Popular music Books
Abrams Mixtape Potluck Cookbook
Book Synopsis “Mixtape Potluck never wavers from its earnest stated intent: to help readers plan the best possible dinner party.” —Eater “Thank you, Questlove, for this inspired book on a theme that is having a resurgence.” —Martha Stewart, from her foreword What if Questlove threw a dinner party and everyone came? Questlove is best known for his achievements in the music world, but his interest in food runs a close second. He has hosted a series of renowned food salons and conversations with some of America’s most prominent chefs. Now he is turning his hand to creating a cookbook. In Mixtape Potluck Cookbook, Questlove imagines the ultimate potluck dinner party, inviting more than 50 chefs, entertainers, and musicians and asking them to bring along their favorite recipes. These recipes are usually enough to feed a dozen or more. Here are: Zooey Deschanel’s bok choy and cucumberTrade Review“Don’t forget to pick up a copy of Questlove’s Mixtape Potluck to add to your cookbook collection! It’s really one-of-a-kind and from my opinion as a cookbook lover, it’s kind of the one we have been waiting for.” -- Drew Barrymore
£999.99
Abrams Music Is History
Book SynopsisQuestlove collects the 500 songs that have changed not just popular music, but also the worldQuestlove'sMusic Is Historyis an in-depth look into the 500 most influential songs in the history of music. Most famously known as a the drummer and joint frontman for the Grammy Award-winning band The Roots, Questlove is also an astute musicologist and voracious historian. In this book, Questlove dives into musical history from every decade of twentieth century, choosing one essential track from each year. The author thoughtfully and insightfully unpacks each song's cultural significance by placing it in its historical context, discussing real world events that shaped both the song's creation and its lasting impact. Analyses of iconic classics like Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder include tangents into the histories of science, politics, and pop culture. Questlove moves fluidly from the personal to the political, from Curtis Mayfield to the history of Black representation in cinema to musings on thTrade Review“Music Is History is an entertaining, informative and far-reaching work, meticulously excavating American culture and history with the eye of a seasoned cratedigger.” * The Washington Post *“This inspired volume continues Questlove’s thoughtful and thought-provoking work and is an enduring analysis of the effects of music on personal, political, and cultural histories.” * Library Journal STARRED Review *“Questlove’s in-depth, witty, creative, personal, and authoritative musical history will keep people reading, listening, questioning, and musing for many years to come." * Booklist *“A palimpsestic, personal, and resonant journey with a living musical encyclopedia.” * Kirkus *“This stimulating work is sure to attract deep thinkers and music theorists everywhere.” * Publishers Weekly *
£18.69
Abrams Fall Through
Book Synopsis Love and Rockets meets Russian Doll in this original, full-color graphic novel about an underground punk band caught in a loop of an eternally repeating tour—from National Book Award–winning cartoonist Nate Powell. At first glance, Diamond Mine seems to have emerged in 1979 as Arkansas’s first punk band. Instead, this quartet is revealed to be interdimensional travelers from 1994, guided—largely against their will—by vocalist Diana’s powerful spell embedded into their song “Fall Through.” As Diamond Mine tours the country, each performance of the song triggers a fracturing of space-time perceptible only by the band members as they’re transported to alternate worlds in which they’ve never existed, but their band’s legend has. That is, until Jody, the band’s bassist and the story’s protagonist, finds herself disrupting Diana’s sorcery, even at
£17.09
Johns Hopkins University Press Harlem World
Book SynopsisA thrilling narrative history of how one rap battle in New York transformed American culture forever. July 3, 1981, was a pivotal night for the future of America's newest art form: hip hop. In New York's Harlem World Club, the Fantastic Romantic Five and the Cold Crush Brothers competed, with an unprecedented $1,000and their reputationson the line in a highly anticipated rap battle. The show drew hundreds of fans to settle a question that still dominates hip hop circles: Who's the best? In Harlem World, journalist Jonathan Mael chronicles this fateful night of hip hop rivalry and shares a new look at how Harlem helped ignite a musical revolution. Since hip hop first emerged in New York in the early 1970s, artists like Theodore Livingston (DJ Grand Wizzard Theodore) and Curtis Brown (Grandmaster Caz) sought to elevate this uniquely American musical genre by pushing the limits of record-playing techniques and lyricism. The two crews they assembled put on the best shows in a world whereTrade Review"Journalist Mael chronicles hip-hop's emergence in late 1970s and '80s New York City in his rollicking debut. . . . Readers curious about the genre's roots will want to take it for a spin."—Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Crispy Crust Pizzeria1. The Sound Room2. Routines3. New York, New York4. Hip Hop's Great Poet5. Harlem World6. Collision Course7. Tough-Ass Four Emcees8. Somebody, and Anybody, and Everybody Scream9. Traveling Tapes10. Wild StyleEpilogue: "The Message"
£20.25
Hal Leonard Dark Side of the Moon Guitar PlayAlong
