History & Criticism

Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A....

Acclaimed music biographer Jonathan Gould presents the long-overdue, definitive story of this singular band, capturing the gritty energy of 1970s New York City and showing how a group of art students brought fringe culture to rock’s mainstream, forever changing the look and sound of popular music.

Think Oasis was just Britpop and brawls? Think again. In this, the definitive book on Britain’s biggest band, John Robb peels back the layers of Manchester's best known musical export, revealing a tale of ambition, ego, talent, and a whole lot of attitude.

More is at stake in the music we listen to or perform than most people are aware....

In more than 40 stories from the glory days of rock’n’roll, featuring Lou Reed, Elton John, Sting and The Clash, Allan Jones remembers a world that once was....

Ted Gioia's History of Jazz has been universally hailed as a classic - acclaimed by jazz critics and fans around the world....

England's Dreaming is the ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and the moment they defined for music fans in England and the United States....

The '90s was the decade when British culture reclaimed its position at the artistic centre of the world....

A whimsical guide to the conduct of a romance interwoven with the history of classical music, which is, surprisingly, not as nice as you might think....

In 1992, the Screaming Trees were expected to become the next big band to come out of the Seattle music scene during the heyday of grunge. Except it never happened....

David W. Barber has delighted fans around the world with Accidentals on Purpose, When the Fat Lady Sings, and other internationally best-selling books of musical humor. His best-selling Bach, Beethoven and the Boys chronicles the lives of the great (and not-so-great) composers....

An entertaining and deeply nostalgic dive into how female pop stars broke through the music industry in the 2000s and altered the cultural landscape forever, from the Ringer writer and Every Single Album podcast cohost.

John Eliot Gardiner takes us as deeply into Bach’s works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists....

By a pair of veteran music writers, an unprecedented history of the electric guitar, its explosive impact on music and culture, and the people who brought it to life....

Opera, said Moliére, is the most expensive noise known to man. From its beginnings in the 16th Century, through to today when there are as many musical styles as there are composers....

Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States reflects the fascinating diversity of regional and grassroots music in the United States....

From Gregorian Chant to Henryk Gorecki, the first living classical composer to get into the pop album charts, here is the fascinating story of over a thousand years of Western classical music....

This is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan '80s - when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives reenergized American rock....

In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times....

Musical Truth Volume 3 completes club and radio DJ-turned author/ researcher Mark Devlin’s trilogy of books, exposing the real nature of the corporate music industry and those that populate it....

The follow-up to The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1, the most complete work on the life and work of Paul McCartney ever published. Volume 2 continues to paint the portrait of one of the world’s greatest musicians, his work post-Beatles, and his life from 1974 to 1980.

Joe Boyd tells of his journey through Sixties music, from tour managing Muddy Waters and Coleman Hawkins to becoming a leading record producer....

After more than two decades of research and travels, Christophe Lebold, who befriended the poet and spent time with him in Los Angeles, delivers a stimulating analysis of Cohen’s life and art.

In this, the first book to take a big-picture view of the entire post punk period, acclaimed author and music journalist Simon Reynolds recreates a time of tremendous urgency and idealism in pop music.

Paper Cuts is the inside story of the slow death of the British music press. But it's also a love letter to it, the tale of how music magazines saved one man's life....

Think Oasis was just Britpop and brawls? Think again. In this, the definitive book on Britain’s biggest band, John Robb peels back the layers of Manchester's best known musical export, revealing a tale of ambition, ego, talent, and a whole lot of attitude. From the gritty pubs of Manchester to the dizzying heights of global stardom, this unauthorized biography is a rollercoaster ride through the Gallagher brothers' turbulent lives and the music that defined a generation.

“Psycho Killer.” “Take Me to the River.” “Road to Nowhere.” Few artists have had the lasting impact and relevance of Talking Heads. One of the foundational bands of downtown New York’s 1970s music scene, Talking Heads have endured as a musical and cultural force for decades, their unique brand of transcendent, experimental rock a lingering influence on popular music—despite having disbanded over thirty years ago. Now on the 50th anniversary of the band’s formation, acclaimed music biographer and contributor to The New Yorker Jonathan Gould offers the definitive story of Talking Heads.

America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles was an unknown young writer taking whatever job he could while pursuing his distant literary dreams. He'd instead become an eyewitness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by “the coy it-girl at the end of history.”

Low-rise jeans, butterfly clips, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and Paris Hilton’s nights out. The early 2000s were a time of major moments in fashion, media, celebrity culture, and especially music. The aughts were a particularly fruitful era for female artists—still the only decade in the history of recorded music when women made up more than half the list of highest-grossing performers—and especially pop stars. Artists such as Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Beyoncé were leading the charge—their success not only leading to a new respect for female artists, but for pop stardom itself.

Thunderclap Newman stunned the music world in the summer of 1969 with the success of their wonderfully odd debut single "Something In The Air", which ousted none other than the Beatles from the top of the charts. They followed up with an LP described by Nik Cohn as "one of the finest, most truly bizarre albums of the era" before disintegrating just a few months after its release. This is the story of one of the most unlikely combos in popular music history, and of the four disparate characters who formed its core.