Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture
The University of North Carolina Press’s new trade imprint Ferris and Ferris published Hale’s most recent book Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Culture and Changed American Culture America. Cool Town draws on her extensive research in the musical recordings and visual art produced in Athens, Georgia in the late 1970s and 1980s (much of it in private hands) as well as on her interviews with over 100 participants and her own memories of playing in a band and owning a music venue there. She constructs the history of important bands like R.E.M., the B-52s, and Pylon and musicians like Vic Chesnutt and tells the story of the surprising origins of Athens’ world famous bohemia in interactions between members of the local gay community, local folk revivalists, and University of Georgia undergraduates at the margins of the college’s football and Greek dominated campus culture, including art students. At a time when many Americans wonder how anyone in our radically polarized society can change, she describes how the alternative culture that emerged in Athens and spread across America in the eighties and nineties transformed the lives and politics of young people across the nation.
Press for Cool Town
Best Books of the Year: NPR (2020), Slate (2020), Rolling Stone/ Kirkus Reviews (2020), and Publishers Weekly (2019), Winner, Bell Award for best book in Georgia history, Georgia Historical Society
“Delivers more than a love song to the music. Cool Town also serves up a textured portrait of a generation caught between baby and tech booms, wriggling under the thumb of the mainstream — in the pre-internet days when 'mainstream' was a discernible thing — and rummaging through thrift-store bins both literal and figurative in an effort to create something new.” — Richard Fausset, NYT Book Review
“It’s true that this book might as well have been written specifically for teenage me, who so idolized R.E.M. that he viewed Athens as a kind of artistic Shangri-La. But Grace Elizabeth Hale’s engagingly written history is more than a portrait of a college town’s most famous college rockers: It will introduce even the most knowledgeable music lover to a dozen or more bands that put the passions and politics of their members into action, and it makes an innovative argument about what it takes for a city to foster creativity in its citizens.” — Dan Kois, Slate
Review
“A thorough history of the scene told from an insider's p.o.v. and buttressed on thorough research. . . . The Cool Town story is multifaceted enough to be interesting without Hale's personal perspective, but that perspective is what makes the storytelling moving and absorbing.” — Mike Segretto, Psychobabble
”Offers an insider's perspective, but with the thorough research typical of her profession. . . . Hale, rather than celebrate and catalog Athens music, contextualizes the music as the most visible product of a culture both experimental and insular, and of a community that nurtured its artists. . . . We see in the Athens of Cool Town the beginnings of the indie culture we may recognize today.” — The Georgia Review
”A detailed work of art. . . . It's hard to imagine an author better qualified or a book more up to the task. Cool Town has done its job admirably.'“ — level: deepsouth
:”A lovingly rendered and richly realized panorama of a new alternative aesthetic in the making. . . . Hale's lucid prose vibrates with generosity as she tells the story of a small town on the move, that surprisingly moved the world. Cool Town is a must-read for anyone interested in the ideas of place and placemaking, and the history of bohemian cultures, alternative music, and the New South.” — The Metropole
“[The Athens Effect] propagated a thrift-store, sexually fluid, avant-pop aesthetic that seemed more accessible than the extremes of punk or of successors such as goth. The fun of Cool Town is to hear where those elements came from, illuminated by Hale's theories about why, and, most poignantly, what it means today.” — Bookforum
”Reconstructs the musical hotbed that birthed R.E.M., The B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel.” — The AV Club
”Captivating. . . . A deeply researched, highly engaging history of the Athens music scene.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution
”While the Athens buzz may have been manufactured, Athens is a very real place, and Hale writes with real passion about her formative years there.” — The Current's Rock and Roll Book Club, Minnesota Public Radio
”Both a historian and a participant in the music scene, Hale crafts a lively account of 1980s Athens: the artists, their stories, and the haunts they frequented, such as the Grit and the 40 Watt Club.” — Library Journal
”Hale's rich, personal narrative draws readers in. . . . This colorfully rendered reverie will delight indie music fans.” — Publishers Weekly
”A carefully constructed history of how Athens, Georgia became a cultural hot spot. . . . A welcome history of an overlooked milieu, one that provides ample inspiration for art makers today.” — Kirkus Reviews