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I Don't Sound like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America. By Albin J. Zak III. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. x, 308 pp. $29.95, isbn 978-0-472-11637-9.)
A seismic transformation occurred in American music from the mid- 1940s to the mid-1960s, argues Albin J. Zak III in / Don't Sound like Nobody, and sound recording stood at the center of it. During those years, recordings came to occupy a new place in the social and economic relations of American music. Increasingly, popular music artists and record producers made records consciously and deliberately as records, as sonic artifice, rather than trying to fabricate "aural snapshots" of real performances (p. 162). As the ideas and practices that underpinned record making changed, the conception and sound of records became as crucial to the Pinal product...