Join us on Tuesday, November 21 at 6pm for a conversation, book signing, and Q&A with Ann Powers, NPR’s acclaimed music critic and author of GOOD BOOTY: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music.
Powers will discuss GOOD BOOTY with Alison Fensterstock from 6:00pm-7:00pm. Audience Q&A session will follow. GOOD BOOTY will be available for purchase and signing.
This event is free and open to the public, presented by the New Orleans Jazz Museum.
About GOOD BOOTY:
In GOOD BOOTY (the title is a nod to Little Richard’s breakthrough hit “Tutti Frutti”), Powers explores how popular music became America’s primary erotic art form. She takes us from 19th century New Orleans through dance-crazed Jazz Age New York to the teen scream years of mid-20th century rock-and-roll to the cutting-edge adventures of today’s web-based pop stars.
Drawing on her deep knowledge and insights on gender and sexuality, Powers recounts stories of forbidden lovers, wild shimmy-shakers, orgasmic gospel singers, countercultural perverts, soft-rock sensitivos, punk Puritans, and even Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus to illuminate how eroticism—not merely sex, but love, bodily freedom, and liberating joy—became entwined within the rhythms and melodies of American song. This cohesion, she reveals, touches the heart of America's anxieties and hopes about race, feminism, marriage, youth, and freedom.
“As an introduction to the racially and sexually charged legacy of pop music in the U.S., this book is well worth a spin.” — Publishers Weekly
“A major, original, comprehensive piece of rock history and analysis.” — Robert Christgau, author of Going Into the City
“A revelatory road trip through the erotic fever dreams of American culture. Ann Powers tells the whole epic saga of how music became the confessional where we go to share our deepest secrets and desires—from the folkways to the pop raves, from New Orleans ballrooms to MTV visions, from the Summer of Love to the riot-grrrl explosion. Only Ann Powers could make this story so head-spinning—and often heartbreaking.” — Rob Sheffield, author of Dreaming the Beatles