"White tears" by Hari Kumzru

Seth (white) secretly records street life. To his surprise a popular, kid, Carter (also white), befriends him. Carter is rich, and into rare blues 78s. He collects pre-digital recording gear. Seth's street recordings include a voice and guitar that impresses Carter. Carter gets Seth to make the recording sound like a 78 and put it online. It attracts attention. Carter is car-jacked, ends up in a vegetative state. His sister Leone is fancied by Seth. They try to track down the dealers who were interested in the recording.

Carter's family evicts Seth from the shared flat. He gets the collection out first. He and Leone try to find out who attacked Carter. Seth has periods of time that he doesn't remember. He feels that events have happened before.

In another thread, a man finds that a workmate is obsessed with blues 78s. He goes dressed as a churchman around poor black communities offering to buy records.

The police arrest Seth, accusing him of assaulting a woman. They assault him. He's interrogated, released. He learns that Charlie Shaw killed Leone. He's met by Carter's family lawyer, offered money in return for waiving royalties to the recordings, and never contacting the family again.

We get Charlie Shaw's first person PoV. He'd been heading to do a recording when the police took him in. He was put in a labour camp (run by ancestors of Carter) and died. The lyrics of the song Seth recorded ("Believe I buy a graveyard of my own...", etc) are from Charlie's life. Charlie's ghost wants his songs distributed, and wants to take revenge on Carter's family, so he'd possessed Seth, who's white so he got away with the crimes, nearly.

I liked the writing - "That basement-dweller look", etc.

Other reviews

• Sukhdev Sandhu (Set in modern-day New York, a gentrifying retropolis where hirsute young men dress as “hobos and mountain men and Pony Express riders”, it tracks the relationship between two white arts college graduates. Seth is a self-proclaimed “weird kid” who had a troubled adolescence and is now a “sonic geologist” searching for the hidden sounds that lurk beneath the city’s honking streets, while Carter Wallace is the popular and cosmopolitan trust-fund son of a Bush-supporting Republican donor. For Carter the best music was made in the past and by black people. He’s obsessed with vintage gear, vinyl records, prewar blues.... At the heart of the book is an exploration, or perhaps dark satire, about cultural appropriation. Here the 78rpm collectors are not lovable fanboys; they’re reifiers, embalmers, morticians. They may fancy themselves as preserving black vernacular art, but the way they assemble their collections is indifferent and sometimes even violent to the communities from which that art sprang. They also speak a language of purity, of tacit segregation, that has little historical basis. Carter listens exclusively to black music because “it was more intense and authentic than anything made by white people”.)