Meeting number 8, dedicated to introducing Kathodik readers to those involved in promoting a discourse of music criticism in Italian and international publishing. The first meeting was with Marco Refe of Edizioni Crac in Falconara Marittima (here). The second meeting was with Professor Luca Cerchiari, editor of the ‘Musica Contemporanea’ series of Mimesis Edizioni (here). The third meeting was with Karl Ludwig, Communication Manager of the German wolke verlag (here). The fourth meeting was with Domenico Ferraro, Editorial Director of Squilibri Editore (here). The fifth meeting was with Fabio Ferretti, creator and editor of the series ‘Chorus’, by Edizioni Quodlibet (here). The sixth meeting was with Massimo Roccaforte, editorial curator of Goodfellas Edizioni (here). The seventh meeting was with Christina Ward, co-curator of the US publishing house Feral House (here). Today I move to the East Coast of The United States to interview Ken Wissoker, Senior Executive Director of Duke University Press. A publishing house that has long found a place in Kathodik because it has very well-edited and interesting titles that are reference points for studying and understanding the music that plays in our heads.
Here you can find the Italian translation
How did the idea of music publishing series come about?
Before I started at Duke as an editor in 1991, I lived on the south side of Chicago in Hyde Park, a neighborhood that has a long jazz history and also is home to the University of Chicago. From 1979 until I left in 1988 I was working at the Seminary Coop Bookstore, a historic academic bookstore, unpacking books and doing the new book displays. For most of that time, I had a radio show on WHPK-FM the University of Chicago radio station. I began doing a post-punk show, that moved along with New Order in the dance direction. House music was born in Chicago at that time, but there was no one playing hip-hop. I turned my show into the first rap show in the city which, even though the station had a weak signal, became super-popular around the south side. The station was also known for jazz, and had an impressive group of jazz djs from around the south side, who changed my idea of jazz history and exposed me to a lot of newer music. This was also the time when Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Paul Gilroy, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose were all bringing new cultural studies approaches to music. I was reading their work and promoting it at the bookstore, and then participating in my own way on the radio. So when I got to Duke University Press a few years later, that music and culture intersection was an area of huge interest from the start. It’s really grown from there. In the early 2000s when Ann Powers and Eric Weisbard started the Pop Conference at what was then Seattle’s Experience Music Project, gathering journalists, critics and academics together, that became a strong boost for my thinking and the list.
How do you select the titles for publication?
We get many proposals every day from all around the world – through the website, by email, or through series editors. The Press only publishes 150 books a year total, so I have to turn down a lot of great things. I look for manuscripts that feel original and smart and that I think will be successful. We can’t do all the ones that meet that criteria, of course. I sometimes compare this part of the job to being a gallery or museum curator, choosing shows or what to highlight. Or a DJ trying to keep people on the dancefloor. The interests and audiences change historically all the time. I’m looking for what will hit when the book comes out. For instance Gavin Butt’s “No Machos or Pop Stars” https://www.dukeupress.edu/no-machos-or-pop-stars and Richard Rodriguez’s “A Kiss Across the Ocean” https://www.dukeupress.edu/a-kiss-across-the-ocean came out at the moment of early 80s revival. They would have hit differently if they came out a decade before (or a decade later).
As far as the selection of foreign authors is concerned, which school of music criticism is the most referred to? Just to give you an example: are you more interested in English-speaking authors? Or in French-speaking authors? Or other languages?
I’m committed to having thought from around the world in all the areas in which I publish. That would be true of critical approaches and of musics. Perspectives from elsewhere are always needed. Translation is expensive, and both the music and the point of view has to be interesting enough for our English-language audience. We just published a great collection on the Korean stars BTS called “Bangtang Remixed” https://www.dukeupress.edu/bangtan-remixed. Would I be excited about a Black Pink anthology edited and translated from Korean writers? Absolutely! For some music, the original language of the thinking makes little difference. If it was an illuminating book about Sun Ra, it could be originally written in any language, as long as it was productive for our readers.
Here follows a few technical questions: what about the fundraising, the circulation, the promotion and the distribution of a title you choose to publish?
We are a univesity press and part of Duke University, so we are expected to break even, not turn a profit. That said, it takes a big effort to break even, especially with all the cutting-edge academic work from around the world that we are proud to publish, even they don’t become big sellers. The popular music books tend to sell better than most of our books, which helps us keep publishing them. They are sold through bookstores and online venues here in North America and through the rest of the world by our distibutor CAP based in London. We do a lot of promotion on social media, send out a lot of review copies (pdfs have made that easier) and get a lot of support in places like The Wire that share a similar range of interests. When there is a big breakout book like Tim Lawrence’s “Life and Death on the New York Dancefloor” https://www.dukeupress.edu/life-and-death-on-the-new-york-dance-floor-1980-1983 then you can see the books reviewed in The Guardian or The New York Times and anywhere else.
What genres do you prefer to deal with for your publications and why?
Mostly I have focused on jazz and R&B and other Black musics, though we have also published successfully on rock https://www.dukeupress.edu/henry-cow (or the 80s new wave examples above), on African musics https://www.dukeupress.edu/tony-allen, Latinx musics https://www.dukeupress.edu/sounds-of-crossing and on country https://www.dukeupress.edu/hidden-in-the-mix. Our new Singles series https://www.dukeupress.edu/series/singles, with books on single songs started with The Modern Lovers, ‘Roadrunner’, moved to ‘Hound Dog’, and Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’, and is expanding from there. So it is more about what the book says, than a single genre, though I have mostly stayed away from classical musics.