Book Synopsis
£19.54
Simon & Schuster I Slept With Joey Ramone
Book Synopsis
£17.09
Temple University Press,U.S. Softly With Feeling
Book Synopsis Joe Wilder set the table. His struggles made it easier for me and many others.--From the Foreword by Wynton Marsalis Trumpeter Joe Wilder is distinguished for his achievements in both the jazz and classical worlds. He was a founding member of the Symphony of the New World, where he played first trumpet, and he performed as lead trumpet and soloist with Lionel Hampton, Jimmy Lunceford, Dizzy Gillespie, and Count Basie. Yet Wilder is also known as a pioneer who broke down racial barriers, the first African American to hold a principal chair in a Broadway show orchestra, and one of the first African Americans to join a network studio orchestra. In Softly, with Feeling, Edward Berger tells Wilder''s remarkable story-from his growing up in working-class Philadelphia to becoming one of the first 1,000 black Marines during World War II-with tremendous feeling and extensive reminiscences by Wilder and his colleagues, including renowned PhiladelphTable of ContentsForeword by Wynton Marsalis Preface Acknowledgments 1 The Making of a Musician: Philadelphia (1922–1938) Musical Beginnings Colored Kiddies of the Air: “Little Louis” Meets Pops William T. Tilden Junior High School 2 From Student to Pro (1938–1943) Mastbaum The Harlem Dictators Leaving Home: Les Hite Lionel Hampton 3 Integration of the Armed Forces: The Montford Point Marines (1943–1946) 4 Big Band Odyssey (1946–1950) Hampton Redux Jimmie Lunceford Dizzy Gillespie Lucky Millinder Sam Donahue Herbie Fields 5 New York (1950–1953) Noble Sissle and the Diamond Horseshoe Breaking Barriers on Broadway Wilder on Broadway Manhattan School of Music 6 On the Road Again: Count Basie (1953–1954) 7 Back on Broadway and into the Studios (1954–1957) Silk Stockings and Most Happy Fella The Urban League: Integrating the Music Industry Developing a Style: Recordings in the 1950s From Mainstream to Third Stream 8 On Staff: African American Musicians and the Network Orchestras (1957–1964) Wilder Joins ABC The Studio Life The Urban League: Integrating the Network Orchestras Record Dates: Sideman and Leader “The Sound of Jazz” Benny Goodman: USSR Tour Miss America Pageant Family Life 9 A Dream Realized: Return to Classical Music (1964–1974) African Americans in Symphony Orchestras: The Beginnings of Change The Symphony of the New World The 1969 Human Rights Commission Hearings Earl Madison’s Reflections Other Classical Activities Wilder and Wilder: Joe and Alec 1960s Recordings 10 Freelance (1974–1990) The End of the Staff Orchestras Peter Duchin and the Society Orchestra Phenomenon Return to Broadway 1980s Recordings 11 New Outlets: Jazz Repertory and Jazz Parties (1990–2000) Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion The Jazz Party Phenomenon 12 Passing It On: Teaching, Awards, and Honors (2000–) Juilliard Awards and Honors The Reluctant Leader Recordings in the New Millennium: Evening Star Arbors Records and the Statesmen of Jazz Coda Notes Discography/Solography Index
£26.59
Continuum Publishing Corporation Shakespeare and Popular Music
Book SynopsisExploring the interactions between Shakespeare and popular music, this book links these seeming polar opposites, showing how musicians have woven the Bard into their sounds. It shows what happens to Shakespeare when he exists in and becomes popular music, in all its diverse and glorious forms.Trade Review"This unique book combines a pop music fan's dedication with an academic's rigour - and gives us an analysis of Shakespeare in popular music and popular music in Shakespeare, in which Shakespeare is both sampler and sampled. From ballads to the Beatles and from Elizabethan sermons to internet fan sites, Hansen's enthusiasm is capacious and revealing. The rest certainly is not silence in a book which collapses distinctions between high and low culture, and is as comfortable with House as with Hamlet." -- Emma Smith, Fellow and Tutor in English, Senior Tutor, University of Oxford, UK'Hansen's passion for both Shakespeare and popular music is infectious and makes me want to revisit Shakespeare's plays. I highly recommend this book so go and order it from your local independent bookstore or visit Continuum's site.' -- Elaine Cusack, rocksbackpagesblog.comAdam Hansen's Shakespeare and Popular Music is a work clearly informed by the author's passion for both of these subjects... -- Routledge ABESReviewed in The Times Literary Supplement"Adam Hansen offers an audacious analysis of the uses to which contemporary music has put Shakespeare and ‘Shakespeare' has put contemporary music. The result is a delightful bricolage of early-modern and post-modern cultural history in which Freud, Adorno and Walter Benjamin rub shoulders with Duke Ellington, Cowboy Jack Clement, the Kaiser Chiefs, numerous rappers, punks and folk-singers as vital interpreters of the Shakespearean text." -- Greg Walker, Masson Professor of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, UKTable of ContentsIntroduction: A Whole Lotta Shakespeare Goin' On?; 1. 'Where should this music be?': Locating Shakespeare in/and/against Modern Popular Music; 2. Shakespeare and the Technologies of Pop; 3. Shakespeare, the Beatles and the 60s; 4. Predicting Riots? Shakespeare, Pop and Politics; 5. 'High Class Dreams': Shakespeare, Status and Country Music; 6. 'Shakespeare with a twist': The Bard, Race, Gender and Popular Music; 7. Rockin' All Over the Globe; 8. Fans, Fans, Fans, Lend Me Your Ears; Index.
