On his book Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination
Cover Interview of February 28, 2017
A close-up
There are a lot of parts of this book I’m pretty proud of.
The last chapter, on the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s, is the one that I’ve
been working on and living with the longest, so it has a special place in my
heart. The third chapter has an extended section on the influence of Motown
session bass player James Jamerson on the Beatles’ Paul McCartney, which is
also a personal favorite. McCartney is obviously one of the most famous
musicians of the 20th Century, whereas Jamerson might be the most criminally
under-recognized genius in all of American popular music. So it meant a lot to
give him a moment in the sun—I’m admittedly biased due to my own background,
but I always feel like sidemen and studio musicians don’t get written about
nearly enough. And in my first chapter I write about Sam Cooke, who’s my
favorite singer of all time and another performer who hasn’t received nearly
the amount of critical and scholarly attention that he should, in my opinion
(although he’s certainly received more than Jamerson). That part of the book is
quite special to me as well.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
There are a lot of parts of this book I’m pretty proud of. The last chapter, on the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s, is the one that I’ve been working on and living with the longest, so it has a special place in my heart. The third chapter has an extended section on the influence of Motown session bass player James Jamerson on the Beatles’ Paul McCartney, which is also a personal favorite. McCartney is obviously one of the most famous musicians of the 20th Century, whereas Jamerson might be the most criminally under-recognized genius in all of American popular music. So it meant a lot to give him a moment in the sun—I’m admittedly biased due to my own background, but I always feel like sidemen and studio musicians don’t get written about nearly enough. And in my first chapter I write about Sam Cooke, who’s my favorite singer of all time and another performer who hasn’t received nearly the amount of critical and scholarly attention that he should, in my opinion (although he’s certainly received more than Jamerson). That part of the book is quite special to me as well.