Spontaneity, immediacy and feeling characterize the blues as a genre. Whether it's the movement of call and response, the expressive bends and wails of voice and instruments or the synergistic relationship between audience and performers, the blues embody a kind of "living in the moment" aesthetic. At the same time, the blues genre has always responded in a unique way to its historical moment, its formal characteristics, figures, and devices constantly emerging from--and speaking to--the social relations emanating from Jim Crow segregation, sharecropping, racist violence, and migration. Time in the Blues presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the specific forms of temporality produced by and reflected in the blues. Examining time as it is represented, enacted, and experienced through the blues, interdisciplinary scholar Julia Simon addresses how the material conditions in the early twentieth century shaped a musical genre. The technical aspects of the blues--ostinato patterns, cyclical changes, improvisation, call and response--emerge from and speak to the Jim Crow era's economic, social, and political relations. Through this temporal analysis, Simon addresses how the moment-to-moment aspect of time in blues performance relates to the genre's location within historical time, with careful examinations of the historical performance and reception of blues music from the 1920s to the present day. Simon examines the structuring of time, and analyzes temporality to open the broader questions of desire, agency, self-definition, faith, and forms of resistance as they are articulated in this music. Ultimately, Time in the Blues, argues for the relevance, significance, and importance of time in the blues for shared values of community and a vision of social justice.

Using the writings of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School as a framework, this book uncovers the tensions and contradictions associated with the rise of capitalism as manifested in the writings of Rousseau and Diderot.

Based on the remake scheduled for release by Universal Pictures in December, these 8 x 8 paperbacks take readers along on the expedition to the mysterious Skull Island. Full color.

Lonnie Johnson is a blues legend. His virtuosity on the blues guitar is second to none, and his influence on artists from T-Bone Walker and B. B. King to Eric Clapton is well established. Yet Johnson mastered multiple instruments. He recorded with jazz icons such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and he played vaudeville music, ballads, and popular songs. In this book, Julia Simon takes a closer look at Johnson’s musical legacy. Considering the full body of his work, Simon presents detailed analyses of Johnson’s music—his lyrics, technique, and styles—with particular attention to its sociohistorical context. Born in 1894 in New Orleans, Johnson's early experiences were shaped by French colonial understandings of race that challenge the Black-white binary. His performances call into question not only conventional understandings of race but also fixed notions of identity. Johnson was able to cross generic, stylistic, and other boundaries almost effortlessly, displaying astonishing adaptability across a corpus of music produced over six decades. Simon introduces us to a musical innovator and a performer keenly aware of his audience and the social categories of race, class, and gender that conditioned the music of his time. Lonnie Johnson’s music challenges us to think about not only what we recognize and value in “the blues” but also what we leave unexamined, cannot account for, or choose not to hear. The Inconvenient Lonnie Johnson provides a reassessment of Johnson’s musical legacy and complicates basic assumptions about the blues, its production, and its reception.

A powerful memoir of redemption from the son of blues legend John Lee Hooker Born in Detroit and exposed to the music world from an early age, John Lee Hooker Jr. began singing as a featured attraction in his father’s shows as a teenager. His father was a sharecropper’s son who became known for hit songs like “Boogie Chillin,” “I’m in the Mood,” and “Boom Boom,” and in 1972, he and his father performed live and recorded an album in Soledad Prison. Junior seemed to have a golden ticket to a successful music career as a child, but trouble brewed as his father’s marriage was in trouble and ripped apart the family. Drug addiction and a series of related crimes, including as a con player, landed Junior in and out of jails & prisons for several decades. An early brush with the law led to a sentence at Synanon, the infamous drug rehabilitation program turned religious cult. Later arrests resulted in time served in prisons including at Soledad, San Quentin, and Avenal. <br>Shot, stabbed, and convicted multiple times, Junior was at his lowest point doing time at a Santa Rita jail, but it was at that moment that he found the Lord. He emerged clean and sober and began a successful career as a blues singer, earning two Grammy nominations as well as the Bobby “Blue” Bland Lifetime Achievement Award. He eventually devoted himself fully to his faith. Reverend John Lee Hooker Jr. testifies, preaches, and performs gospel music in churches and prisons in both Germany and America.

