If I have any complaint at all it is that he repeats his points a bit too often, but that is a minor nit. This is an incredibly well researched and well written book. The anecdotes and analysis are on target. He walks through the history of recording and makes note of some greats along the way: Berry Gordy, Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, Trent Reznor, Quincy Jones, and the Chemical Brothers etc. The thesis of the book is that as recording technology has progressed, producers have become artists in a very literal sense. A while back, I saw a reference to this book and I decided to give it a read. He had a CD out called 'Distractions On The Way To The King's Party' back in the early 2000s. I first heard of Virgil Moorefield through his music. The evolution of the studio producer into composer and artist and performer is broader and more nuanced than the tidy narrative presented here. Not only is this perspective racist, it misses an enormous part of the story he has set out to tell. This is repeated in the section on remixing, which begins with a paragraph about King Tubby and Lee Perry and the invention of Dub, but shifts to American, mostly white, producers to fully refine the remix practice. The narrative of black artists discovering a technique that is limited by their access to technology and then white artists refining it into proper production needs to go away. This is followed by a lengthy section on electronica with a discussion of how these white English artists refined the use of samples. The following section on hip hop production grapples with the idea of making music from samples, but with none of the attention to detail that's in the earlier parts of the book (the close listening analysis offers no insights). The section on hip hop in the eighties only mentions Rick Rubin, Beastie Boys, and Run DMC's collaboration with Aerosmith, but no black artists. The last third of the book falls into a very dated and white perspective.
These early sections, though clearly a survey and not an in-depth history, are well considered and very interesting. I discovered details in recordings I've listened to all my life that I hadn't heard before.
He punctuates the history with close listening analysis of significant tracks.
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