors, all of whom are professors of music (except Judith Halberstam who is in English and Feminist Studies). The subject matter ranges from Elvis, to the mosh pit, to emo, to Justin Timberlake, and to Indonesian pop (just to mention a few). My favorites were Freya Jarman-Ivens' "Don't Cry Daddy" on the degeneration of Elvis' virile masculinity in the course of his career and what that might mean for the (in)stability of masculinity more generally, and to assign to my Gender, Women and Rock and Roll class, and Judith Halberstam's "Queer Voices and Musical Genders" which uses Big Mama Thorton (the original singer of "Hound Dog")to queer the butch (masculine) personas of the early women blues singers. Neither of these articles is an easy read, mostly due to unnecessary academic jargon, but they are worth the effort, as taken together they offer a different "founding" or beginning for the history of rock and roll, one that features a less stable view of gender and sex identity, which could in turn provide a very different basis upon which the rest of the story of rock might be told.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-08 00:00:00 Gilda Alarcon This is not a good book. It is specially not a good book compared to what it promises to be. It promises to be a book that discusses the concept of masculinities within music. It isn't. It is a collection of essays on music performance that uses 'masculinity' as a category of analisys. This is also not a good book for what it is. For a book that wants to use 'masculinity', the range of theories on masculinity, and gender performance more in general, is quite narrow. This might be precisely because the book does not "discuss" masculinities, but "uses" masculinity to talk about their cases. Therefore, rather than chalenging assumptions and coming up with new discussions on masculinities, it instead often choses a theory of masculinity to attach it to the analysis being made. It comes short of its promise, and it does not go a good job on what it does. It can be an interesting read at times, specially for someone looking for ways people use masculinity to analyse data; but if one is looking into gaining more understanding on Masculinity itself, I wouldn't recommend.