Cool Town
How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture
by Grace Elizabeth Hale
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Pub Date Mar 23 2020 | Archive Date Jan 03 2020
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Description
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. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities.
In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.
Advance Praise
"An absolutely brilliant account of an essential American scene--one that helped define what was hip and cool in the 1980s. Hale's story of Athens and why it matters is smart, probing, revealing, moving, fun, propulsive, and engaging."--Bryant Simon, author of The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781469654874 |
| PRICE | $26.00 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Geoff U, Educator
A really interesting history of the creation and fostering of the Athens, GA music scene, I missed the college radio years of indie so it was great to understand how the transition from hippie to indie (through punk) happened. I also didn't realize just how many artists I've enjoyed came from or through Athens (R.E.M., B-52s, Vic Chestnutt, Widespread Panic, Matthew Sweet).
Three things really struck me with this book. First, how important the geography, culture, economics, institutions, and people of Athens were to making the scene. Bands may have played up , played down, or alternated between accepting and rejecting the "southern" label, but Hale does a good job showing how the culture, contradictions, and relative isolation of Athens helped foster the scene.
The second was the unique point of view of the author. She is both a trained academic and was an active participant in the scene (playing in a band and co-owning and operating a cafe/performance venue). I actually think the book (as far as I can tell) does a good job both as an objective-ish work of history and as a personal look inside the scene.
Thoroughly enjoyable and interesting.
Alex M, Media/Journalist
This is a gem of a book, by an author that couldn't be more perfect for the task of chiseling out this diamond. Grace Elizabeth Hale actually lived through the crucial years, when Athens GA was cultivating and producing all those great artists; then she went onto to get some scholarly creds, that gave her the expertise to say something worthwhile about all that she lived through and observed. One such nugget that stuck with me: Hale said the participants way back when would have been a bit bemused at the proliferations of labels such as LGBTQ and so forth about sexuality. The whole point back then was to get rid of such a bourgeois thing as labels. The point was to simply be, and to blend and to mix. Another nugget: Athens GA is still a cool town, she says. It's still cheap and cool. I may have to move there. Another nice thing: Hale goes into a bit of detail about my favorite band from that era, Love Tractor. I put on their song Cartoon Kiddies today, and it still sounds as good as ever.
-- Alex Marshall
Author:
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Ann E B, Media/Journalist
This book shines a spotlight directly at a brief period in a small town that launched a seismic movement in American music culture. _Cool Town_ is an exhaustive account of how Athens, Georgia, in the 80s was the right place at the right time to grow a scene out of which thrived bands like the B-52s, R.E.M., Pylon, Love Tractor, Mercyland, and more, as well as artists, zines, poets, and a new kind of bohemian lifestyle. The author, Grace Elizabeth Hale, was a part of that scene as a musician and University of Georgia undergrad and grad student specializing in American cultural studies. I myself caught a glimpse of Athens culture when I worked for Atlanta's alternative newsweekly Creative Loafing straight out of college. I was drawn to Hale's book because a lot of the bands, venues, folk artists, and characters on the scene were familiar to me. Hello, Rockfish Palace! It brought me back to a time when every night meant another chance to be a +1 or put my name +1 on another list at the door. Another chance to hang with the cool freaks. Another chance to "discover" a folk artist's installation in the woods.
_Cool Town_ skews very specialized, but if you're into meticulously crafted cultural history of popular music, you'll want to read it.
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