Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music

NPR Best Books of 2017

In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR’s acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race.

In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America’s primary erotic art form. Powers takes us from nineteenth-century New Orleans through dance-crazed Jazz Age New York to the teen scream years of mid-twentieth century rock-and-roll to the cutting-edge adventures of today’s web-based pop stars. Drawing on her deep knowledge and insights on gender and sexuality, Powers recounts stories of forbidden lovers, wild shimmy-shakers, orgasmic gospel singers, countercultural perverts, soft-rock sensitivos, punk Puritans, and the cyborg known as Britney Spears to illuminate how eroticism—not merely sex, but love, bodily freedom, and liberating joy—became entwined within the rhythms and melodies of American song. This cohesion, she reveals, touches the heart of America's anxieties and hopes about race, feminism, marriage, youth, and freedom.

In a survey that spans more than a century of music, Powers both heralds little known artists such as Florence Mills, a contemporary of Josephine Baker, and gospel queen Dorothy Love Coates, and sheds new light on artists we think we know well, from the Beatles and Jim Morrison to Madonna and Beyoncé. In telling the history of how American popular music and sexuality intersect—a magnum opus over two decades in the making—Powers offers new insights into our nation psyche and our soul.

In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR’s acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate both emotionally and truthfully about our most fraught social issues, sex and race.

In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America’s primary erotic art form. She takes us from nineteenth-century New Orleans through dance-crazed Jazz Age New York to the teen scream years of mid-twentieth-century rock and roll and the cutting-edge adventures of today’s viral pop stars. Drawing on her deep knowledge of gender and sexuality, Powers recounts stories of forbidden lovers, wild shimmy-shakers, orgasmic gospel singers, countercultural perverts, soft-rock sensitivos, punk Puritans, and the cyborg known as Britney Spears to illuminate how eroticism—not merely sex, but love, bodily freedom, and liberating joy—became entwined within the rhythms and melodies of American song. This cohesion, she reveals, touches the heart of America’s anxieties and hopes about race, feminism, marriage, youth, and freedom. 

Spanning more than a century of music, Powers both heralds little-known artists—such as Florence Mills, a contemporary of Josephine Baker, and gospel queen Dorothy Love Coates—and sheds new light on artists we think we know well, from the Beatles and Jim Morrison to Madonna and Beyoncé. In telling the history of how American popular music and sexuality intersect, Good Booty—Powers’s magnum opus over two decades in the making—offers new insights into our national psyche and our soul.

“No writer is better equipped than Ann Powers to clarify and dissect the fundamental American myths that power our popular music. She understands-as a critic, and just as importantly, as a fan-how big ideas about sex and race have informed and directed the last two hundred years of pop music. Good Booty is an expansive, electrifying, and important book. It changed the way I listen.” - Amanda Petrusich, author of Do Not Sell At Any Price

“No writer is better equipped than Ann Powers to clarify and dissect the fundamental American myths that power our popular music. Good Booty is an expansive, electrifying, and important book. It changed the way I listen.” - Amanda Petrusich, author of Do Not Sell At Any Price

“No writer on music has as keen a mind or as great a heart as Ann Powers. Sex is the subject, but Good Booty is really a tour-de-force history of an entire century of pop, rich in feeling and fierce in insight. It’s a dazzling achievement.” - Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise

“No writer on music has as keen a mind or as great a heart as Ann Powers. Sex is the subject, but Good Booty is really a tour-de-force history of an entire century of pop, rich in feeling and fierce in insight. It’s a dazzling achievement.” - Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise

“A revelatory road trip through the erotic fever dreams of American culture. Ann Powers tells the whole epic saga of how music became the confessional where we go to share our deepest secrets and desires—from the folkways to the pop raves, from New Orleans ballrooms to MTV visions, from the Summer of Love to the riot-grrrl explosion. Only Ann Powers could make this story so head-spinning—and often heartbreaking.” - Rob Sheffield, author of Dreaming the Beatles

“A revelatory road trip through the erotic fever dreams of American culture . . . tells the whole epic saga of how music became the confessional where we go to share our deepest secrets and desires . . . Only Ann Powers could make this story so head-spinning—and often heartbreaking.” - Rob Sheffield, author of Dreaming the Beatles

