Musicology / Cultural Studies

0-920159-89-3 - April 2002

$26.95 CDN / $17.95 US

6 x 9 - 192 pages - paper

BISAC: SOC001000 - MUS020000

Author: John Sobol

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Contributors to this book

A lyrical analysis of the intersections between poetic speech and music, intertwined with the history of black/white relations in America.

Digitopia Blues is a fluid narrative about orality and literacy — their individual histories, and their blended futures. Musician and poet John Sobol pinpoints the African American struggle to find a language of revolutionary power through orality and music, as well as the literate poet’s impulse to transcend the printed page. Then he locates literacy and orality in the new digital media, in rap, in rave, and even in Napster. Sobol’s book is intertwined with the stories of the blues, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll, the powerful world of the printed word, and the potential dangers and advantages that digital communications technologies offer people of colour.

Digitopia Blues represents a savvy analysis of music, poetry, and the digital scene that documents the future of cultural politics in America. Slipping easily from the works and stories of personalities known and unknown, from Billie Holiday to Drop Dead Fred, Digitopia Blues marks the passage of the word through the realms of song and the printed page, and also its crossing of the digital divide into a terra incognita.

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