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Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics
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About This Book
In this exceptional cultural history, Atlantic Senior Editor Ronald Brownstein tells the kaleidoscopic story of one monumental year that marked the city of Los Angeles' creative peak, a glittering moment when popular culture was ahead of politics in predicting what America would become. Los Angeles in 1974 exerted more influence over popular culture than any other city in America. Los Angeles that year, in fact, dominated popular culture more than it ever had before, or would again. Working in film, recording, and television studios around Sunset Boulevard, living in Brentwood and Beverly Hills or amid the flickering lights of the Hollywood Hills, a cluster of transformative talents produced an explosion in popular culture which reflected the demographic, social, and cultural realities of a changing America. At a time when Richard Nixon won two presidential elections with a message of backlash against the social changes unleashed by the sixties, popular culture was ahead of politics in predicting what America would become. The early 1970s in Los Angeles was the time and the place where conservatives definitively lost the battle to control popular culture. Rock Me on the Water traces the confluence of movies, music, television, and politics in Los Angeles month by month through that transformative, magical year. Ronald Brownstein reveals how 1974 represented a confrontation between a massive younger generation intent on change, and a political order rooted in the status quo. Today, we are again witnessing a generational cultural divide. Brownstein shows how the voices resistant to change may win the political battle for a time, but they cannot hold back the future.
Reviews
"There was also a lively comedy scene that was jump-started in 1972 when Johnny Carson moved The Tonight Show to Burbank and Mitzi Shore opened the Comedy Store, where a new brand of humor developed, more freewheeling and less neurotic than its East Coast counterpart."
"You might imagine that a book focused primarily on the pop-culture scene in 1974 Los Angeles might be limited in scope."
"Brownstein knits together the threads of history to show that, for the first time in 1974, politics and entertainment were not separate things, that the line between the two was blurred almost to the point of irrelevance."
"Although appealing as a narrative device, doing so makes it more difficult to analyze the categories and draw connections between them."
"Brownstein spends much more time on the years before 1974 than actual events occurring that year, and much of the content is repetitive, but there are interesting backstories that fans of television history will enjoy."
"Rock Me on the Water segues seamlessly between movies, music, and television, often adding politics to the mix ..."
"Enriched by interviews with the period's luminaries, including Warren Beatty and Linda Ronstadt, this astute and wide-ranging account shows how L.A."
"An endlessly engaging cultural history that will resonate with anyone alive in 1974."
"Brimming with nicely woven stories, gossip, and insights, Brownstein's book recounts month-by-month the cultural upheavals of the year ..."
"Brownstein's lens is focused squarely on what white men had to say in film, television and music, making the book itself a demonstration of that same problem."
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