What is the most interesting title that has been published to date and why?
There is no way I can answer this with a single book, so I will give you three or four!
Fred Wesley, “Hit Me, Fred” https://www.dukeupress.edu/hit-me-fred
The James Brown and Parliament Funkadelic bandleader, trombonist, and arranger gives his own account of all the amazing music he was central to. He talks a lot about the position of the non-star in a thoughtful honest way. Yet there he was completely crucial to some of the most important music of the last fifty or sixty years.
Tim Lawrence, “Love Saves the Day” https://www.dukeupress.edu/love-saves-the-day
This book, translated into Italian and into Japanese, did so much to change our idea of disco, and the history of dance music in general, putting gay men of color back at the center of the story, and offering a utopic sense of the possibilities of the dance floor. The book recently inspired an art installation at the Museum of Modern Art, and forms the ground for new work like our book by Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, “Together, Somehow: Music Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor” https://www.dukeupress.edu/together-somehow
Greg Tate, “Flyboy 2” https://www.dukeupress.edu/flyboy-2
What can I say? Greg was the greatest writer on popular music we had. After his far-too-early death, a huge range of writers testified to his influence. Many of them didn’t write on music, or even on popular culture. He set a bar most of us can only hope to reach on rare occasion, and made it look easy. This collects a lot of his best work from the nineties forward.
Maureen Mahon, “Black Diamond Queens” https://www.dukeupress.edu/black-diamond-queens
This book tells the story of rock and roll as a history led by Black women. Women who were often relegated to back-up roles in most account, are at the center here. The genre, and our sense of history is completely better for it.
I could easily come up with another five that are just as crucial, but I will stop here.
How did the idea of Studies in the Grateful Dead come about?
I get no credit for that one! The Duke University Press Director, Dean Smith, came from Cornell University Press, where they had a big hit with a book on the Grateful Dead concert there, and publication was coordinated with a Rhino Records reissue of the concert. He had the idea of broadening that effort out here, and that’s just getting started!
Do you think co-production between publishers for selected releases is possible, as it happens between microlabels in music?
I think that might be possible on some books, but it is harder than it might seem. If one publisher does all the work and another press buys rights to publish the book in their territory, that happens fairly easily. We do that reasonably often with books that have important home audiences in South Africa or India – places we reach but not as well as publishers based in those places. A co-production, where the same book would be published in different languages seems possible, but one would have to choose the right kind of books. My favorite record store, Dusty Groove in Chicago: https://www.dustygroove.com/ often carries fabulous books from Japan that feature incredible photos of every LP from a given jazz label, or of the most collectible LPs for sampling. The text is all in Japanese, but a lot of collectors buy them for the pictures and the listings. Could those be done with multiple language texts in the same book (as often happens with architecture monographs)? Probably.
Does the USA state help publishers with publishing?
No. There are a few exceptions to that. National museums like the Smithsonian, publish catalogs and other work. And the National Endowment for the Humanities, which gives grants to scholars and writers, also has a program to help support open access for publications by those scholars, but in general, no. There isn’t even the foundation support for publishers that might have come from Rockefeller or the Getty when I first started. There’s a lot of neo-liberal pressure to make things self-supporting, which of course limits what one can publish.
In addition to books, are you thinking of other forms of publication? For example documentaries, movies, podcasts?
No. We are happy when people option our books for those forms, or the authors’ develop their work further in those directions, but we have our hands full publishing books and journals. No film production is in the works!
Are there any forthcoming titles worth mentioning?
Yes, several! I’m excited for Marisol Negrón’s “Made in NuYoRico” which tells the story of Fania Records and the rise of Salsa: https://www.dukeupress.edu/made-in-nuyorico and the forthcoming Singles series books on “Ne me quitte pas” the Jacques Brel and Nina Simone classic: https://www.dukeupress.edu/ne-me-quitte-pas and “Under Pressure,” the Bowie and Queen anthem: https://www.dukeupress.edu/under-pressure.
On a different note we are publishing two books by writers and performers. Songwriting and singing teacher Masi Asare’s “Blues Mamas & Broadway Belters” https://www.dukeupress.edu/blues-mamas-and-broadway-belters, opens up the stylistic conversation between Black women vocalists and the way they studies and heard each other.
Then, Jessie Cox, a composer who studied at Columbia under jazz writer and legend George Lewis, has written a briliant book called “Sounds of Black Switzerland”: https://www.dukeupress.edu/sounds-of-black-switzerland. Cox himself is Black and Swiss, and comments that holding those two identities together is nearly impossible – one is supposed to be either Black or Swiss. He wonders what it would be like to not have Black Swiss determined by the state, or in contrast to white swiss, but to actually put together all the different Black experiences and understandings in conversation and to build the sense of Black Swiss from there. Cox compares that to avant garde and free musics, building from open conversation between the players, and in the book goes back and forth between this kind of philosophical thought and discussion of compositiions by Black Swiss musicians. It’s original and completely compelling!
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