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Music Is History
- Narrated by: Questlove
- Length: 11 hrs
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Publisher's Summary
Best-selling author and Sundance award-winning director Questlove offers a thrilling, music-driven ride through the last 50 years of American history
In Music Is History, best-selling author and Sundance award-winning director Questlove harnesses his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and his deep curiosity about history to examine America over the past 50 years. Choosing one essential track from each year, Questlove unpacks each song’s significance, revealing the pivotal role that American music plays around issues of race, gender, politics, and identity.
Music Is History focuses on the years 1971 to the present, not only the country’s most complex and rewarding half-century when it comes to the ways that pop culture and culturally diverse history intersect and interact, but also the years that overlap with Questlove’s own life. Music Is History moves fluidly from the personal to the political, examining events closely and critically, to unpeel and uncover previously unseen dimensions, and encouraging listeners to do the same. Whether he is exploring how Black identity reshaped itself during the blaxploitation era, analyzing the assembly-line nature of disco and its hostility to Black genius, or remembering his own youth as a pop fan and what it taught him about America, Questlove finds the hidden connections in the American tapestry.
Complete with playlists organized around personal, playful themes that touch on everything from the relationship of hip-hop to music’s past to the secret ingredient in all funk songs, Music Is History is filled with and informed by Questlove’s preferences, perspectives, and particularities. It feels like both a popular history of contemporary America and a conversation with one of music's most influential and unique voices.
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What listeners say about Music Is History
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- snickels
- 2023-11-16
Music and history
I often see music as part of the history I remember. A song brings back feelings, sights, sounds, and even smells. It was wonderful hearing these things through someone else’s lens. It humbles me to see how much I missed and didn’t know. I was doing my own thing from my own experience. It wasn’t necessarily wrong, but I am happy to learn another parallel history I wish I had payed attention to. It’s never too late to teach an old dog new tricks.
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