“No writer on music has as keen a mind or as great a heart as Ann Powers. Sex is the subject, but Good Booty is really a tour-de-force history of an entire century of pop, rich in feeling and fierce in insight. It’s a dazzling achievement.” - Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise

“Monumental . . . takes us on an epic journey through the evolution of American popular music culture with sex at its center. By way of offering a boldly revisionist, feminist, racially and culturally expansive history of pop, one of our greatest rock critics offers a thrilling, sophisticated and beautifully rendered tale of the longing, desire and pleasure that drives the performances, recordings, and fan cultures that shape our modern lives.” - Daphne Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent

“Informative and entertaining. . . . Powers reveals an extraordinary breadth of knowledge and insight and has produced an absolutely essential addition to any pop-culture collection.” - Booklist (starred review)

“Stirring.” - O, the Oprah Magazine

“Both an indispensable guide to American pop music and a damned fine read . . . The best thing about Good Booty is that it reminds us that the right song shows us how to be somebody in a way that’s not possible with any other art form.” - Wall Street Journal

“If for no other reason—though there are lots of other reasons—the book is worth a read for its mapping of the way hope and joy are present even in the darkest times. . . Powers’ writing is deeply compassionate and nuanced.” - Chapter 16

“A fascinating history of popular music.” - Bustle, “Best Nonfiction of the Month”

“Informative and entertaining ... Powers reveals an extraordinary breadth of knowledge and insight and has produced an absolutely essential addition to any pop-culture collection.” - Booklist, starred review

“NPR music critic Ann Powers explores themes of gender, sexuality, race and identity in this sweeping survey of popular music.” - Chicago Tribune, Summer Reading Round Up

“With precision and wit, and across multiple musical genres, Powers contextualizes the complicated interplay of gender, sex, and race inherent in popular music within and against the backdrop of America’s puritanical founding.” - Library Journal, starred review

“Fascinating. . . . readers won’t look at Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj the same way.” - Kirkus

“A history as ambitious as its name implies . . . it’s hard to imagine any other writer tackling this mammoth subject with more success. . . . provocative . . . refreshingly clear-eyed . . . This . . . is what useful feminist music criticism looks like.” - VICE/Broadly

“An enlightened examination of how America has been revivified, undone, scandalized, and changed by sexual expression in song. Here Powers seamlessly weaves through antebellum New Orleans to Beyonce, from L.A. groupie culture to Buddy Holly’s “tortured monogamy,” giving us an essential education on American music—the teenagers who love it, the outrage it provokes, and, most crucially, what gets us off. A fearless and often funny, feminist work. I feel like I have been waiting my whole life for this book—Good Booty is glorious!” - Jessica Hopper, author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic Jessica Hopper, author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic

“A fearless and often funny, feminist work. I feel like I have been waiting my whole life for this book—Good Booty is glorious!” - Jessica Hopper, author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic

“‘SEX’N’DRUGS’N’ROCK’N’ROLL!’ is a great, shoutable slogan. Anyone who’s actually had sex knows it’s rarely that simple. From race to religion and repression to rebellion, Ann Powers makes the decades-long dance of music and desire a page-turning drama. Good Booty transforms stars I thought I knew, and uncovers cries and whispers I’d never heard. It’s an instant, indispensable classic, for a culture that always needs sexual healing.” - Carl Wilson, author of Let’s Talk About Love

“An instant, indispensable classic, for a culture that always needs sexual healing.” - Carl Wilson, author of Let’s Talk About Love

“What a monumental book! From its achingly volatile racial roots in the crucible of the slave trade to the seductive energy of Jazz Age dance floors, from the worlds of sensuous gospel catharsis, sweat-drenched rock and roll teenage dreams, and libidinal psychedelia to the throbbing sexual decadence of the seventies, the late twentieth-century censorship battles, and the digital erotics of the aughts, Ann Powers’s Good Booty takes us on an epic journey through the evolution of American popular music culture with sex at its center. By way of offering a boldly revisionist, feminist, racially and culturally expansive history of pop, one of our greatest rock critics offers a thrilling, sophisticated and beautifully rendered tale of the longing, desire and pleasure that drives the performances, recordings, and fan cultures that shape our modern lives.” - Daphne Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent

“A major, original, comprehensive piece of rock history and analysis.” - Robert Christgau, author of Going Into the City