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MUSIC

What Makes a Musical Genius?

Books about everything from Tupac Shakur to Latin music and memoirs by Sinead O’Connor and Rickie Lee Jones offer an answer.

Credit...Ryan Gillett

“There is nothing I could write in this book or tell you that would help you get to know me,” writes Sinead O’Connor in her new memoir, REMEMBERINGS (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pp., $28). “It is all in the songs.”

Whether she really believes this or not, it’s not a bad point — but audiences clearly don’t feel the same. As a batch of new books demonstrates, efforts to get closer to the mysteries of musical expression continue to come in many forms — history, criticism, autobiography and various combinations thereof. In the absence of live music during our pandemic year, there’s been a flood of music-related stories, especially onscreen, with both documentaries (the Bee Gees, Tina Turner) and dramatic narratives (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Sound of Metal”).

In fact, O’Connor’s spectacular rise and fall would make a fine film. To most of the public, her story has forever been defined by one crash-and-burn moment — her 1992 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” when she tore a photograph of the pope into pieces (in the book, we learn that the photo was the actual image that hung in her mother’s living room) and proclaimed: “Fight the real enemy!”She was banned, boycotted and eviscerated in the press, dismissed as a nut case who flushed away her multiplatinum success — so much that the world has largely forgotten what a magnificent singer and songwriter she could be, with a voice that soared from mesmerizing murmur to a powerful wail (true story: I once walked out of an O’Connor concert so spellbound that I wandered into the street and got hit by a car). Also, one can’t help wondering how differently her protest would be received today, after decades of scandal surrounding the Catholic Church.

But that isn’t how O’Connor sees that infamous incident. “A lot of people say or think that tearing up the pope’s photo derailed my career,” she writes. “That’s not how I feel about it. I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.” In brief, episodic, often arresting chapters, she uses “Rememberings” to make this case; her 1990 breakthrough album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” gets a few passing mentions, while she goes in depth on later projects focusing on reggae and spirituals. She’s also quite funny — recalling herself feigning illness to get out of school, she says that “I got away with mere Golden Globes-worthy performances; they didn’t have to be Oscar-winning.”

Like her recordings, O’Connor’s book often veers between defiance and pain. She rejoices as she remembers first getting her head shaved. “I loved it. I looked like an alien. Looked like ‘Star Trek.’ Didn’t matter what I wore now.” But several longer set pieces recount terrifying encounters in vivid detail: one with Prince at his Los Angeles home that ended with her running away from him on foot onto a highway (apparently Prince was angry at her for signing on with his former manager).

O’Connor’s childhood in Ireland was brutal, but she grants her family forgiveness and repeatedly claims responsibility for even her most outlandish actions. “I got in trouble every time I opened my mouth,” she writes. “People would ask me a question; I’d answer it; I’d be in trouble.” Seemingly enormous events — a suicide attempt, her conversion to Islam — are cited fleetingly, matter of factly. The naked and fearless emotion that made Sinead O’Connor such a riveting artist shines through in her words and her self-awareness — “I cause a lot of upset on this earth. Being the kind of person I am” — and in the end, she emerges as a survivor.

Rickie Lee Jones is another completely distinctive singer-songwriter who walked through the fire and lived to tell the tale. But if O’Connor’s sentences and chapters are short and spiky, the language in LAST CHANCE TEXACO: Chronicles of an American Troubador (Grove, 364 pp., $28) is winding and leisurely, as rich and colorful as Jones’s best lyrics. It’s a classically American picaresque tale, a recounting of a life in which she “lived volumes as a young girl long before I was famous.”

In 1979, Jones — with jazzy chords, lowlife stories and post-beatnik glamour — exploded onto the scene, winning the best new artist Grammy and getting dubbed “The Duchess of Coolsville” in Time magazine. But the fully realized universe of her self-titled debut album (and its smash single “Chuck E’s in Love”) blossomed out of decades of chaos and disorder, tangled up with excitement and experience.

Jones was born in Chicago; her mother had been raised an orphan, and her father was the son of vaudeville performers. They were certainly unequipped for parenthood — often absent, sometimes abusive — yet she (like O’Connor) is both forgiving and understanding, aware of all they offered her as well as the ways they fell short. The family moved to Arizona when she was 4 and then remained in perpetual motion, which soon manifested in her own dangerous, frequently terrifying youthful adventures — the subject of most of the book. She repeatedly runs away, at one point moving into a commune located in a California cave at age 14, and is constantly getting tossed into juvenile halls and jail cells.

