books + ANYONE CAN PLAY GUITAR
Jennifer Love Hewitt Reef Younis catalogues the curious music careers of mega celebrities. Illustrated by Josie Sommer. / Records, unsurprisingly, dropped her. It should have been a decisive blow, but nodoubt convinced she could sing as well as any Disney Princess, Hewitt took a sabbatical before returning like a long-forgotten X-Factor winner. There was some success, too, as she realised her chart dream with 1999 single ‘How Do I Deal’ (taken from the I Still Know What You Did Last Summer soundtrack) achieving lukewarm acclaim in the US and a lofty number eight in the Australian singles chart. In 2002, the exile was officially over as Hewitt returned with her fourth solo album, ‘BareNaked’, and she continued her chart dominance in Australia, the Netherlands, Germany and the US with places at 31, 72, 75 and 37 in the respective album countdowns. The critics, for the most part, remained split on what proved to be Hewitt’s last tilt at reclaiming the pop stardom of her pre-teens with Q’s eight-out-of-ten review a surprisingly positive highlight: “Admittedly, her FM-friendly singalongs aren’t rocket science, just fantastically effective.”The music magazine chose not to review compilation releases of the Asia-only ‘Cool with You: The Platinum Collection’ in 2006, nor the Brazil-only ‘Hey Everybody’ in 2007.
Somewhere after Madonna and Mariah, but before Beyoncé, Adele, Rihanna and Christina, Jennifer Love Hewitt takes her place in the pantheon of female artists. Now, it might have an asterisk next to it or act as one of the hundreds of thousands of footnotes, but if you’ve taken the time to release four (FOUR!) solo albums, that effort should be recognised, even if it wasn’t by the charts. Back in 1989, a 9-year-old Hewitt could have quit on top of the pop game with Martika’s numberone single ‘Toy Soldiers’, which featured the young Hewitt’s backing vocals. Seasoned by that success, three years later the then 12-year-old Hewitt released her 1992 debut album, ‘Love Songs’, exclusively in Japan where her cookiecutter cuteness gave her the instant pop success she would never quite recreate. Unfortunately for her, the transition from Japanese to American audience was less than seamless, even with her turn as Sarah in ’90s teen drama Party of Five. In 1995, (now 16) she watched the questionably titled ‘Let’s Go Bang’ crash and burn, with the album and three subsequent singles all failing to chart. Her self-titled 1996 follow-up fared little better, and when that album and four singles failed to chart once again, Atlantic
by jani ne & L ee bullman
Sound System: The Political Power of Music by Dave Randall
Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics By Richard Seymour
pluto
Verso
When Dave Randall first heard the Specials’ song ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ he had absolutely no idea who Nelson Mandela was, but by the end of the first chorus he knew he should be free.The moment was an eye-opener for Randall (himself an accomplished musician, playing with the likes of Dido, Faithless and Sinead O’Connor) and kickstarted a fascination with the deep, symbiotic and complex relationship between politics and music. Perceptive, witty and engaging, Sound System charts and explores that relationship (and the power of music in action) from its earliest incarnation to the present day with the understanding of an insider and the zeal of a fan.
Depending on who you ask, Jeremy Corbyn is either the only principled man in a parliament of fools, or a doomed retro throwback with a secondhand plan. Richard Seymour sees him as the former and The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics describes in close-up detail the Labour leader’s extraordinary rise from back bench obscurity via a genuine grass roots movement that saw his party become the biggest in Europe. The book provides context as far as recent British left wing politics are concerned and Seymour manages to steer clear of political rhetoric and instead provides welcome insight and thoughtful analysis, not only of Corbyn, but the political culture he hails from.
loudandquiet.com
8
Albrecht Durer by Norbert Wolf prestel
Albrecht Durer was the renaissance man with rock star looks who left behind him a body of work and artistic legacy that would go on to influence Pablo Picasso and others. His famous, dark sixteenth century woodcuts dealt in beauty and horror, angels, devils, life, death and all points in between, but as the wonderfully named Norbert Wolf points out here, there was far more to Durer than is widely known. Wolf’s lovingly curated book shines a light on all the areas that caught the artists’ attention and imagination, as well as highlighting how Durer’s love of self-portraits, mass marketing of his own prints and creation of his own logo can be viewed as a blueprint for the exercise in branding which so much of art has become.