Showing titles in History & Criticism

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 – one of dark excess and excitement, outrageous deeds and extraordinary talent, featuring legends at both the beginnings and ends of their careers.

In 100 brief chapters, John M. Borack discusses and ranks the greatest moments in Beatles history. An avid Fab Four fan since childhood and a music journalist for more than 35 years, Borack has created a book to agree with and disagree with, and one that is sure to spark conversations. A love letter to the greatest rock band of all time, The Beatles 100 is a book for Beatles buffs and casual fans alike.

This is the first comprehensive history of goth music and culture. John Robb explores the origins and legacy of this enduring scene, which has its roots in the post-punk era. Featuring sound and original music, and read by the author in his distinctive narrative style, this is a truly atmospheric audiobook that takes you right into the heart of the history of goth.

In Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age, Liam Inscoe-Jones explores five contemporary artists who broke the old rules of sound, style and the music industry at large: Devonté Hynes (of Blood Orange), FKA Twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and SOPHIE. Each began their careers as obscure outsiders but, over time, they helped to re-shape pop culture in their image. Through these five extraordinary figures and an eclectic supporting cast of dozens more, Inscoe-Jones paints a picture of the sonic landscape of the last ten years.

Beatleness explains how the band became a source of emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual nurturance in fans’ lives, creating a relationship that was historically unique. Looking at that relationship against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and other events of those tumultuous years, the audiobook critically examines the often-heard assertion that the Beatles changed everything.

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. The book covers the diverse strains of American folk music - Latin, Native American, African, French-Canadian, British, and Cajun - and offers a chronology of the development of folk music in the United States. A chapter includes detailed information about the roots of hip hop.

Sacha Lord's journey is interwoven with the history and culture of the city of Manchester. Listeners will discover Manchester’s vibrant music scene(s) and the challenges it has faced over the decades. The book takes the listener behind the scenes of Sacha's groundbreaking events, including his early nights at the legendary Haçienda club, the establishment of Warehouse Project and Parklife. Sacha's never-told stories are fascinating and entertaining, covering a three-decade structure through 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

Bitches Brew is still one of the most astonishing albums ever made in either jazz or rock. Seeming to fuse the two, it actually does something entirely more revolutionary and open-ended: blending the most avant-garde aspects of Western music with deep grooves, the album rejects both jazz and rock for an entirely different idea of how music can be made.

Everyone wanted Madonna’s 1992 album Erotica to be a scandal. In the midst of a culture war, conservatives wanted it to be proof of the decline of family values. The target of conservative loathing, gay men reeling from the AIDS epidemic wanted it to be a celebration of a sexual culture that had rapidly slipped away. And Madonna herself wanted to sell scandal, which is why she released Erotica in the same season as her erotic thriller Body of Evidence and her pornographic coffee-table book simply titled Sex.

The question of control for Black women is a costly one. From 1986 onwards, the trajectory of Janet Jackson’s career can be summed up in her desire for control. Control for Janet was never simply just about her desire for economic and creative control over her career but was, rather, an existential question about the desire to control and be in control over her bodily integrity as a Black woman.

Reflecting on the Beach Boys’ long, fascinating history, this book tells the story behind 50 of the band’s greatest songs from the perspective of group members, collaborators, fellow musicians, and notable fans. The band's music is as influential now as it was 50 years ago, and this retelling of how the iconic rock group found itself in the annals of pop culture couldn't come at a better time.

Reflective and expansive, Mirror in the Sky situates Stevie Nicks as one of the finest songwriters of the twentieth century. This biography from distinguished music historian Simon Morrison examines Nicks as a singer and songwriter before and beyond her career with Fleetwood Mac, from the Arizona landscape of her childhood to the strobe-lit Night of 1000 Stevies celebrations.

An estimated four hundred gold records have been recorded in the Muscle Shoals area. Many of those are thanks to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, dubbed "the Swampers."

Music journalists Dean Budnick and Josh Baron chronicle the behind-the-scenes history of the modern concert industry. Filled with entertaining rock-and-roll anecdotes about The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, and more - and charting the emergence of players like Ticketmaster, StubHub, Live Nation, and Outbox - Ticket Masters will transfix every concertgoer who wonders just where the price of admission really goes. This edition has an updated epilogue that covers recent industry developments.

Schumann: The Faces and the Masks is a groundbreaking account of a major composer whose life and works have been the subject of intense controversy ever since his attempted suicide and early death in an insane asylum. Schumann was a key figure in the Romanticism which swept Europe and America in the 19th century, inspiring writers, musicians and painters, delighting their enthralled audiences and reaching to the furthest corners of the world.

Frémeaux & Associés, label de référence historiographique du jazz avec la Collection Quintessence d'Alain Gerber, édite dans le cadre de la collection "Une histoire expliquée par" avec les Presses Universitaires de France, une histoire du jazz racontée par Laurent Cugny, professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Sorbonne Université et ancien directeur de l'ONJ (Orchestre national de jazz).

The story of two outsiders and obsessives whose collision prompted an evangelistic alliance on the furthest frontiers of underground music. Steve Davis first met Kavus Torabi - guitarist with Gong, Guapo, Cardiacs and Knifeworld - in the mid-2000s at a gig by French underground rock legends Magma. Over the next few years, this unlikely duo's shared affinity for visionary psychedelic music would become the foundation of not only a firm friendship, but also the most infectiously inclusive broadcasting style since the much-mourned death of John Peel.

Few songs have captured the contradictions and ambiguities of the 1960s as memorably as "California Dreamin'," the iconic folk music single that catapulted the Mamas & the Papas into rock and roll history. In All the Leaves Are Brown, author Scott Shea details how John Phillips, Denny Doherty, Michelle Phillips, and "Mama Cass" Elliot became standard-bearers for California counterculture, following their transformation from folk music wannabes to rock sensations and chronicling the tumultuous events that followed their unexpected success.

The first book dedicated solely to exploring his creative work, Man in the Music guides us through an unparalleled analysis of Jackson’s recordings, album by album, from his trailblazing work with Quincy Jones to his later collaborations with Teddy Riley, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, and Rodney Jerkins. Drawing on rare archival material and on dozens of original interviews with many who helped bring the artist’s music into the world, Jackson expert and acclaimed cultural critic Joseph Vogel reveals what gave rise to an immortal body of work.

In October 1942, SS guards at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp violently disbanded a rehearsal of a secret Jewish choir led by conductor Rosebery d'Arguto. Many in the group did not live to see morning, and those who survived were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only one of its members survived the Holocaust. Yet their story survives, thanks to Aleksander Kulisiewicz. An amateur musician, he was not Jewish, but became friends with d'Arguto in Sachsenhausen. D'Arguto tasked him with a mission: to save the musical heritage of the victims of the Nazi camps.