£28.99
Hodder & Stoughton Amy 27
Book SynopsisFrom critically acclaimed biographer, Howard Sounes, comes the most detailed and insightful portrait of the life and death of Amy Winehouse, in the context of the infamous 27 Club.Trade ReviewFans of Amy and of the host of music stars who met their end too soon will find much to enthrall them here. * Stylist *Much of the book's power lies in its refusal to pander to the romantic-melancholy notion of the tortured young artist who lives fast and dies young. Instead the squalor and chaos of their everyday existence if exposed in uncompromising detail... This book is not about more rock star mythologizing. It's about skewering the mystery of the 27-connection, by exposing its all-too-tragic reality. * Sunday Times *Sounes' masterstroke is to unearth forensic levels of detail on his subjects. Jim Morrison's end in a Paris bathtub is well known, but Sounes reveals minutiae explaining the bad luck that caused this unhappy and alcoholic but probably not suicidal man to die when he did... Sounes acknowledges the danger of theorising too heavily on the 27 Club but in the main he has pulled off what could have been a tasteless project with sensitivity. And he's best of all on the subject that clearly fascinates him: the relationship between Amy Winehouse and her father. * The Times *A meticulously researched corrective that spares none of the often squalid truth and should, if there's any justice, put paid to decades of ill-informed mythologizing. http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/numbered+days+Winehouse+Club/8754647/story.html * Montreal Gazette *
£10.99
Pan Macmillan Creation Stories
Book Synopsis'Essential reading for anyone interested in the heady, vulgar, marvellous miasma of British music and culture in the nineties' - Irving Welsh'A true believer in the power of music and more importantly a believer in the people that make music. He gave me and many more like me a chance to change my life' - Noel GallagherAlan McGee's Creation Stories is a star-studded, outrageous, funny and anarchic account of the record label he set up and the bands that defined an era, including Primal Scream and Oasis.A charismatic Glaswegian who partied just as hard as any of the acts on his notoriously hedonistic label, Alan McGee became an infamous character in the world of music in the nineties. In Creation Stories he tells his story in depth for the first time, from leaving school at sixteen to setting up the Living Room club in London which showcased many emerging indie bands, from managing the Jesus and Mary ChainTrade ReviewMcGee was our Malcolm McLaren and Tony Wilson. An instigator and motivator, a born upsetter. I've never met anyone like him and neither have you. This is his story -- Bobby GillespieMcGee is a true believer and a complete one-off. I doubt anyone else could have built an entity like Creation and ran it for so long, making it all up as they went along. Essential reading for anyone interested in the heady, vulgar, marvellous miasma of British music and culture in the nineties, before it was all swamped by the surgical spirit sterility of the global marketplace -- Irvine WelshIn the 1980's Alan McGee saved British music by pumping ambition, passion and chaos into the independent scene. Without him Go West and Living In A Box would have won. A brilliant read for anyone interested in music -- James BrownIt's fast and loose and as insane as the label, full of great anecdotes and machine gun prose - it tells it like it was and it doesn't flinch from the truth -- John RobbA true believer in the power of music and more importantly a believer in the people that make music. He gave me, and many more like me, a chance to change my life. A pity he supports Rangers -- Noel Gallagher
£11.69
Lulu.com Altprogcore Dal Post Hardcore al Post Prog
Book Synopsis
£24.56
Grand Central Publishing Acid for the Children
Book Synopsis
£25.50
Grand Central Publishing Acid for the Children
Book Synopsis
£17.09
Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation Ray Brown Legendary Jazz Bassist NoteForNote
Book Synopsis
£22.49
Hal Leonard Corporation Late Night Jazz
Book Synopsis
£17.09
Hal Leonard Corporation Neil Peart
Book Synopsis
£22.19
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd The Silver River
Book SynopsisA moving and inspiring memoir of families lost and rediscovered, by a founding member of legendary band Midnight Oil. For fifty years, songwriter, guitarist and keyboard player Jim Moginie was a driving force behind one of Australia's most iconic rock bands, Midnight Oil. As they made their way through the nascent domestic punk scene and the uncharted musical territory of the Western Desert to the concert halls of Europe and America, the band members developed a feeling of 'five against the world'. For Jim, this de facto family was a bulwark against a nagging sense that something was missing from his life: he'd long known that his biological mother had given him up for adoption as a baby. While Midnight Oil grappled with the challenges of chart success, their political activism and global tours, Jim's quest to find his birth family increasingly led him in different directions, to the quiet suburbs of Canberra and the meandering rivers and verdant hills of rural Ireland - and emotion
