Asher’s book is a Midnight Special of its own. It’s a fog-piercing down-bound train of a book, better than it had to be ... If these profiles had been straightforward, that might’ve been enough. But Asher is a calm and sophisticated storyteller who picks you up and sets you back down in places you didn’t anticipate. Like a good film director, he knows how to stagger his material ... Taken together, the profiles in The Midnight Special amount to a multilayered indictment of America’s prison system, the largest in the world. None of these men were blameless, but the injustice on display will frequently make you sick to your stomach. The book also underlines sheer human resiliency.
A fresh new take on American music ... Mr. Asher explains how the New York Police Department during this time shaped the very sound of jazz, locking up numerous musicians ... These stories show how the aura of imprisonment enhances the public perception of an artist and his music.
Written with a touch of grace and a recognition of shared humanity. This chronicle is full of little epiphanies: for example, Lead Belly 'dreamt in song . . . and woke singing what he’d heard in his sleep,' and Don McLean’s 'Vincent' inspired Shakur to write music. A well-written and mesmerizing group portrait of five musical outlaws.
Asher takes a unique approach by focusing on five men—and five specific records—who either wrote and recorded music while in prison or about their prison experiences ... The Midnight Special succeeds in several fronts in being a book about artists, music, the creative process, and how one of the worst places a person could end up in relates to it all.
Asher doesn’t prescribe any solutions to the endemic and intractable problems that force talented people in this country to have to express themselves from within cages. He’s not a proselytizer but rather a careful and sympathetic observer who does his homework and lets his readers come to their own conclusions ... Asher’s book is an unexpected gift.
A complete history of music in American prisons might be impossible ... Instead, Asher (Never a Lovely So Real, 2019) chose five albums that capture how prison has influenced musicians ... The book is most compelling when he connects these albums to a wider history, as when he links the characters in Tupac Shakur’s raps to the similar downtrodden characters in Lead Belly’s blues. At times, however, the author’s analysis of both music and prisons takes a backseat to the life stories of these musicians ... A rich history of prisons and music, though light on analysis.
Journalist Asher (Never a Lovely So Real) takes a probing look at the ways in which policing and the carceral system have shaped American music ... Asher does especially nimble work in portraying his subjects as three-dimensional figures while detailing how the record industry exploited their links to the prison system to profit off their music, often in ways that flattened their life narratives. This is illuminating.
