History & Criticism

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL MOVIE STARRING MACHINE GUN KELLY, DANIEL WEBBER, DOUGLAS BOOTH, AND IWAN RHEON, DIRECTED BY JEFF TREMAINE. Celebrate over thirty years of the world's most notorious rock band with the audiobook edition of The Dirt—the outrageous, legendary, no-holds-barred autobiography...

Maximum Volume offers a glimpse into the mind, the music, and the man behind the sound of the Beatles....

The fascinating story behind the making of Bruce Springsteen’s most surprising album, Nebraska, revealing its pivotal role in Springsteen’s career—now with a new afterword Soon to be a major motion picture starring Jeremy Allen White (The Bear) “Brilliant . . . For fans of American music...

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

Celebrated journalist, TV personality, and award-winning author Touré investigates one of the most enigmatic and fascinating figures in contemporary American culture: Prince....

Blunt, irreverent, and at times wittily subversive, Opera Wars spotlights opera’s colorful and sometimes warring personalities, increasingly fierce controversies over content, and the battles being waged for its economic future. Drawing on interviews with dozens of opera insiders—as well as...

Music can move us and tell stories of faith, struggle, or love. It is common to all cultures across the world. But how has it changed over the millennia? Robert Philip explores the extraordinary history of music in all its forms, from our earliest ancestors to today’s mass-produced songs....

For half a century, Michael Jackson’s music has been an indelible part of our cultural consciousness. Landmark albums such as Off the Wall and Thriller shattered records, broke racial barriers, amassed awards, and set a new standard for popular music. While his songs continue to be played in...

A groundbreaking book exploring the breadth of history of recorded music by and for the LGBT community and how those records influenced the evolution of the music we listen to today....

From his school days in Stoke -on-Trent to his years in Take That, his battle with drink and drugs and the song that 'saved his life'....

The finest book on Britain's most popular rock 'n' roll band 'Read on … It's all true' Noel Gallagher Featuring an exclusive interview with Noel Gallagher and bespoke artwork by celebrated Oasis album designer Brian Cannon Think Oasis was just Britpop and brawls? Think again. John Robb was...

Originally published in 1978 as The Beach Boys and the California Myth, this groundbreaking study was both the first full-length book on the band and the first to recognize Brian Wilson as one of the most significant and influential artists of the twentieth century....

Spray Paint the Walls tells Black Flag’s story from the inside, drawing on exclusive interviews with the group’s members, their contemporaries, and the bands they inspired....

“Paul is dead.” It was the late 1960's, the Beatles hadn’t toured since 1966, and some truly bizarre indications began appearing, pointing to the unthinkable: Paul McCartney had been killed in a car accident and replaced by a look-alike....

*The inspiration for the CNN original series Vegas: The Story of Sin City* “Outstanding pop-culture history.” —Newsday The “smart and zippy account” (The Wall Street Journal) of how Las Vegas saved Elvis and Elvis saved Las Vegas in the greatest musical comeback of all time. Elvis’s...

In the '80s, the Birmingham, England, band Duran Duran became closely associated with new wave, an idiosyncratic genre that dominated the decade's music and culture. No album represented this rip-it-up-and-start-again movement better than the act's breakthrough 1982 LP, Rio.

Grunge Is Dead weaves together the definitive story of the Seattle music scene through a series of interviews with the people who were there....

Brought to you by Penguin. The Beatles landing in New York in February 1964 was the opening shot in a cultural revolution nobody predicted. Suddenly the youth of the richest, most powerful nation on earth was trying to emulate the music, manners and the modes of a rainy island that had recently...

Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra - a.k.a. Herman Blount - was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn....

Magnum Opus: The Unbelievable 15 Year Saga of Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy recounts in engaging depth and detail the long and often ludicrous road to the last mythic rock n' roll album of the 20th Century.

Salsa is one of the most popular types of music listened to and danced to in the United States....

A leading music journalist’s riveting chronicle of how beloved band Pearl Jam shaped the times, and how their legacy and longevity have transcended generations. Ever since Pearl Jam first blasted onto the Seattle grunge scene three decades ago with their debut album, Ten, they have sold 85M+...

A group biography of '90s punk rock told through the prism of Green Day, The Offspring, NOFX, Rancid, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, and more Two decades after the Sex Pistols and the Ramones birthed punk music into the world, their artistic heirs burst onto the scene and changed the genre...

The definitive history of twenty-first-century indie rock—from Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie to Phoebe Bridgers and St. Vincent—and how the genre shifted the musical landscape and shaped a generation. This program is read by the author. Maybe you caught a few exhilarating seconds of...

A thought-provoking exploration of Bruce Springsteen’s iconic album, Born in the U.S.A.—a record that both chronicled and foreshadowed the changing tides of modern America On June 4, 1984, Columbia Records issued what would become one of the best-selling and most impactful rock albums of all...

El célebre tenor Ian Bostridge pasó casi dos años sin poder pisar los escenarios a causa de la pandemia, hecho que lo llevó a reflexionar sobre el valor irrenunciable del contacto directo con el público, a la vez que le permitió ahondar en el amplio catálogo de clásicos que ha interpretado a lo largo de su carrera.

Yeah Yeah Yeah is a landmark and addictive work that audaciously charts the entire story of pop music. Unlike other books, it comprehensively covers the genre's history, spanning from the advent of the music charts in the 1950s to the digital transition of the year 2000. It covers an astonishing range of artists, from Billy Fury and Roxy Music to TLC and Britney, including giants like Led Zeppelin and Donna Summer. This book will remind you exactly why you first fell in love with pop.

In 2020, guitar expert John Stubbings released a limited-edition book on the American acoustic guitar that sold out in days. Now, The Devil Is in It returns with additional research and subject matter for a new generation of listeners. Stubbings traveled the country and met with guitar makers, players, collectors, and historians to unravel the long and rich history of the acoustic guitar, its evolution, and the music it has made over the last hundred years.

Mylène Farmer est une égérie et une icône. L'interprète de Désenchantée, de Sans contrefaçon, de L'Âme-stram-gram ou de Libertine transmet à travers ses paroles des messages forts souvent inspirés par de grands auteurs et de grands philosophes. Mélancolie, amour, sexualité, religion, mort, identité… les thèmes abordés par Mylène Farmer depuis le début de sa carrière sont nombreux et essentiels. Découvrez comment Kant, Platon, Saint-Exupéry ou encore Baudelaire ont influencé les mots de Mylène Farmer.

Mozart was chaos. A boy wonder. A broke genius. A man who joked about farts and wrote music that made kings weep. This book isn’t a textbook. It’s a story. From the powdered courts of Europe to the echo of his Requiem, MOZART: The Man Who Was Born in Tune follows the full arc. The prodigy, the rebel, the romantic, and the ghost. You’ll meet the father who pulled the strings, the wife who stayed through the madness, the enemies who envied him, and the symphonies that bent light.