This volume explores concepts of freedom and bondage in the blues and argues that this genre of music explicitly calls for a reckoning while expressing faith in a secular justice to come. Placing blues music within its historical context of the post-Reconstruction South, Jim Crow America, and the civil rights era, Julia Simon finds a deep symbolism in the lyrical representations of romantic and sexual betrayal. The blues calls out and indicts the tangled web of deceit and entrapment constraining the physical, socioeconomic, and political movement of African Americans. Surveying blues music from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century, Simon’s analyses focus on economic relations, such as sharecropping, house contract sales, debt peonage, criminal surety, and convict lease. She demonstrates how the music reflects this exploitative economic history and how it is shaped by commodification under racialized capitalism. As Simon assesses the lyrics, technique, and styles of a wide range of blues musicians, including Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Albert Collins, and Kirk Fletcher, she argues forcefully that the call for racial justice is at the heart of the blues. A highly sophisticated interpretation of the blues tradition steeped in musicology, social history, and critical-cultural hermeneutics, Debt and Redemption not only clarifies blues as an aesthetic tradition but, more importantly, proves that it advances a theory of social and economic development and change.

Renowned for his influence as a political philosopher, a writer, and an autobiographer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is known also for his lifelong interest in music. He composed operas and other musical pieces, invented a system of numbered musical notation, engaged in public debates about music, and wrote at length about musical theory. Critical analysis of Rousseau’s work in music has been principally the domain of musicologists, rarely involving the work of scholars of political theory or literary studies. In Rousseau Among the Moderns, Julia Simon puts forth fresh interpretations of The Social Contract, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and the Confessions, as well as other texts. She links Rousseau’s understanding of key concepts in music, such as tuning, harmony, melody, and form, to the crucial problem of the individual’s relationship to the social order. The choice of music as the privileged aesthetic object enables Rousseau to gain insight into the role of the aesthetic realm in relation to the social and political body in ways often associated with later thinkers. Simon argues that much of Rousseau’s “modernism” resides in the unique role that he assigns to music in forging communal relations.

Beyond Contractual Morality looks at current debates over the meaning of liberalism by reexamining their roots in eighteenth-century texts, which demonstrate the historical intertwining of political, legal and moral problems in their extension of social contract theory into various realms of public and private lives. Writers such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Sade, and Montesquieu are discussed. In light of contemporary debates over liberalism, and informed by the problems of contemporary democratic, pluralistic culture, Beyond Contractual Morality reexamines the roots of these current discussions in eighteenth-century texts. Enlightenment texts demonstrate the historical intertwining of political, legal and moral problems in their extension of social contract theory into various realms of private and public life. Specifically, these textspoint to an over-reliance on the notion of contract to resolve ethical dilemmas. A range of issues and authors is discussed, including: the historical development of social contract theory from Hobbes to Rousseau; conflicting conceptions of education in Rousseau's writings; the rise of professional ethics; the concept of tolerance as discussed by Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; the divide between the public and private realms in the writings of Charriere and Sade. Beyond Contractual Morality concludes with a reemphasis on the contemporary context of debate and proposes a defense of a revised version of liberalism that can take account of positive duties without sacrificing individual autonomy.Julia Simon is Associate Professor of French at the Pennsylvania State University.

Reed Richards and his crew have been forever changed by a cosmic cloud. But the exposure has brought out the worst in Victor Von Doom. He has turned Ben Grimm against Reed, convincing him that Reed is responsible for Ben's hideous appearance. Slowly Ben realises that Victor is out to ruin Reed and unites with his friends to stop him. Join Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm - now the Fantastic Four - as they battle against their new, electrified enemy, Dr Victor Von DooM. This 24-page illustrated storybook let parents and children accompany the Fantastic Four on their extraordinary journey. Ages 3-7