New Books in Performing Arts Marshall Poe

In Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers (Headpress, 2024), Jared Stearns tells the untold story of the world's most famous X-rated star, who rose to fame as the face of Ivory Snow and the star of Behind the Green Door but struggled to find her true self in a world of sex, scandal, and shattered dreams. Marilyn Chambers was the embodiment of the free-spirited Seventies, the world's most famous X-rated star, and an unappreciated talent whose work in adult films hindered her dreams of becoming a serious actress. Raised in an affluent Connecticut suburb, Marilyn catapulted to fame when it was learned that not only had she starred in the groundbreaking X-rated film, Behind the Green Door but was also the model on the box of Ivory Snow laundry detergent (product tagline: "99 44/100% Pure.") Marilyn was the first woman known primarily for her work in adult films to cross over to mainstream entertainment. She sustained a versatile three-decade career in entertainment, including roles in dramatic plays, a Broadway musical revue, her own television show, and the lead role in David Cronenberg's film Rabid. 
But her success in adult films also proved to be her undoing. Marred by a violent relationship with her abusive husband-manager, Chuck Traynor, she developed the persona of a twenty-four-hour-a-day sex star. In the process, she lost her sense of self and spent much of her life searching for her true identity. With recollections from family and friends, many of whom have never spoken publicly, along with Marilyn's own words, and never-before-published photos, Jared Stearns vividly captures the revolutionary career of one of the twentieth century's most misunderstood icons.
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Infinite Dreams: The Life of Alan Vega (Backbeat, 2024) by Laura Davis-Chanin and Liz Lamere is the first biography on the life of Alan Vega, best known as the co-founder of the punk duo Suicide. In their exhaustive biography Davis-Chanin and Vega's wife of 30 years, Liz Lamere, start with Vega's early life and attempts at astrophysics in college, to his encounter with Iggy Pop that changed his path and encouraged him to become an artist and performer. Infinite Dreams describes Vega’s many experiments across a variety of media, including the partnership with Marty Rev that became Suicide, which challenged audiences to look deep inside themselves and to not settle for distractions. Delving into his artistic life as well as his personal trials, Infinite Dreams combines candid photos, drawing, images of art pieces, and reminiscence of a wide array of musicians and artists, creating an intimate glimpse into the life of Vega and those he influenced. 
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Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) explores the channels of musical exchange between Cuba and the United States during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, who eased the musical embargo of the island and restored relations with Cuba. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical relations but also the larger political, economic, and cultural implications of musical dialogue between these two nations. In this first book on the subject since Obama’s presidency, musicologist Timothy P. Storhoff describes how, after specific policy changes, musicians were some of the first to take advantage of new opportunities for travel, push the boundaries of new regulations, and expose both the possibilities and limitations of licensing musical exchange. This ethnography demonstrates how performances reflect aspirations for stronger transnational ties and a common desire to restore the once-thriving US-Cuban musical relationship.
Dr. Timothy Storhoff is an orchestra administrator, fundraiser, and ethnomusicologist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.
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Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.
Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).
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Tara López's Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso (University of Texas Press, 2024), is an immersive study of the influential and predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene in El Paso, Texas. Punk rock is known for its daring subversion, and so is the West Texas city of El Paso. In Chuco Punk, Tara López dives into the rebellious sonic history of the city, drawing on more than seventy interviews with punks, as well as unarchived flyers, photos, and other punk memorabilia. 
Connecting the scene to El Paso's own history as a borderland, a site of segregation, and a city with a long lineage of cultural and musical resistance, López throws readers into the heat of backyard punx shows, the chaos of riots in derelict mechanic shops, and the thrill of skateboarding on the roofs of local middle schools. She reveals how, in this predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene, women forged their own space, sound, and community. Covering the first roots of Chuco punk in the late 1970s through the early 2000s, López moves beyond the breakout bands to shed light on how the scene influenced not only the contours of sound and El Paso but the entire topography of punk rock.
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Ramón Espejo's book The Catalonian Journey of American Drama 1909-2000: From Jimmy Valentine to The Vagina Monologues (Legenda, 2024) delves into the fascinating journey of American drama in Catalonia, exploring how the theatrical output of a world superpower has impacted (and transformed) the stages of an allegedly minor actor in the cultural scene of the 20th century. Yet, while Catalonia is the birthplace of such geniuses as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí or Antoni Gaudí, it is also that of playwrights Joan Brossa, Manuel de Pedrolo, Fermín Cabal or Jordi Galcerán, among others. All of them grew up in, and imbibed, a theatrescape in which American borrowings were not only habitual (often the only foreign plays around) but inspiring and groundbreaking. If Alias Jimmy Valentine re-defined theatrical decorum in Catalonia in the early 1900s, The Vagina Monologues, in the 1990s, challenged prevalent sexual taboos. Throughout the 20th century, Catalonia went from a peripheral, marginalized region of a once vast empire to a booming and largely autonomous centre of culture, recognized all over the world and admired for its uniqueness and original artistic contributions. American plays accompanied, and often directly inspired, such a journey.
Ramón Espejo is Full Professor of American Literature at the University of Seville, Spain, and is one of the leading American drama and theatre scholars in Europe.
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