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Musician Rickie Lee Jones in her apartment in Hollywood, California on January 11, 2007.Credit...Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“Last Chance Texaco,” named for one of the memorable songs on that first album, also offers accounts of her problematic romances with Tom Waits, Lowell George and Dr. John. Musicians are trouble, but it’s music (starting with childhood obsessions with “West Side Story” and Laura Nyro) that provides her stability. She has a breakthrough writing the stunning ballad “Company” — “a visceral, tortuous process … these were pure feelings as airy and unrooted as a color or a tingle.”

There’s a detailed description of a genuinely odd, fantastical encounter with Van Morrison at an Irish music festival, but she mostly breezes through her last several decades, in which she has continued to make interesting, if less celebrated, new music, and grew out of just being “the girl in the red beret.” Still, Jones paints a striking, distinctive self-portrait.

Rickie Lee Jones and Sinead O’Connor would find themselves among kindred spirits in Lesley Chow’s YOU’RE HISTORY: The Twelve Strangest Women in Music (Repeater, 147 pp., paper, $14.95). The slim, sharp book considers a range of female artists from Janet Jackson and Taylor Swift to TLC and Nicki Minaj, a group that the Australian cultural critic Chow views as “outliers, marking moments where the culture might have swerved to incorporate their influence, but somehow contrived not to.”

Chow’s real premise is that music writers have their priorities all wrong, that they analyze lyrics rather than sounds and that the pop canon “too often … venerates the same old stinging monologues and obvious cynicism.” Of course she’s right — it’s much easier to write about words than about music, especially if words, and not music, is how you make your living. And she’s correct that one effect of this tactic is to minimize the contributions and achievements of female pop singers, who are so often dismissed as minor figures next to the Dylan/Cohen axis of rock ’n’ roll “poets.”

Chow makes the case for some of her subjects more convincingly than others, and a few of the women — Kate Bush, Shakespears Sister — resonate far greater in the U.K. than they do stateside. (The subtitle is also an unnecessary distraction.) But she consistently delivers observations that are bracingly smart and original: that Taylor Swift is “as enamored with fashion as Fitzgerald was,” that “Rihanna doesn’t so much sing as bluntly bat at the sound,” that Janet Jackson’s best music is defined by a “fascinating tension between rigor and relaxation.”

“You’re History” displays the importance of these details, but they’re in service of a greater point, which is to try to grasp music’s mysterious and unknowable essence. “The best pop songs are not ‘universal,’ but unaccountably specific in their detail,” she writes, noting elsewhere that to comprehend a song “involves trying to digest the emotional meaning of sounds — something that criticism has historically been reluctant to do.” Chow writes often of the wordless elements of singing, musing early in the book that the story of pop could be told as a history of the “oohs” in songs — leading, inevitably and delightfully, to the appendix: “The Greatest ‘Oohs’ in Modern Music.”

In FINDING THE RAGA: An Improvisation on Indian Music (New York Review Books, 258 pp., paper, $17.95), the novelist, poet, essayist, and musician Amit Chaudhuri also explores the power of wordless vocalizing. At one point, he ponders the prevalence of “aahs” in John Lennon’s singing, which “punctuate his idea of song” and contribute “a never-worked-up laziness: a teetering toward escape from the fatigue of being.” But Chaudhuri’s book doesn’t focus on pop music; it tells his own story of setting aside his singer-songwriter ambitions as a teenager to devote himself to the study of Indian classical music — and becomes an inquiry into the role and meaning of music in the two cultures, and in his own life.

“The raga’s relationship to the world was different from Western music’s,” he explains, right down to the very notion of its creation; “you can’t compose a raga because ragas have no composers in the conventional sense — they are ‘found’ material turned into fluid and imperishable forms by the culture.” Chaudhuri’s mother was a prominent singer, and he comes to find that the ubiquity and functionality of Indian music led to it being underappreciated, and that his embrace of this tradition was nothing short of “revolutionary.”

Merging music theory, literary criticism and memoir, “Finding the Raga” can be challenging. The cascade of references — Pasolini, Renaissance paintings, the movie “Shane,” Kant, John Cage — draws from a wide range of media; at one point, 12 consecutive pages are empty but for a single line on each, to illustrate the tempo changes in one raga. But even if you can’t follow every nuance, Chaudhuri will suddenly offer an insight that stops you in your tracks. Listening, he writes, “takes us out of ourselves. We read novels, as Walter Benjamin said, to find ourselves in them; we listen to be elsewhere.”

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Novelist Amit Chaudhuri photographed in Calcutta, India, on March 25, 2021.Credit...Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times

After hearing nothing but Hindustani classical music for 16 years, Chaudhuri re-engages with Western sounds, and he now composes music that attempts to incorporate both traditions. As “Finding the Raga” reveals, he has made a lifelong exploration of a fundamental question: “What does listening involve?”

