Other Planes of There: Critical Notice of Graham Lock's Blutopia

In this essay Paul Anderson discusses Lock's book "Blutopia". He claims Lock sought to elucidate what Ra, Ellington, and Braxton said and wrote in their books, interviews, liner-notes, poems, and elsewhere about their music and its social and philosophical connotations. When he turns to specific musical examples, Lock is usually in search of particular extramusical and programmatic implications embedded in lyrics, titles, and other linguistic cues. Scholars expecting formal musical analyses may be thrown off by Lock's critical method but they may also be surprised by how far his archival and interview research and his interpretive tools can take readers into the distinctive conceptual worlds of Ra, Ellington, and Braxton. Anderson delves into great analysis on the subjects previously stated as well as reiterates the information contained within the book