Billet's book on protest and popular music scored by 1968 Press

1968 Press has bagged Shake the City: Experiments In Space and Time, Music and Crisis by LA-based culture writer Alexander Billet.

Co-founder Jaice Sara Titus acquired international rights directly from the author, for publication in paperback and e-book in winter 2022.

The publisher said: “Part utopian manifesto, part theoretical exegesis, part love-letter to human creativity, Shake the City is a plea for revolt to be as poetic and musical as we deserve it to be.”

Its synopsis states: “The crises in neoliberalism and its lurch toward authoritarianism have produced countless opportunities to interrogate the relationship between music and politics, such as the use of music in hostile architecture, the grime rebellion, and the relationship between hip-hop and Black Lives Matter. Synthesising radical urbanism, Marxist musicology, anti-racist and anti-colonial thought, Shake the City argues that a formal and holistically materialist understanding of music reveals a deeper meaning of social struggles over time and space. More than just another front in the battle of ideas, music’s relationship to social struggle reflects a battle over who gets to determine history.”

Billet is a writer of prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, Los Angeles Review of Books, Salvage, In These Times, Radical Art Review, Historical Materialism, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, Chicago Review, Against the Current, and other outlets. He is a member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective and serves on the editorial board of its publications Locust Review and Imago.

He said: “As a Marxist, I’ve long been preoccupied with questions regarding the social function of music and the arts. What, exactly, is music for? Most conventional answers really miss the mark, which is only worsened by the constant overwhelming ubiquity of music, adding to the suffocating environment of the late capitalist city. This book is an attempt to cut through that static. The people at 1968 Press have, even in their short time, shown themselves to value theoretical rigor around difficult questions while also not relying on rote, paint-by-numbers truisms. It was an absolute no-brainer to go with them.”

Titus added: “1968 Press is excited to bring Alexander Billet’s unique brand of cultural analysis to a wide audience. As multiple crises of economics, war and climate arise and collide, there has never been a more crucial time to explore the ways in which protest and popular music intersect. Billet is perfectly placed to explore the history of that relationship while a new generation of social movements constructs its own soundtrack.”