Danny Alexander is a white man who has written a book about a black female artist: Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige. Mary J. Blige grew up in Yonkers, New York, and Danny Alexander grew up in small town Oklahoma. Their backgrounds and life experiences couldn't be more different, but Blige's music has a way of connecting people. As America continues to wrestle with racial difference, Danny Alexander's new book is a testament to the hope that deeply personal and politically conscious music—like that of Mary J. Blige and many others—can bring about a more "woke" world. We asked Danny to write about what brought him to this project.
Why I Wrote a Book on The Queen of Hip Hop Soul
By Danny Alexander
My hometown library was built and long curated by a somewhat famous librarian named Ruth Brown, who just happens to share her name with the R&B artist who famously built Atlantic Records. In 1950, Bartlesville, Oklahoma’s Ruth Brown was fired for her civil rights activities, principally her work integrating the library around the children’s story hour. She was a member of the Congress for Racial Equality and was labeled a communist. Bette Davis played a fictionalized version of her in the 1956 movie Storm Center, yet she remains known mainly in civil rights circles (the Cold War environment I lived in as a child meant I didn’t even learn Brown’s story until years after I moved away). Since my own writing career has been focused on freedom of expression and a belief in trying to cross social boundaries that, in general, remain intact sixty-six years later, I was proud to have my first book signing across from her portrait in her former library. I was also happy to think she might have approved of the scene before her.
Alina Simone is a singer-turned-writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Slate, The Wall Street Journal and the Guardian Long Read. She has authored two other books: the "vibrant, taut and humorous" You Must Go and Win (Kirkus Review), and the "wisecracking, mordantly observant, wide-awake" Note to Self (O Magazine). She's the daughter of political refugees from Soviet-controlled Ukraine (her father refused recruitment into the KGB) and happens to be hilarious.
When Simone agreed to write a book about Madonna for UT Press, she thought it might provide an interesting excuse to indulge her own eighties nostalgia. Wrong. While writing Madonnaland: And Other Detours into Fame and Fandom, she discovered not only an endless torrent of information on Madonna and her own ambivalence/jealousy of the Material Girl’s overwhelming commercial success, but also some quirky detours through the backroads of celebrity and fandom in America.
We put together the infographic below to illustrate some of the strange, compelling detours Alina Simone followed on her quest to write Madonnaland. Simone wrestles with Madonna's sexual politics and the "anti-Madonna" Sinead O'Connor. She delves into another Bay City, Michigan, musical act—the all-Latino Question Mark and the Mysterians of "96 Tears" fame. She excavates a black classic rock band whose mystery and rare vinyl cred rivals that of the guys from A Band Called Death. We've also excerpted a portion of the book below and thrown in a Madonnaland-themed Spotify playlist.
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Excerpt
The first thing you see as you enter Bay City, Michigan, heading down M-25 West, is a sign commemorating the 2008 state championship win of the All Saints High School’s bowling, baseball, and softball teams. Further down M-25, beyond a historic district lined with the nineteenth-century homes of lumber barons, a sign celebrates the sister cities of Ansbach, Germany (capital of Middle Franconia), and Goderich, Ontario (home to the world’s largest undergound salt mine). Yet a third sign, located a few blocks north, announces Bay City as the hometown of Katie Lynn Laroche, Miss Michigan 2010. None of these signs are unusual for a quiet city of thirty-five thousand tucked between the Mitten State’s thumb and forefinger, but their subject matter does tell you a few things: that Bay City isn’t above a little self-congratulation, that you don’t have to be Helen Keller or Martin Luther King to have your name immortalized in painted metal on either end of M-25, and that Bay City doesn’t necessarily have a surplus of sign-worthy things to say about itself. Insofar as the third point goes, that turns out not to be true. The top-selling female artist in history and one of the most famous women alive, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, was born in Bay City on August 16, 1958. A fact commemorated by the city exactly nowhere.
I’d been commissioned to write a book about Madonna, a project I’d taken on with enthusiasm, even bluster. After all, I still had my original copy of Like a Virgin on vinyl, an archive of back issues of Teen Beat magazine, and a Slinky’s worth of calcified black rubber bracelets in my parents’ closet back home. I’d spent more than half my life surfing the sine waves of Madonna’s career and could casually rattle off details both intimate and frighteningly banal about her sex life, her workout regime, her stance on the gifting of hydrangeas, and the unfortunate rodent problem she’d experienced of late at her $32 million compound on East Eighty-First Street, where a rat had been glimpsed scurrying into the bathroom while she discussed the possibility of collaborating again with Britney Spears during a video chat with the online radio show Saturday Night with Romeo.
Looking back, these qualifications were perhaps less than PhD-strength.
