Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture

Today’s post is on  Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture by Grace Elizabeth Hale. It is 371 pages long and is published by University of North Carolina Press. The cover is a picture of the B-52’s in concert. The intended reader is someone who is interested in music history and how one small town grew new music. There is mild foul language, discussion of sex and sexuality, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- 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. 

Review- A well written history about music in Athens, GA and the bands who made it there. Hale was a student at University of Georgia, she was involved in this scene, and knew all the major players in it too; so she is writing from a place of knowledge and personal experience. Hale gives an excellent background for the culture of the area, the people who lived here, the kids who moved there, and everything in between. At times it is a little too much with so many people. Places, dates, and other information that it can be overwhelming but the overall narrative of counterculture and the musicians who made the music is very detailed. She explores her topic by time starting with the start of the Scene and the creation of the B-52’s and why they started making music. She ends the book with her time in Athens and how it changed the course of her life. If you are interested in musical history then you should give this one a try. 

I give this book a Three out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.