[Commlist] New book - Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis

New book: Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (mit.edu) 
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781913380168/take-this-hammer/>

The emergence of the popular music industry in the early twentieth 
century not only drove a wedge between music production and consumption, 
it also underscored a wider separation of labor from leisure and of the 
workplace from the domestic sphere. These were changes characteristic of 
an industrial society where pleasure was to be sought outside of work, 
but these categories have grown increasingly porous today. As the 
working day extends into the home or becomes indistinguishable from 
leisure time, so the role and meaning of music in everyday life changes 
too. In arguing that the experience of popular music is partly 
conditioned by its segregation from work and its restriction to the time 
and space of leisure—the evening, the weekend, the dancehall—/Take This 
Hammer/ shows how changes to work as it grows increasingly precarious, 
part-time, and temporary in recent decades, are related to 
transformations in popular music.

Connecting contemporary changes in work and the economy to tendencies in 
popular music, /Take This Hammer/ shows how song-form has both reflected 
developments in contemporary capitalism while also intimating a horizon 
beyond it. From online streaming and the extension of the working day to 
gentrification, unemployment and the emergence of trap rap, from 
ecological crisis and field recording to automation and trends in dance 
music, by exploring the intersections of work and song in the current 
era, not only do we gain a new understanding of contemporary musical 
culture, we also see how music might gesture towards a horizon beyond 
the alienating experience of work in capitalism itself.

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