Music-History & Criticism

How sampling remade hip-hop over forty years, from pioneering superstar Grandmaster Flash through crate-digging preservationist and innovator Madlib Sampling--incorporating found sound and manipulating it into another form entirely--has done more than any musical movement in the twentieth century to maintain a continuum of popular...

With its own fashion, culture, and chaotic energy, punk rock boasted a do-it-yourself ethos that allowed anyone to take part. Vibrant and volatile, the punk scene left an extraordinary legacy of music and cultural change. John Robb talks to many of those who cultivated...

Unbroken Circle: a Quotable history of the Grand Ole Opry"", edited by Randall Bedwell, is a tribute to this most homegrown of American institutions. Filled with quotations from Opry stars -- from Uncle Dave Macon to Patsy Cline, Hank Williams to Roy Acuff and...

A lively chronicle of the year that shaped popular music forever, with an all new Spotify appendix More than half a century ago, friendly rivalry between musicians turned 1965 into the year rock evolved into the premier art form of its time and accelerated...

Pink Floyd's sound and light shows in the 1960s defined psychedelia, but their later recordings combined rock, orchestral music, literature, and philosophy. Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall ignored pop music's usual strictures to focus on themes of madness, despair, brutality, and...

Long before Elvis Presley entered Sam Phillips's Sun Records studio in 1954, rock 'n' roll was being performed and recorded by the likes of Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, the Clovers, the Dominoes, the Midnighters, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Wanda Jackson, and Johnny...

New York Times BestsellerThe greatest Southern storyteller of our time, New York Times bestselling author Rick Bragg, tracks down the greatest rock and roller of all time, Jerry Lee Lewis--and gets his own story, from the source, for the very first time.A monumental figure...

Roy Harper must be one of Britain's most undervalued rock musicians and songwriters. For over fifty years he has produced a series of innovative albums of consistently outstanding quality. He puts poetry and social commentary to music in a way that extends the boundaries...

What makes Mozart's music so great? Why does a minor chord sound sad and a major chord sound happy? What's the difference between opera and operetta? From Bach to Bernstein, this definitive guide offers a complete survey of the history of classical music. Whether...

History of Buffalo Music & Entertainment from the 1830s to the early 1980s. Covering Canal Street & Christy's Minstrels, The Pan-American Exposition, Theaters (vaudeville, burlesque & movie), Crystal Beach & other amusement parks, Nightclubs of the 1930s - 1960s, Big Band Jazz, early radio...

When singer Amy Winehouse was found dead at her London home in 2011, the press inducted her into what Kurt Cobain's mother named the 27 Club. "Now he's gone and joined that stupid club," she said in 1994, after being told that her son,...

"Neither in Europe, nor in the States, has anyone published a volume dealing with contemporary jazz problems in such a concise and detailed manner."--Jazz Forum When originally published in 1974, Ekkehard Jost's Free Jazz was the first examination of the new music of such...

Based upon Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music (1976), by Alan Lomax, Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music is a contemporary guide to understanding and exploring Cantometrics, the system developed by Lomax and Victor Grauer for analyzing the formal...

Pay attention to that violin you used in high school. Look closely at the next violin you see at a garage sale. It might be worth millions of dollars. The greatest violin ever made is not in a museum. It might be in your...

Breaking the global record for streams in a single day, nearly 10 million people around the world tuned in to hear Kendrick Lamar's sophomore album in the hours after its release. To Pimp a Butterfly was widely hailed as an instant classic, garnering laudatory...

The history of Macon, Georgia, has an exceptional soundtrack, and SOMETHING IN THE WATER provides a lively narrative of the city's musical past from its founding in 1823 to 1980. From its pioneer origins to the modern era, the city has produced waves of...

Amidst the heated fray of the Culture Wars emerged a scrappy festival in downtown New York City called Bang on a Can. Presenting eclectic, irreverent marathons of experimental music in crumbling venues on the Lower East Side, Bang on a Can sold out concerts...