£15.29
Alfred Music Alfreds Easy Guitar Songs Rock Pop 50 Hits from
Book Synopsis
£20.69
Alfred Music Alfreds Easy Piano Songs Standards Jazz
Book Synopsis
£22.09
Alfred Music Megahits of 2016 12 Pop Country Broadway and
Book Synopsis
£9.98
Alfred Music 2019 Greatest Pop Movie Hits Deluxe Annual
Book Synopsis
£13.49
Alfred Publishing Co Inc.,U.S. Jazzin Up Christmas 1 11 Christmas Carols with
Book Synopsis
£7.95
Alfred Music Jazzin Up Christmas 2 11 Christmas Carols with
Book Synopsis
£7.95
Alfred Music In the Heights
Book Synopsis
£21.24
Alfred Music Circle of Song
Book Synopsis
£19.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC A Critical Companion to the American Stage
Book SynopsisElizabeth L. Wollman is Associate Professor of Music at Baruch College, City University of New York, in New York City, USA.Trade ReviewElizabeth L. Wollman manages to create subject of many academic dreams: a scholarly text with mass-market appeal. Meticulously researched and bristling with citations, A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical has the dual feature of potentially being heavily cited at MATC or ATHE, while simultaneously being quoted by Jennifer Ashley Tepper at BroadwayCon or on Twitter. The book's greatest strength is its tone, which is key to the book's dual marketability as a classroom text or a theatre lover's enrichment reading. * New England Theatre Journal *Particularly useful for those just embarking on study of theater, A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical takes a fresh look at the Broadway musical, a unique art form … This book is meant as further illumination of the numerous extant works on musical theater history. In the last of the eight sections, "Critical Perspectives," Wollman offers five essays, written by contemporary scholars, that shed further light on the forces behind commercial musical theater, thus providing the reader with additional voices and opinions about the development she outlines in the main body of the text. The detailed notes, index, and bibliography offer further opportunity for researchers to connect with a greater body of writing. This compact book provides a vast wealth of information. Summing Up: Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Wollman offers a substantial historiography of the musical, in the context of the form as a commercial industry, in this recent addition to Bloomsbury's excellent 'Critical Companion' series ... The volume comprises a substantial monograph section, with several valuable contributions by figures such as Stacey Wolf, who offers an important consideration of amateur musical theatre. * New Theatre Quarterly *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1 The Birth of (the Popular Culture of) a Nation: Stage Entertainment in a New Land Chapter 2 The Civil War Era to the Gilded Age Chapter 3 The Early 20th Century Chapter 4 The Great Depression to World War II Chapter 5 World War II to 1960 Chapter 6 We’ve Surely Got Trouble: The 1960s and 1970s Chapter 7 The Megamusical to Hamilton Chapter 8 Other Angles: Different Approaches to the American Stage Musical Putting It Together: A Step-By-Step Look At Musicals from the Page to the Stage, by Robert Meffe (San Diego State University, USA) Making Musicals for Serious Pleasure, by Stacy Wolf (Princeton Univesity, USA) Off Off Off Off Broadway: Musicals and the Regional Theater, by Laura MacDonald (University of Portsmouth, UK) Today, Broadway; Tomorrow, the World: The “American” Musical and Globalization, by Jessica Sternfeld (Chapman University, USA) Ways of Knowing: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studying the Stage Musical, by Elizabeth Titrington Craft (Harvard University, USA) and Joanna Dee Das (Williams College, USA) Notes Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index
£26.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Hopelessly Devoted
Book SynopsisFreedom has only ever meant Love. And life lived without loveIs not life enough. Chess is in prison. Facing a lengthy sentence, her cell mate, Serena, becomes her soul mate. But when Serena is given parole, Chess faces total isolation.Hope comes in the form of a music producer looking for a reason to love music again. She finds a powerful voice in Chess. But to harness her talent, Chess must first face her past. Featuring Kae Tempest''s trademark lyrical fireworks and live music, this is a story of love and redemption. Hopelessly Devoted received its world premiere on 19 September 2013 at the DOOR, Birmingham Rep, co-produced by Paines Plough and Birmingham Rep. It toured the UK again in 2014.Trade ReviewA raw dissection of the experience of young women in prison . . . a passionate argument for the humanising and redemptive power of art * Daily Telegraph *In conveying the fundamental isolation of a life lived on the inside . . . Hopelessly Devoted is very good. * Time Out London *The result is an ingenious whole that's funny and true about growing up, getting wasted and – as they gather round a tree planted to remember their friend – wasting life . . . The movement between rap and drama is fluid rather than jolting . . . Tempest's writing oscillates between dynamic poetry that's full of vividly phrased acute observation and dialogue that's plainer but just as spot-on. An ingenious whole that's funny and true...dynamic poetry that's full of vividly phrased acute observation . . . spot-on. * Guardian - on 'Wasted' *As Ms. Tempest’s gorgeous streams of words flow out, they conjure a story so vivid it’s as if you had a state-of-the-art Blu-ray player stuffed into your brain, projecting image after image that sears itself into your consciousness. Both as writer and performer, Ms. Tempest stitches together words with such animate grace that language acquires an almost tactile quality. * New York Times - on 'Brand New Ancients' *
£14.19
Edinburgh University Press Mapping the Rockumentary
Book SynopsisMapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury is the first anthology to explore the rockumentary as a central component of both the documentary and world cinema.Trade Review"This book is a milestone in the study of rockumentary as a genre and the way it reflects history, gender and politics. It takes us through the almost uncharted land of this important genre: from early forms of mediated music, to the breakthrough in the 1960s and into the digital era. It is a rich and illuminating analysis of rockumentary and its cultural context." -Ib Bondebjerg, professor emeritus, University of Copenhagen
£24.69
Orion Publishing Co Sing Backwards and Weep
Book SynopsisThe most honest and unsparing grunge memoir ever committed to the page by one of the greatest alternative rock stars of the past thirty yearsTrade ReviewRaw, ravaged and personal - a stoned cold classic -- Ian RankinSing Backwards and Weep is powerfully written and brutally, frighteningly honest. First thought that came to my mind was, 'Mark Lanegan gives the term 'bad boy' a whole new meaning.' These are gritty, wild tales of hardcore drugs, sex, and grunge. But this is also the story of a soulful artist who refused the darkness when it tried to swallow him whole. And who found redemption through grace and the power of his unique and brilliant music. Finally, the song becomes truth. And the truth becomes song -- Lucinda WilliamsA mesmerising trip to the dark side that in places is so gloriously bleak it achieves a kind of Grand Guignol comedy. Written in blood, with true intensity, it becomes an instant classic of the genre -- Kevin BarryA dark tale of dysfunctional normality and diseased reality. At war with the world and himself, Mark Lanegan writes like he sings, from the pained heart of a damaged soul with brutal honesty -- Bobby GillespieOne of the rawest and most honest music autobiographies I've ever read -- Stuart BraithwaiteThe frontman of the Screaming Trees gives a bloody, brawling, dope-fueled tour of his personal battlefields By any reckoning, Lanegan should be long dead alongside beloved friends like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Kristen Pfaff of Hole, and Layne Stanley of Alice in Chains. By either miracle or stamina, the author is still alive to offer a blisteringly raw self-portrait of life not just as an excessively self-indulgent rock star, but also a victim of his own hubris . . . This isn't just a warts-and-all admission; it's a blackout- and overdose-rich confessional marked by guilt and shame. It's also not a redemption song, but like any other train wreck, it's impossible to look away. A stunning tally of the sacrifices that sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll demand of its mortal instruments * Kirkus *Many rock memoirs come with a third act in which the artist achieves sobriety and disavows their former life. Not so Lanegan, who delivers grand guignol scenes of heroin-fuelled violence, degradation and self-abuse while recalling his Screaming Tree days, with little in the way of regrets. Rare in its rawness and bracing honesty. * The Guardian, 10 of the Best Music Biographies *The most brutally honest rock memoir imaginable -- Daily TelegraphNot for the faint-hearted -- 9/10, Classic RockAn astonishingly frank, heartbreaking and tremendously brave book -- Record CollectorDark yet borderline-hilarious cavalcade of horror and mayhem -- Big IssueThe book reads like a debauched Bukowski novel, as Lanegan drifts from sin to sin, cursing those who held him back from music, drugs, and hookups, and recounting grisly tales about his famous friends -- Rolling StoneThis is a frank, astonishing and often horrifying recollection from someone who has certainly lived a life, and who has