Early in Cool Town, Grace Elizabeth Hale’s intimately detailed book about the Athens, Georgia, music scene, the author describes growing up in 1970s suburban America. In those days, she says, America was a place wherein parents who’d been rewarded by the spoils of the post-war prosperity brought up their children in “a new version of the South created by desegregation, interstates, air conditioning, and airports” (2). Yet it was also a place that clung to old ideas about life and work and community, a place that was oblivious to nuances of race, gender and class, and the children of those people, knowingly or not, felt unconstrained by previous era’s values and beliefs. “We did not want to be rednecks or racists or conservative Christians or live in subdivisions or work as middle managers,” Hale writes. “We dreamed not of the Reagan-era Sunbelt but of a different world, a new,...
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June 2021
Book Review|
June 01 2021
Review: Cool Town: How Athens Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, by Grace Elizabeth Hale
Grace Elizabeth Hale.
Cool Town: How Athens Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture
. Chapel Hill, NC
: University of North Carolina Press
, 2020
. 369 pp.
Gina Arnold
Gina Arnold
University of San Francisco Email: [email protected]
Gina Arnold is a former rock critic and the author of four books about popular music, including Route 666: The Road to Nirvana (St. Martin's, 1993) and Exile In Guyville (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). She holds a Ph.D. in modern thought & literature from Stanford University and teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Punk with George McKay.
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Journal of Popular Music Studies (2021) 33 (2): 158–160.
Citation
Gina Arnold; Review: Cool Town: How Athens Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, by Grace Elizabeth Hale. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2021; 33 (2): 158–160. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2021.33.2.158
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