A team of experts write about each era of the band's existence, examining what they were doing for each of their original 12 UK-release albums.This informative work tells the story of the famous Liverpool musicians, from the band's formative days in Hamburg and Liverpool...

Tom Waits, even with his barnyard growl and urban hipster yawp, may just be what the Daily Telegraph calls him: "the greatest entertainer on Planet Earth." Over a span of almost four decades, he has transformed his music and persona not to suit the...

In 2007, Ruben Molina published the first-ever history of Mexican-American soul and R&B music in his book, Chicano Soul: Recordings and History of an American Culture. Ten years later, Chicano Soul remains an important and oft-referenced study of this vital but often overlooked chapter...

Wallace demystifies the narratives of Beethoven's approach to his hearing loss and instead explores how Beethoven did not "conquer" his deafness; he adapted to life with it. We're all familiar with the image of a fierce and scowling Beethoven, struggling doggedly to overcome his...

Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the Twenty-21st Century is a multi-authored, collaboratively conceived book of essays that tackles key challenges facing scholars studying music of the United States in the early twenty-first century. This book encourages scholars in music circles and...

Tony Conrad is exemplary of the 1960s artist who remains inassimilable to canonic histories. Creator of the "structural" film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt's radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and...

REVOLVER: HOW THE BEATLES REIMAGINED ROCK 'N' ROLLAuthor: Robert RodriguezISBN-10: 1617130095ISBN-13: 9781617130090Publisher: Backbeat BooksLanguage: EnglishPublished: 04/01/2012Pages: 282Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.00lbsSize: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d

For his 2007 critically acclaimed 33 1/3 series title, Let's Talk About Love, Carl Wilson went on a quest to find his inner C駘ine Dion fan and explore how we define ourselves by what we call good and bad, what we love and what...

Though Nevermind was Nirvana's most commercially successful album, and the record that broke them - and the grunge phenomenon - internationally, In Utero has increasingly become regarded as the band's best album, both by the critics and the band members themselves. Instead of sticking...

When it was originally published in 1999, Techno Rebels became the definitive text on a hard-to-define but vital genre of music. Author Dan Sicko demystified techno's characteristics, influences, and origins and argued that although techno enjoyed its most widespread popularity in Europe, its birthplace...

Based on the popular Wall Street Journal column, Anatomy of a Song captures the stories behind 45 influential rock, R&B, and pop hits through oral-history interviews with the artists who wrote and recorded them--including Keith Richards on Street Fighting Man, Rod Stewart on Maggie...

The first definitive biography of music legend Stevie WonderStevie Wonder's achievements as a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer are extraordinary. During a career that has spanned almost fifty years, he has earned more than thirty Top 10 hits, twenty-six Grammy Awards, and a place in...

This is a compelling and inspiring look at spiritual beliefs that influenced some of the world's greatest composers, now revised and expanded with eight additional composers.Author: Patrick KavanaughISBN-10: 0310208068ISBN-13: 9780310208068Publisher: ZondervanLanguage: EnglishPublished: 03/19/1996Pages: 256Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.50lbsSize: 7.90h x 5.30w x 0.80d

Black Tooth Grin is the first biography of "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, the Texas-bred guitarist of the heavy metal band Pantera, who was murdered onstage in 2004 by a deranged fan-24 years to the day after John Lennon met a similar fate.Darrell Abbott began as...

Francis Davis's The History of the Blues is a groundbreaking rethinking of the blues that fearlessly examines how race relations have altered perceptions of the music. Tracing its origins from the Mississippi Delta to its amplification in Chicago right after World War II, Davis...

This passionate love letter to opera, lavishly praised and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award when it was first published, is now firmly established as a cult classic. In a learned, moving, and sparklingly witty melange of criticism, subversion, and homage, Wayne...

On the south side of Chicago in the late 1940s, two immigrants; one a Jew born in Russia, the other a black blues singer from Mississippi; met and changed the course of musical history. Muddy Waters electrified the blues, and Leonard Chess recorded it....