now decided to share a part of it . . . far from your usual Rockstar Memoir -- Si Forster * Echoes and Dust *One of the most unflinching memoirs in the history of music writing . . . it is a survivor's tale, and a brilliantly written one at that * Kerrang *[Sing Backwards and Weep] makes for a harrowing epic, a thriller if I ever read one . . . the lyricist's flair he applies to its best passages elevates the book from the level of hachneyed retreads . . . he's able to dial himself up in moments of rage, sink us chin-deep into his sorrow at the loss of good friends . . . and crank the tension into a tightly wound ball when the dope-sickness sets in and the chase for a fix is on * Bookanista *A harrowing but often hilarious chronicle of addiction and regret . . . packed full of surprises . . . [Lanegan's] eye-popping memoir explores hell's many sub-basements, and lived to produce good writing -- Kitty Empire * Guardian *Rare in its rawness and candour, the book is a brutal chronicle of addiction -- Fiona Sturges * Guardian *[A] deeply sensitive book -- GuardianA brutally honest, harrowing yet utterly compulsive read * The Quietus *frank about his youthful search for "decadence, depravity, anything, everything" and refuses to flinch from the guilt he still carries around the death of his friend Kurt Cobain * NME *It's a depiction of addiction and self-loathing so bleak that your fingernails come away its pages caked in dirt. In it Lanegan lays his track-marked past bare, cycling endlessly between his roles as powerless victim, talented screw up and toxic enabler from page to stinking page * Clash *unflinchingly tells the musician's hardscrabble story from his early days in backwater Ellensburg, Washington as he drifts from a teen gambler and porn fiend to petty criminal * Spin *A chronicle of depravity and drugs, laced with dark humour and crackling with - well, not exactly joie de vivre, but certainly the will to live. The story of the rock star who descends into substance-abuse hell but survives to tell the tale has been told a thousand times, but Lanegan relates his experiences with irresistible swagger and honesty * Financial Times *A bejewelled document of excess and redemption * Mirror *The book is a triumph. * New Statesman *This is a narrative packed with surprises [...] but there is room in this heavy, heavy book for quite astonishing turns of kismet. * The Observer *A visceral, unforgettable memoir. * The New European *Sing Backwards and Weep is an unflinching trawl - or would be, were it not marginally leavened by straight-shooting yet eloquent language, gallows humour and his sweet, boyish excitement at the breifest of encounters with musical heroes such as Waylon Jennings and Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh * Scotland on Sunday *The usual offering is that dreaded soufflé of bullshit known as the rock memoir - the airy embellishment of glory days that inevitably collapses under the weight of its own conceit. But Lanegan's Sing Backwards and Weep is a rock memoir only insofar as its author happens to have sung rock n' roll in seminal bands while developing close friendships with some of the genre's most dearly departed * Vice *Rare in its rawness and candour, the book is a brutal chronicle of addiction [...] despite the tragedies, an arch humour characterises a lot of the writing * The Guardian *gripping memoir * Sunday Express *This is a narrative packed with surprises [...] but there is room in this heavy, heavy book for quite astonishing turns of kismet. * The Observer *A rock autobiography as raw as it gets. Come for the magnificent rant about Liam Gallagher, stay for the bleak and gripping account of addiction and loss * The i *Sing Backwards and Weep is a painstakingly unflinching account of a troubled life further troubled by the excesses of rock 'n' roll. It is among the very best memoirs I have read, by a musician or anyone else * The Australian *Sing Backwards and Weep is the only rock autobiography you need investigate. Like some nicotine-stained amalgam of Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain, Mark Lanegan gives another meaning to "warts and all" as he recounts his near obliteration during the Seattle grunge boom of the 1990s, of which he is one of the few survivors. A brazen and bleakly comic saga about the needle and the damage done. * Irish Independent *Sing Backwards and Weep - by turns mordant, entertaining and bleak - is both a portrait of a damaged man and a chronicle of a now legendary music scene * TLS *Sing Backwards and Weep is the only rock autobiography you need investigate. Like some nicotine-stained amalgam of Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain, Mark Lanegan gives another meaning to "warts and all" as he recounts his near obliteration during the Seattle grunge boom of the 1990s, of which he is one of the few survivors. A brazen and bleakly comic saga about the needle and the damage done. * Irish Indepdendent Summer Reads *
£10.44
