Showing titles in History & Criticism

Can't Give It Away on Seventh Avenue: The Rolling Stones and New York City explores the history of the group through the prism of New York. It is a highly detailed document of the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between the world's most famous band and America's most famous city as well as an absorbing chronicle of the remarkable impact the city has had on the band's music and career.

This Very Short Introduction takes an expansive and inclusive approach meant to broaden and challenge traditional views of music and technology. In its most common use, "music technology" tends to evoke images of twentieth and twenty-first century electronic devices: synthesizers, recording equipment, music notation software, and the like. This volume, however, treats all tools used to create, store, reproduce, and transmit music—new or old, electronic or not—as technologies worthy of investigation.

In Plunderphonics, Matthew Blackwell tells the story of a group of musicians who advocated for changes to the copyright system by deploying unlicensed samples in their recordings. Though the legal terrain did not shift in the favor of plunderphonic musicians, they changed public perception of fair use and enabled more widespread sampling in underground music.

Ehemals Musik junger Abgehängter und Outlaws, ist Heavy Metal heute mehr und mehr in der Mitte der Gesellschaft angekommen: Wohl mehr als 10 Millionen Deutsche hören Heavy Metal. Aber warum tun sie das? Was suchen und was finden sie in dieser Musik, die von Außenstehenden oft als purer Lärm empfunden wird? Warum wimmelt es im Heavy Metal nur so von Monstern und Teufeln - und wieso schweigen auch die Götter und die Engel nicht? Was erleben Metal-Fans, wenn sie ihre Musik hören - und welche Erfahrung treibt sie immer wieder ins Konzert.

Rocking in the Free World explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock 'n' roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the fifties, the countercultural revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the sixties and seventies, and the end-of-history triumphalism of the eighties.

The must-read memoir from the visionary figure behind Manchester's legendary music scene, from The Haçienda to The Warehouse Project. Tales From the Dance Floor is an electrifying journey into the heart of Manchester’s music culture with its most influential promoter. Over the past three...

In Simply Stravinsky, Professor Pieter van den Toorn takes a fresh look at the composer and his legacy, providing a compact, exciting, and accessible introduction to the 20th century’s most celebrated composer and his timeless music. From Stravinsky’s apprenticeship in St. Petersburg to his life among the émigré community in Southern California, Professor van den Toorn shows how the composer’s music was tied to his personality and how it came to influence artists from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass.

Featuring a player rejected by both Nirvana and Soundgarden who became a decorated special forces soldier, Britpoppers who spiralled into addiction before becoming novelists and missionaries, the terrifying story of Guns N' Roses' first drummer, super-rejecting band leaders, self-destroying rappers, troubled hard rock bassists and girl-band burnouts, The Rejects takes an intimate, thoughtful look at people who've been kicked out of bands, what they experienced and what came afterwards.

The definitive history of the rise and heyday of the revolutionary Greenwich Village music scene, based on new research and first-hand interviews with many of its legendary performers Although Greenwich Village encompasses less than a square mile in downtown New York, rarely has such a concise...

A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, PITCHFORK, NPR, METRO AND HERALD SCOTLAND BEST MUSIC BOOK OF 2018 ‘The definitive grime biography’ NME ’A landmark genre history’ Pitchfork This audiobook is narrated by Ash Hunter, stage and screen actor who is currently playing Hamilton in the West End production...

Thirty years ago, Chuck Berry starred in the seminal music documentary Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll, which profiled the legend during a star-studded concert celebrating his 60th birthday. Now comes the complete story behind one of America's most enduring and embattled icons. Compiled as an oral history by the film's producer, Stephanie Bennett, Johnny B. Bad combines interviews from the film's participants, including its music director - Keith Richards. These unique interviews and accounts paint a vivid and multifaceted picture of the artist.

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 oral history documents the story of Oasis as told by the fans who were there. Discover never-before-seen perspectives charting the rise, fall, and rise again of Liam and Noel Gallagher and the British rock band whose music defined a generation. A few years after Definitely Maybe topped the...

Run the Song is also the story of how a professional critic, frustrated with conventional modes of criticism, finds his way back to a deeper relationship with music. When stumped or preoccupied by a piece of music, Ratliff starts to think that perhaps running can tell him more about what he’s listening to—let’s run it, he’ll say. And with that, the listener in turn is invited to listen alongside one of the great listeners of our day in this wildly inventive and consistently thought-provoking chronicle of a profoundly unsettling time.

No longer dismissed as relics of the hippie era, a new generation has lionized the Dead for creating a culture that paved the way for social networking, free music swapping, and the uncompromising anticorporate attitude of indie rock. Now, fifty years after the band first began changing rock 'n' roll both sonically and psychically, So Many Roads paints the most vivid portrait yet of the Grateful Dead, one of the most enduring institutions in American music and culture.

Creed Taylor was one of the most successful jazz producers of all time—and one of the most controversial. His career spanned five decades, in which he produced albums with legends such as John Coltrane, Ray Charles, George Benson, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, Stan Getz, and Nina Simone. In 1960, he famously founded Impulse! Records and signed John Coltrane, and in later years he produced at Verve Records—where he introduced the US to Bossa Nova, producing "The Girl from Ipanema"—and ultimately founded Creed Taylor Incorporated, which defined the sound of jazz during the 1970s.

Queercore officially got its name in the mid-1980s when G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce named it in their revolutionary zine J.D.s, but the movement began years earlier with bands like Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, Nervous Gender, and Fifth Column. The scene exploded into the next decade with the popularity of bands that often crossed over into the riot grrrl scene, including Tribe 8, Team Dresch, Sister George, and Huggy Bear. Their revolution took the form of zine and cassette creation, which they distributed far and wide.

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.

Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in the world, with around one million participants in this dynamic, multifaceted artform – and, as of 2024, Olympic sport. Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of breaking in the Bronx, New York.

Popular music history collides with data analytics, charts, and numbers in this insightful and surprising look at the greatest hits and musicians, fads, forgotten artists, and much more. Data analyst and musician Chris Dalla Riva reframes everything you thought you knew about music. Coupling hard data with engaging anecdotes, Uncharted Territory is both a takedown and celebration of popular music and provides new ways to think about your favorite songs, genres, and artists from the last 6 decades using unexpected statistics and playful visualizations.