Grammy-winning music producer Ian Brennan’s seventh book, Muse-Sick, is a primer on how mass production and commercialization have corrupted the arts. Broken down into a series of core points and action plans, it expands upon Brennan’s previous music missives, Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth and How Music Dies (or Lives).
Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives through images and earworm hooks. Justice, at most levels, is something one may have little influence upon, leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where concrete change can occur. By exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent commercialized and prepackaged fruit, we begin to rebalance the world, one engaged listener at a time.
In fifty-nine clear and concise points, Brennan reveals how corporate media has constricted local cultures and individual creativity, leading to a lack of diversity within “diversity.” Muse-Sick’s narrative portions are driven and made corporeal via the author’s ongoing field-recording chronicles of places including Comoros, Kosovo, Pakistan, and Rwanda, with disparate groups such as the Sheltered Workshop Singers, brought to life by Marilena Umuhoza Delli’s striking photographs.
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