University of Texas Press A Spy in the House of Loud
Book SynopsisPopular music was in a creative upheaval in the late 1970s. As the singer-songwriter and producer Chris Stamey remembers, the old guard had become bloated, cartoonish, and widely co-opted by a search for maximum corporate profits, and we wanted none of it. In A Spy in the House of Loud, he takes us back to the auteur explosion happening in New York clubs such as the Bowery's CBGB as Television, Talking Heads, R.E.M., and other innovative bands were rewriting the rules. Just twenty-two years old and newly arrived from North Carolina, Stamey immersed himself in the action, playing a year with Alex Chilton before forming the dB's and recording the albums Stands for deciBels and Repercussion, which still have an enthusiastic following. A Spy in the House of Loud vividly captures the energy that drove the music scene as arena rock gave way to punk and other new streams of electric music. Stamey tells engrossing backstories about creating in the recording studio, describing both the inspiration and the harmonic decisions behind many of his compositions, as well as providing insights into other people's music and the process of songwriting. Photos, mixer-channel and track assignment notes, and other inside-the-studio materials illustrate the stories. Revealing another side of the CBGB era, which has been stereotyped as punk rock, safety pins, and provocation, A Spy in the House of Loud portrays a southern artist's coming-of-age in New York's frontier abandon as he searches for new ways to break the rules and make some noise.Trade ReviewIn many ways, the manner of Mr. Stamey’s book . . . is comparable to his songwriting style; it’s measured and thoughtful; it has imagery and flow with a mixture of intellect and very sophisticated yet never pretentious humor. It’s a book that’s warm, fun and deeper than what you may expect. . . Never lightweight but never overbearing, the music of Chris Stamey is a marvel. As is this book. So it would stand you in good stead to pick this book up, read it and then seek out Mr. Stamey’s catalog. It’s very easy to embrace it all. -- Rob Ross * PopDose *Like so many artistically minded young people in the late '70s, a bright, talented 20-something named Chris Stamey followed his muse from his native North Carolina to Manhattan, at that time a near-bankrupt megapolis with a seedy, disreputable downtown that just happened to be giving birth to some of the most exciting and original music of the 20th century. . . While fans will relish the stories of '70s Manhattan, when Stamey collaborated with another young ex-pat named Alex Chilton or popped into his neighborhood bar to catch a new band called Television woodshed some tunes, musicians will appreciate his explanations of how songs come together, how one chord feeds off another or how a chorus can be crafted to complement a verse. * Jersey Journal *Through happenstance and his own curiosity, Chris Stamey became a player in two blossoming music scenes. . . [his book] captures the zeitgeist of both those scenes with anecdotes and reflections that also serve as a window into his musical evolution. * Winston-Salem Journal *[Stamey’s] book smoothly takes us back to an auteur explosion happening in small NY clubs lead, most notably, by up and coming bands like The Talking Heads. . . a great guided tour of the studio experiences behind each song, with just as many highly articulate insights into the other musicians of the era as his own work. It also portrays a brilliant Southern boy’s coming of age in a city of other brilliant talents, where it seemed that every second person he met was as brilliant as himself. The main thing they all had in coming, apart from unique voices, styles and ways of producing electric music, was a fervent desire to break the rules and make some noise. * Critics at Large *Students of indie-rock history will find Stamey’s book loaded with interesting tidbits. . . [he] brings a fair amount of musical analysis, acoustical science, and audio-engineering knowledge to his writing, which will add to the book’s appeal for theory nerds and studio rats. . . the stuff can be complex, but his writing is approachable and energetic. * Yes! Weekly *A vivid, thoroughly lived-through depiction of a time when music mattered greatly and a disaffected minority sought to overthrow the existing pop culture. * Milwaukee Shepherd-Express *Where most musician autobiographies are fueled by backstage drama, this book focuses almost entirely on the creative process, a choice that not only proves to be compelling but helps turn Stamey’s personal journey into a necessary document of peak-era college rock, illustrating how it was a vibrant scene filled with unexpected cross pollination. * Pitchfork *A Spy In The House of Loud works best on quiet stages, taking singular trips down clearly paved roads with definite endings. * PopMatters *There’s a great warmth to [Stamey's] storytelling that makes this book particularly endearing. . . like you’re sitting around with Chris and he’s telling you the stories almost in confidence. It’s a comfortable voice and the tales aren’t particularly tall—they’re just human and entertaining and informative. * Magnet Magazine *Table of Contents Preface: The Story behind the Painting 1. Don’t Stop to Think 2. I Love the Sound of the Traffic 3. In Our Wildest Dreams 4. Have You Seen the Last Elite? Jukebox: Just Tryin’ to Tell a Vision 5. The More You Learn, the Less You Know 6. Pavement Slapping My Feet 7. Eyes Submerge Your Face 8. Caress and Spite 9. I Loved You, and You Did, Too 10. Exhilaration; or, Gorging a Neuronic Aperture 11. Just Like Yesterday 12. Who Will Baudelaire? 