Review of George Lipsitz. 2007. Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

What popular music can teach us about certain issues- such as ethnic discrimination and the social constructedness of racial categories- is the subject in George Lipsitz’s Footsteps in the Dark: The hidden Histories of Popular Music, a book in which Lipsitz calls for “reading popular music as history and interpreting history though popular music”. Addressing a rich counterpoint of musical cultures and sociopolitical questions with the authors characteristic candor, commitment and acuity, Footsteps in the Dark is a volume few scholars other than Lipsitz wuold have been able, or willing to write. Footsteps in the Dark adds to a corpus that has firmly established Lipsitz as one of the seminal and most widely influential scholars in the fields and subfields of cultural studies.