Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music

"Ann Powers is the head music critic at NPR and I think she’s been working on this book for years. I’ve seen her do various readings from it at Pop Conference in Seattle. It’s the culmination of her life’s work. She’s a great feminist critic who always writes astutely about the intersection of gender, sex, race and power. And this book is a sweeping history of all of those things in pop music. To survey all of those things in one book is a really mean feat, so she breaks eras down into distinct chapters. “She’s a great feminist critic who always writes astutely about the intersection of gender, sex, race and power.” I particularly loved one about Britney Spears and Beyoncé and what she calls ‘cyborg pop’, about how they have both been depersonalised by the digital realm and how that’s worked to Beyoncé’s advantage, but perhaps less so to Britney Spears’ advantage. I also really loved her chapter on pop and the aids crisis and how pop retreated—or advanced, depending on how you look at it̛—into this fantastical zone. She talked about how many pop videos of that era used white space to create a fantasy that was removed from the world. There’s a lot of observations and analyses like that in the book that stuck with me. She takes a much more artist-first approach rather than an industry-first, but there is a bit in that when she writes about how the entertainment complex dehumanised Britney Spears. But a lot of people—and I am among them—think that one of Britney’s best albums is Blackout , which was made in the midst of her breakdown and which wields cyborg voices and other depersonalised techniques against the media."