Author: Bela Koe-KrompecherISBN-10: 0989196380ISBN-13: 9780989196383Publisher: Don Giovanni RecordsLanguage: EnglishPublished: 08/03/2021Pages: 328Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.80lbsSize: 8.10h x 5.80w x 1.10d

Rising to prominence in 1994 on the back of their eponymous debut album, Korn ushered in a new sound within heavy metal which many would try and imitate in the years that followed. Earning themselves the title of "The Godfathers of Nu Metal", the...

What does jazz mean 20 years into the 21st century? Has streaming culture rendered music literally meaningless, thanks to the removal of all context beyond the playlist? Are there any traditions left to explore? Has the destruction of the apprenticeship model (young musicians learning...

A detailed chronicle of the rise and fall of the grunge music scene in Seattle and beyond. Author: Dave ThompsonISBN-10: 1493055690ISBN-13: 9781493055692Publisher: Backbeat BooksLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/15/2021Pages: 328Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.05lbsSize: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d

Shelved for over 20 years, Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, stands alongside Otis Redding's Live in Europe and James Brown's Live at the Apollo as one of the finest live soul albums ever made. It also reveals a musical, spiritual,...

"Baraka writes with the passion and lyricism that can only come from a jazz critic who is uncompromisingly invested in the social and aesthetic dimensions of the music." --WBGO (Newark Public Radio)In 2007, Akashic Books ushered Amiri Baraka back into the forefront of America's...

This Music Leaves Stains presents the full story behind the Misfits and their ubiquitous, haunting skull logo: a story of unique talent, strange timing, clashing personalities, and incredible music that helped shape rock as we know it today. James Greene, Jr. maps this narrative...

Two of the most notorious unsolved cases in the annals of American crime, the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls have been the subject of exhaustive investigations, relentless speculation and a tangled web of rampant rumors, crackpot conspiracies and dark secrets. Now, for...

Nas was playing a role on Illmatic, even if it was himself. By constructing this persona, Nas not only laid out his own career for the next decade plus, but the careers of dozens of other rappers who were able to use their considerable...

Many albums could be cited to support the claim that great suffering yields great art. Elliott Smith's XO should not be one of them. Smith's 1998 major label debut defies the "tortured singer-songwriter" stereotype, and takes up this defiance as a central theme. At...

The Pixies have had a career unlike any other in alternative rock, disappearing as not-quite-the-next-big-things only to become gods in absentia. Doolittle is their knotty masterpiece, the embodiment of the Pixies' abrasive, exuberant, enigmatic pop. Informed by exclusive interviews with the band, Sisario looks...

The first inside story of this Jamaican reggae styleWinner of the ARSC's Award for Best Research (History) in Folk, Ethnic, or World Music (2008)When Jamaican recording engineers Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock, Errol Thompson, and Lee "Scratch" Perry began crafting "dub" music in the early...

Carole King's Tapestry is both an anthemic embodiment of second-wave feminism and an apotheosis of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter sound and scene. And these two elements of the album's historic significance are closely related insofar as the professional autonomy of the singer-songwriter is an...

HEARTS OF DARKNESS: JAMES TAYLOR JACKSON BROWNE CAT STEVENS AND THE UNLIKELY RISE OFAuthor: Dave ThompsonISBN-10: 1617130311ISBN-13: 9781617130311Publisher: Backbeat BooksLanguage: EnglishPublished: 02/01/2012Pages: 352Format: HardcoverWeight: 1.50lbsSize: 9.00h x 6.30w x 1.10dReview Citation(s): Choice 08/01/2012

Connecting the black music tradition with the black activist tradition, Party Music brings both into greater focus than ever before and reveals just how strongly the black power movement was felt on the streets of black America. Interviews reveal the never-before-heard story of the...

From the creator of the popular rock 'n' roll true crime podcast, DISGRACELAND comes an off-kilter, hysterical, at times macabre book of stories from the highly entertaining underbelly of music history.You may know Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin but did you know...