Sunday, October 25, 2009

Hold On To Your Dreams review

Here is a review I wrote of Tim Lawrence's Arthur Russell biography, Hold On To Your Dreams:
http://thefanzine.com/articles/music/373/arthur_russell_revived-_hold_on_to_your_dreams_
"One of the most impressive things that Lawrence does throughout Hold On To Your Dreams, is not only provide a sensitive and detailed rendering of Russell's life, but also the story of large and complex cultural confluences channeled by a single person. Russell's lifework is also a Whitmanesque project of containing multitudes inasmuch as it successfully negotiates groups of people, musical styles, and cultures that, to many at the time, seemed at best mutually exclusive, and at worst downright antagonistic. As Lawrence insists repeatedly throughout his book, during a time when 'avant garde,' pop, classical, (post-) punk, and emergent dance musics such as disco and house could not seem to speak to each other, let alone find common cause, Russell was equally pioneering in each musical culture/genre."

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