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New Books in Music

New Books in Music

By: Marshall Poe
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 This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/musicNew Books Network Music
Episodes
  • Paul Rees, "Raised on Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine and Payola - the AOR Glory Years 1976-1986" (De Capo, 2026)

    Paul Rees, "Raised on Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine and Payola - the AOR Glory Years 1976-1986" (De Capo, 2026)
    Feb 14 2026
    Paul Rees' Raised on Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine and Payola - the AOR Glory Years 1976-1986 (De Capo, 2026) is a massively entertaining oral biography of the golden era of critically derided yet monumentally popular radio rock, when Journey, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Toto, and more ruled the airwaves Paul Rees' Raised on Radio is, remarkably, the first biography of the (at the time) critically derided and yet massively popular AOR (album-oriented rock) bands whose heyday was 1976-1986, when groups like Journey, Boston, Foreigner, Toto, and REO Speedwagon sold many millions of albums, toured stadiums, and whose songs continue to stream in record numbers. Many of them still tour. And sure, they were punching bags for the elitist rock critics more interested in covering punk and new wave, terminally uncool, and never fashionably cutting edge, but their music was, and is, the soundtrack to so many people's lives. Who among music fans (of a certain age) didn't pump their fist to "Don't Stop Believin'" (long before The Sopranos), play air guitar to "More Than a Feeling," bellow along with Toto's "Africa," or have their heart broken to the strains of "Can't Fight This Feeling"? Even better: their tour stories and the tales of making the music are as entertaining and eye-opening as any of the antics from the annals of rock and roll history. Cocaine use was rampant, intra-band fighting was par for the course, and for better or worse, the groups' members lived life to excess. In so many ways, it was these artists' music (they are responsible for the power ballad) and lifestyles that led directly to the soon-to-follow hair metal scene. And in spite of what the critical establishment wrote, it turns out the music has aged . . . rather well! Raised on Radio is a stadium-sized, massively entertaining oral history in the bestselling tradition of Meet Me in the Bathroom, Nothin' But A Good Time, and Please Kill Me, capturing a time and a place that was as big and booming and as unabashed as the music that provided its soundtrack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    47 mins
  • Ian Gittins, "The Cure: A Perfect Dream" (Gemini Books, 2025)

    Ian Gittins, "The Cure: A Perfect Dream" (Gemini Books, 2025)
    Feb 12 2026
    The story of The Cure: a tall tale of a truly unique British band. The Cure's story is a fantastical pop fable, but their trajectory has not been one of unbroken success. Along the way, their uneven, uneasy pop odyssey has taken in fierce intra-band tensions and fall-outs, numerous line-up changes and even a bitter court case that saw original group members feuding over payments and ownership of the band's name. There has been alcoholism, substance abuse and countless long, dark nights of the soul, many of which have been translated into luscious dark-rock symphonies. From gawky teenage art-punks in Crawley to gnomic, venerable rock royalty with 30 million record sales to their name, their journey has been a scarcely believable, vivid pop hallucination. The Cure: A Perfect Dream (Gemini Books, 2025) is the tall tale of a truly unique British band. It's the story of The Cure. This fully updated edition includes a deep dive into the band's long-awaited 14th studio album released in 2024: Songs of a Lost World. Ian Gittins has interviewed and reviewed The Cure during a 30-year career as a music writer on titles such as Melody Maker, Time Out, Q and the Guardian. He is the co-author with Motley Crew's Nikki Sixx of the 2007 New York Times best-seller The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star. He lives in London. Ian Gittin’s website. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    36 mins
  • Areum Jeong, "K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today" (U Michigan Press, 2026)

    Areum Jeong, "K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
    Feb 10 2026
    K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today (U Michigan Press, 2026) insists that K-pop fan practices and activities constitute a central productive force, shaping not only K-pop’s explosive global popularity, but also K-pop’s cultural impacts, politics, and horizons of possibility. Over the past three decades, the K-pop fandom and its activities have expanded, intensified, and diversified along myriad dimensions, assuming novel social, technological, and economic forms, some of which are unique to K-pop, and some of which reflect broader cultural and industrial logics of globalized mass entertainment culture. Areum Jeong argues that K-pop fans, in performing deokhu—a Korean term connoting an “avid fan”—perform a materialization of affective labor that also seeks to produce good relationships between asymmetrically positioned actors in the K-pop ecosystem. Through an autoethnography of becoming a K-pop deokhu, Jeong connects their experiences to generations of K-pop fans, showing simultaneously how fandom practices have shifted over time and the intricacies of fan labor participation. This personal connection paved the way for participant-observation and co-performer witnessing methodologies in the study, which crucially allowed for collaborating with fans whose communal pursuits have been stigmatized by dominant discourses that denigrate their activities as solely addictive, uncritical, and wasteful. Jeong’s genre-spanning corpus of fan activities and analyzing its contexts and contents represents an important contribution to the making of a fan archive that is also an archive of affective labor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    37 mins
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