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Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture
Maybe someday
28
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
12/100Critics
43/100Scholars
Author:
Grace Elizabeth Hale
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Date:
March 23, 2020
In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible.
What The Reviewers Say
...with this meticulously reported microhistory, Hale, who once played in a band and ran an underground club in Athens, delivers more than a love song to the music. Cool Town also serves up a textured portrait of a generation caught between baby and tech booms, wriggling under the thumb of the mainstream.
... you are in for a wild ride with Cool Town, Grace Elizabeth Hale’s hybrid ethnography-memoir. And even if Pylon and Love Tractor are old hat to you, Cool Town is still going to teach you a whole lot.
... it’s hard to deny that the Athens Effect was of unusual proportions.
Grace Elizabeth Hale's Cool Town is one of those books with a subtitle that sounds like an oversell: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture. Hale has the receipts, though.