The beauty that results from crashing different styles into each other is a story that runs through Leila Cobo’s DECODING “DESPACITO”: An Oral History of Latin Music (Vintage, 304 pp., paper, $16.95). One of pop’s biggest developments in recent years is that, especially as streaming has become the dominant mode of consumption, Latin hits have exploded into global phenomena, and such Spanish-singing artists as Bad Bunny and Ozuna have become mainstream superstars. Cobo, who covers the Latin industry for Billboard magazine, makes the case that this shift was nothing sudden, but the “result of a long slow boil that was years in the making.”

Beginning with the surprise success of Jose Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad” in 1970, the book considers 19 songs across 50 years that changed the game for Latin music. It tracks the change from the first few decades — when the crossover hits were novelties like Los del Rio’s “Macarena” or Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson’s duet on “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” — to the current popularity of unapologetically Latin creations.

What emerges, though, is how moments that draw upon multiple musical styles are so often the ones that break through. While Lesley Chow argues in “You’re History” that “an artist may have only the faintest awareness of what their influences really are,” these musicians frequently display a clear knowledge of the sounds they’re blending.

Gloria Estefan describes the Miami Sound Machine’s 1985 hit “Conga” as a combination of Andrews Sisters harmonies, a funk foundation, “legit Cuban conga” and a sampled James Brown scream. Carlos Vives’s 1995 “La Tierra del Olvido” fuses “pop and rock with Colombian tropical beats” and was “created on the outskirts of Bogotá by rockers, folk instrumentalists, and even a British producer.”

As oral history, some of the chapters are pretty thin, with as few as three voices (some of those picked up from other sources), and — as always — accounts of studio sessions can be a bit mundane. But Cobo shows that while the “Latin Music Goes Pop!” moment that landed Ricky Martin on the cover of Time magazine in 1999 may not have sustained, the mania triggered by Luis Fonsi’s record-breaking “Despacito” in 2017 truly seems to have transformed the universe of music. As Erika Ender, one of the writers of the song that gives the book its title, tells Cobo, “we’re at a time when Latin stopped being Latin and began being cool.”

Occasionally, one rare artist can embody the sorts of contradictions and collisions that Chaudhuri and Cobo find between different musical cultures. A rapper, actor, activist, thug, poet, rebel — Tupac Shakur was a lightning rod, a screen onto which millions of people projected their feelings about rap, about race and about the young Black man in America today. When his life was snuffed out at age 25 in 1996, his mythology went on to make him the most iconic figure in hip-hop around the world.

In CHANGES: An Oral History of Tupac Shakur (Simon & Schuster, 273 pp., $26.99), The New Yorker writer and editor Sheldon Pearce illuminates the kaleidoscopic aspects of Shakur’s life. The son of a Black Panther, he was a talented student at a performing arts high school in Baltimore before moving to Oakland and starting a music career. Encounters with the police exacerbated his already radicalized worldview, and a stint in prison for a sexual abuse charge (one of the jurors on that case offers some revelatory details about that controversial sentencing) both hardened his attitude and left him in debt to the infamous Suge Knight of Death Row Records, who posted his bail money.

Shakur’s boldness in his lyrics, whether screaming for vengeance against his enemies or speaking up for feminism, always defined him — “He’s saying things that most people didn’t have the courage to say,” says the journalist Rob Marriott. “Is this guy crazy, or is he telling the truth?” But what often comes through in “Changes” is his growing sadness and confusion.

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Tupac Shakur in Oakland, CA on January 7, 1992.Credit...MediaNews Group via Getty Images

It’s tempting to speculate on all the things Shakur could have done if he had been allowed to live, but as the record executive Virgil Roberts points out, it’s a fool’s errand. “I don’t know that he would have become more,” he says. “Sometimes when folks die young it’s in part because of the way they live their lives. Maybe they can never become old.”

The oral history format is an appropriate way to convey such a complicated life, but it’s also only as good as its sources, and (as Pearce notes) there are a lot of other Tupac book projects that limited his access. He gamely attempts to turn this into an asset — “I decided to focus particularly on those who hadn’t spoken as much or could provide a rarely heard perspective” — and sometimes he scores remarkable details, like Shakur listening to the “Lion King” soundtrack on repeat during a photo shoot. But too many important details (album releases, arrests) are handled in footnotes, and there’s too much reliance on other reporters to flesh out the narrative.

The life of a figure as magnetic and incendiary as Tupac Shakur, though, can’t help being gripping. “He was in a hurry to create a body of work that would outlast him,” says one associate. It’s a curious, audacious impulse — the notion that making music can provide a form of immortality — but it drives every artist in every one of these books. And it’s one reason we want to keep reading their stories.


Alan Light is the co-host of “Debatable,” a daily music talk show on SiriusXM.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 28 of the Sunday Book Review. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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