Showing titles in History & Criticism

Read by the author. In this special seasonal edition, bestselling author Robert J. Morgan shares the incredible stories behind traditional holiday hymns of faith, including Christmas, Easter, and more. Is there a festive season of the year that is complete without one of your favorite hymns? Not...

In this biography, written long before the significance of Mozart's work was fully realized, Holmes reveals the musician's character and genius, his struggles, his influence on art, and the brilliant reputations that surrounded him.

From a legendary journalist with four decades of unprecedented access and untold stories, an insider’s behind-the-scenes look at the major personalities of rock and roll. Lisa Robinson has interviewed everyone from John Lennon to Bono to Patti Smith, Eminem to Lady Gaga to Jay-Z and Kanye West...

Pioneering metal writer Keith Kahn-Harris presents a moving, visionary exploration of Ozzy Osbourne, and of metal music and culture: the potent legacy Ozzy left us. What is a ‘good death’? How about this: After years of terrible health, you gather friends and admirers for one last, glorious...

Unlike all previous versions of rock 'n' roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects 10 songs recorded between 1956 and 2008 and then proceeds to dramatize how each embodies rock 'n' roll as a thing in itself in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts out - a new language, something new under the sun.

Songs that sell the most copies become hits, but some of those hits become something more—iconic recordings that not only inspire a generation but also change the direction of music. In Anatomy of 55 More Songs, based on his column for the Wall Street Journal, music journalist and historian Marc Myers tells the story behind fifty-five rock, pop, R&B, country, and soul-gospel hits through intimate interviews with the artists who wrote and recorded them.

“What are the greatest rock albums of all-time?” Perhaps one of the more common questions examined between music-loving chums, that has led to many a good-natured debate. But if you really dig deeper into the question…is it from the standpoint of the album’s importance in rock history? A classic release that proved significant to an artist’s career? Or perhaps merely a personal favorite, that you just can’t get enough of?

El propio título lo dice: ¡Viva la música, j***r! Que es lo mismo que decir, viva la más incomprendida de las músicas: bien porque se supone que la clásica es demasiado difícil de escuchar, o porque su etiqueta de conciertos resulta demasiado pomposa y encorsetada o, simplemente, porque sus entradas son demasiado caras.

The central experience of the Ramones and their music is of being an outsider, an outcast, a person who’s somehow defective, and the revolt against shame and self-loathing. The fans, argues Donna Gaines, got it right away, from their own experience of alienation at home, at school, on the streets, and from themselves. This sense of estrangement and marginality permeates everything the Ramones still offer us as artists, and as people. Why the Ramones Matter compellingly makes the case that the Ramones gave us everything.

In Black and Blur - the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy Consent Not to Be a Single Being - Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of Blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms.  

Standing at the bleeding edge of the new decade between the experimental Berlin Trilogy (Low, Heroes, and Lodger) and 1983’s wildly successful Let’s Dance, it was here Bowie sought to bury the ghosts of his past and the golden decade of the 1970s to become a global superstar reaching millions of new fans. Featuring fresh insights and exclusive interviews with close collaborators, Adam Steiner’s Silhouettes and Shadows uncovers the studio stories, meanings behind, and secret history of Scary Monsters...

This collection of uplifting, informative stories behind your favorite hymns will warm your heart and revitalize your worship. Each entry comes with the hymn's full text and musical score. Perfect for devotions, sermon demonstrations, bulletin inserts, and introducing congregational hymns, each hymn story includes information about the author, composer, the tune's name, and scriptural basis.

As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race.

Doomed to Fail explores the heaviest music the world has ever heard, tracing doom, sludge, and post-metal as their own distinct (and incredibly loud) traditions. Anselmi covers the bands and musicians that have impacted those styles most - Black Sabbath, Candlemass, Melvins, Eyehategod, Godflesh, Neurosis, Saint Vitus, and many others - while diving into the cultural doom that has spawned such music, from the bombing of Birmingham and hurricane devastation of New Orleans to glaring economic inequality, industrial alienation, climate change, and widespread addiction.

This Very Short Introduction, written with both humor and flair, begins with a sampling of music as human activity and then goes on to consider the slippery phenomenon of how music has become an object of thought. Covering not only Western and classical music, Cook touches on all types from rock to Indonesian music and beyond. Incorporating musical forms from every continent, Music will be enjoyable for beginner and expert alike. 

Quincy Troupe's account of his friendship with Miles Davis is a revealing portrait of a great musician and an intimate study of a unique relationship. It is also an engrossing chronicle of the author's own development, both artistically and personally. A keen and critical observer, Troupe captures and conveys the power of Miles' presence, the mesmerizing force of his personality, and the restless energy that lay at the root of his creativity.

Based on decades of work as a professor of literature and as a musician, Jesse Kavadlo analyzes the ways in which 1980s heavy metal aligns with and develops many of the themes prevalent in the canon of literature. In doing so, the book examines some of the contexts of 1980s heavy metal, including Cold War, the rise of MTV, and the formation of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and subsequent congressional hearings.

In January 1959, Berry Gordy borrowed $800 from his family and founded the Detroit-based record company that in less than a decade was to become the largest Black-owned business in the United States. It also became one of the most productive and influential producers of popular music anywhere in the world. The Story of Motown is the story of Berry Gordy's triumph over powerful, established financial interests, entrenched popular taste, bigotry, and racism.

As the first anthology to assess the nature of fan response and the band's enduring appeal, Fandom and The Beatles: The Act You've Known for All These Years defines and explores the key ways in which this particular pop fusion has inspired such loyalty and multigenerational popularity. 

The untold story of four Jewish American musicians-turned-amateur-spies who risked everything to aid “refuseniks” in the Soviet Union. In 1985, while the United States engaged in a battle of nuclear brinkmanship, four Americans landed in Moscow on a mission to smuggle secret information in...