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Josh Kun

Josh Kun is a professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (University of California Press).

Recent Articles

CSI: David Byrne

An investigation of music’s power by one of its great polymaths

Josh KunOct 01, 2012
(Flickr/DividedSky46)
(Flickr/Dividedsky46) David Byrne at Bonnaroo in Manchester Tennessee, 2004. I f you listen to music too soon after reading David Byrne’s new book, How Music Works , especially Chapter 5 (how recording studios shape what we hear), Chapter 6 (how collaborations shape what we hear), and Chapter 7 (how recording budgets shape what we hear)—you might be in for a disorienting experience, like watching a magic show after you’ve been taught all the tricks. I happened to put on Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel , an album I’ve enjoyed repeatedly over the past few months. Suddenly, instead of the songs I’d come to know by heart, with their minimalist but emotionally brutal stabs at self-analysis that it took Apple seven years to complete, I heard an assembly of parts. I became obsessed with microphone placement and where each song was recorded, debated whether I was hearing an upright piano or an electronic keyboard, tried to picture the number of musicians, imagined Apple’s writing process (words...

A Nightstick Turned into a Song

Two new books and a documentary cue up the soundtrack of the black-power movement.

Josh KunMar 15, 2012
(Courtesy of Louverture Films)
I n January, President Barack Obama made his singing debut on the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater. During a campaign fundraising speech, he leaned into the microphone, gently slid his State of the Union baritone up to a whispery falsetto, and nailed the opening line from “Let’s Stay Together,” the Al Green soul classic that has melted hearts and warmed sheets since its release in 1971. “I-I-I-I, I’m so in love with you,” Obama cooed. The video of his impromptu performance has logged more than four million views, and the song has become an unofficial re-election theme. Obama’s rendition is available as a ringtone; inevitably, Green showed up to sing it at an event in February. Yet the power of the clipped cover version was its resurrection of the ghosts of Obamas past. The serenade was a reminder not just of the subtle swagger that found Obama brushing the dirt off his shoulders à la Jay-Z back in 2008 but also of a tradition of civil rights–era black culture and politics that Obama...

Death Rattle

A new musical movement turns Mexican drug violence into catchy sing-alongs.

Josh KunJan 05, 2012
Movimiento Alterado has taken traditional narcocorridos to a new extreme.
GerardoOrtiz.net Gerardo Ortiz, whose latest CD both celebrates and questions the culture of drug violence I n 2010, the collective of Mexican musicians known as Movimiento Alterado released a rousing carousel blitz of tubas, accordions, and snare rolls it called “Sanguinarios del M1.” The song’s title roughly translates as “The Bloodthirsty Killers of El M1”—M1 is the nickname for Manuel Torres Félix, an infamous member of the Sinaloa drug cartel. (He also goes by El Ondeado , “The Off One” or “The Crazy One.”) His long rap sheet includes a 2008 “message murder” in which he left three decapitated bodies with severed legs in the trunk of a car with a signed note and a decapitated snake. “Sanguinarios” begins with the sound of semiautomatic gunfire, and then a rotating cast of singers role-plays as AK-47- and bazooka-toting M1 mercenaries. “We are crazy bloodthirsty guys,” the singers declare. “We like to kill.” They brag about their kidnapping, beheading, and torture skills and...

Sing, Memory

Josh KunSep 30, 2011
Y ou would be forgiven if at some point this past summer you forgot what year it was. The season’s sleeper-film hit, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, uses Sidney Bechet’s 1952 “Si Tu Vois Ma Mère” as the soundtrack to contemporary Paris while its protagonist time-travels back to the 1920s on the wings of Cole Porter 78s. Beyoncé’s 4, one of the summer’s biggest CDs, revels in the silky ’80s R&B synth and horn arrangements that once made Whitney Houston an MTV fixture. Then there was indie folk favorite Bon Iver, who made early ’90s Bonnie Raitt hip again and whose self-titled second album finishes with a song that starts off sounding like ’80s hit-maker Howard Jones and ends up as the theme song to Beverly Hills, 90210. Yet it was Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne, touted all August (mostly by Jay-Z and Kanye West) as hip-hop’s new bar-setter of “black excellence,” that turned out to be the summer’s most musically backward-looking album. The royal couple don’t just sample...