“Tutti Frutti” is as good an index of rock and roll attitude as any, and a biography of the song resembles a US coming-of-age story in the twentieth century: born in 1955 to a flamboyant man and a prim woman who would argue about its parentage for decades, the blues number with the rollicking groove and saucy lyrics was soon adopted by a conservative white Christian who admitted he neither liked nor understood it. Then, leaving home to sow wild oats across Europe and beyond, it had a few embarrassing moments, but finally settled down respectably in old age.Footnote ¹ In recording “Tutti Frutti,” Little Richard melded boogie woogie piano with the new rock and roll beat, and his gospel yelps were paired with Dorothy Labostrie's new lyrics, so that a ribald tribute to anal sex came to express inarticulable teen exuberance all around the world. In choosing the song's expurgated lyrics for her title, Ann Powers deftly signals that Good Booty is a book insisting on the interconnectedness of music and sex in American culture. The result is a brilliant analysis of US attitudes towards sexuality, race, religion, violence, family values and more, as heard and felt through music of the past two hundred years.

Powers, inarguably one of the United States’ most perceptive and positive music critics, seeks always to honor that which makes us human, declaring that “we, as a nation, most truly and openly acknowledge sexuality's power through music” (xvii) and foregrounding the body in a fascinating history of US culture. The result is a book that is thoughtful, informed by relevant scholarship and theoretical models, and built on wide-ranging listening and research, that is aimed at a non-specialist reader. While some might bristle that a book addressing “American music” tout court is actually focused exclusively on popular and vernacular musics, there is much here for the serious scholar of US music history (though as a Canadian, I am obligated to point out that non-US musics are absent altogether, despite the subtitle!). Good Booty is a timely celebration of the life force that Audre Lorde terms the erotic: “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”Footnote ²

Through eight chapters, each of which can be read alone, Powers traces a history of bodies striving to make sense of themselves through music, from the scant joys of slaves dancing in the early nineteenth century to the carefully choreographed abandon of teen pop at the end of the twentieth. The first chapter, “The Taboo Baby,” draws on a range of primary sources, from memoirs and newspaper accounts to contemporaneous literary and musical works, to examine the dance music of a brutal slave economy in New Orleans in the nineteenth century. Of Congo Square, Powers muses that “the questions its legends raise about where ‘public’ ends and ‘private’ begins, about how the longing of observers—the audience—shape the meanings of both popular music and eroticism, remain crucial to this day” (35).

The second chapter, “That Da Da Strain,” transports the reader to New York to witness the scandalous evolution of the shimmy, which simulated sexual excitement through vibrating and undulating. Powers observes that the shimmy dancer was the model for both stock carnival character Little Egypt and Richard Strauss's Salome, demonstrating the dance's influence on high and low culture. This chapter also shines light on forgotten star Florence Price, whose slender, boyish frame and electrifying dance skills, showcased in Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's groundbreaking Shuffle Along, offered a new model of feminine comportment for the 1920s. Next, in “Let it Breathe on Me,” Powers turns her attention to the spiritual erotics of gospel music, considering Thomas Dorsey's creation of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” a “space where the beauty and poeticism of desire was revealed, and where the physicality of spiritual longing could be manifest” (85). This song, and others crafted in its model of intimate rapture, would become iconic through the throats of Mahalia Jackson, members of gospel quartets, and Elvis Presley himself.

The fourth chapter, “Teen Dreams and Grown-Up Urges,” brings us at last to Little Richard and the explosion of rock and roll into mainstream youth culture at mid-century. Here, Powers foregrounds teenage girls, noting that “male artists’ reliance on a support system of young female fans was (and is) part of the bedrock of rock and roll culture” (140). While she rejoices in the sexual confidence of a thirteen-year-old fan rhapsodizing over a kiss from Elvis Presley, Powers also points to rock and roll's remorseless predation of underage girls from the 1950s on. Powers's feminist standpoint also ensures that her fifth chapter, “The Sexual Revolution and Its Discontents,” offers a refreshing view of the much-storied 1960s, noting acidly that “the counterculture was a great place to be a white male” (190) and complicating easy celebrations of free love and sexual liberation. Training her gaze (and ear) on shapeshifters Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison, Powers investigates the capacity of music to forge and reforge identities and social institutions during this turbulent decade.

In too many histories of rock and roll, the decades after the 1960s are treated as a period of decline, as though punk was the last gasp of anything “real” before music solidified into nothing but business—so if nothing else, Powers should be lauded for offering more nuance in her last three chapters. “Hard and Soft Realities” examines the relationship of music to the burgeoning porn industry in the 1970s, noting that “before porn became audible, music was the only place where erotic noises regularly surfaced” (207) and exploring the ways that artists in hard rock, disco, and soul made music sexy. In chapter 7, Powers turns her attention to the rise of AIDS and its impact on both sex and sexy music, noting that the major pop stars of the 1980s (Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince) capitalized on the new platform of music video and “played freely within the dreamscape of eroticized fantasy” for a generation coming of age at a moment when sex could kill (249). This chapter positions Madonna emerging from dance clubs and punk style to become an artist whose principal fan base was the teenage girls and gay men whose sex lives so agitated US politicians and inspired the creation of the Parents Music Resource Centre. The prurient and paranoid censoriousness of the PMRC was resisted in the 1990s by riot grrrl bands, whose noisy musical language emboldened girls to raise their voices about sexual violence in frank terms.

The emergence of hip hop into the mainstream offered models of black manhood that were attractive in their hard-heartedness, as charted in chapter 8 and into the final chapter, “Hungry Cyborgs.” Powers considers the appeal of hip hop's thug persona in the context of how the AIDS crisis and the “war on drugs” threatened young black men disproportionately, and she connects the development of Viagra in the twenty-first century to the rise of virtual reality through technology, in that both offered men fantasies of sexual perfection and control. Bodies in this soundscape needed to be hard, and singers like Britney Spears matched this aesthetic with voices that were steely and mutable, polished into post-human perfection by AutoTune. But the enigmatic Beyoncé Knowles, whose marriage to hip hop patriarch Jay Z in 2008 seemed to signify the dissolving of musical boundaries between hip hop and pop, offered new ways of “keeping it real.” Drawing on Elizabeth Bernstein's useful notion of “bounded authenticity,” as when sex workers sell emotional as well as carnal intimacy, Powers analyzes Beyoncé as an avatar, the “perfect conduit for the increasingly fluid sense of self and erotic life online” (313).

Maintaining an intersectional approach to the raced, sexed, classed, and aged body in music, Powers demonstrates an extraordinary and admirable capacity to synthesize complex theoretical ideas and present them through language that is vivid, accessible, and passionate. With unflinching acknowledgement of how black bodies, queer bodies, and female bodies have been exploited, oppressed, and victimized through US history, Powers nonetheless offers her readers a hopeful and joyful path forward, assuring us, in her final sentence, that “when we think we can't move, the music is always there to say that we can” (349). Here is a writer at the top of her game, offering a new take on US mainstream musical cultures of the past two hundred years. Good Booty is an extraordinary achievement that will transform our understanding of US popular music history.