13. Cut It Hot, Cut It Up, Cut It Clean, Cut It Slow Jukebox: The More You Look, the More You See Jukebox: We’ve Got Your Sons’ Blood on Our Hands 14. Your Ballerina Curls 15. She Took the Soda Pop 16. Wine in Plastic Cups 17. The Distance That Surrounds Us Jukebox: Don’t Push Me, ’Cause I’m Close to the Edge 18. The Air Is Full of Air 19. Like a Party Balloon on the Strand Jukebox: Calling Out, in Transit 20. Never a Time Jukebox: Backseat for a Bed 21. Anyone Who Had to Laugh 22. The Whole World’s Dirt 23. Newspapers Collect on the Street 24. I Want to Break Your Heart 25. All Around You Now the Stars Are Falling Down Afterword Acknowledgments Appendix: A Listener’s Guide Notes Selected Discography
£19.94
University of Texas Press Bird on a Blade
Book SynopsisWith an iconic sound that transcends country, pop, rock, and blues, Rosanne Cash’s voice and vision have captured American life for generations of fans. Over the same time span, internationally acclaimed artist Dan Rizzie has wowed collectors with his evocative paintings, prints, and collages. Now, in a book that is as unique as their artistry, Cash and her longtime friend Rizzie have teamed up to create an extraordinary hybrid. Blending images created by Rizzie with strands of lyrics from a variety of Cash’s songs (including new material from her latest album, She Remembers Everything, as well as her beloved classics), Bird on a Blade is a mosaic designed to inspire the imagination and soothe the heart.Oscillating between periods of growth and times of darkness, Bird on a Blade reflects on life’s mysteries. Powerful lines from songs such as “God Is in the Roses” from the 2006 album Black Cadillac evoke themes of mournTrade ReviewJuxtaposed with tender paintings from artist and friend Dan Rizzie, Cash's lyrics are luminescent nuggets, gleaming with desire, loss, home, and self-empowerment. * Vulture *
£15.19
University of Texas Press Glitter Up the Dark
Book SynopsisWhy has music so often served as an accomplice to transcendent expressions of gender? Why did the query 'is he musical?' become code, in the twentieth century, for 'is he gay?' Why is music so inherently queer? For Sasha Geffen, the answers lie, in part, in music’s intrinsic quality of subliminal expression, which, through paradox and contradiction, allows rigid gender roles to fall away in a sensual and ambiguous exchange between performer and listener. Glitter Up the Dark traces the history of this gender fluidity in pop music from the early twentieth century to the present day.Starting with early blues and the Beatles and continuing with performers such as David Bowie, Prince, Missy Elliot, and Frank Ocean, Geffen explores how artists have used music, fashion, language, and technology to break out of the confines mandated by gender essentialism and establish the voice as the primary expression of gender transgression. From glam rock and punk to disco, techno,Trade ReviewGeffen’s 2020 book is a gem...Their arguments about the music of the last 60 years—from the Beatles to Prince and David Bowie to Frank Ocean and Perfume Genius—are revelatory. The gender binary, they argue, is not simply worth breaking; it has always been broken...Geffen creates one of the most helpful and useful things a writer can give: hope for a more inclusive future. Anyone interested in gender would benefit from reading Glitter Up the Dark, and music obsessives can find a plethora of new interpretations of music history as well. Ultimately, that is what the best music books can do. * PopMatters, "12 Contemporary Books That Will Have You Rethinking Music History" *A must-read for all those interested in the politics of sound. * The Guardian *This is how Glitter Up the Dark, and all of Geffen’s writing, works: Once you start reading it, you’ll hear the world through new ears. You’ll devour Glitter Up the Dark with eyes wide and mind racing, drawing connections to whatever music you listen to. It’s exciting. And if you’re a queer or trans listener, it’s validating reading about how generations of us have found a haven in music. * Vulture *An ecstatic celebration of freedom through sound and movement, Glitter Up the Dark makes pop history feel thrillingly new. * Kirkus/Rolling Stone, "Best Music Books of 2020" *[Glitter Up the Dark] speaks to pop music’s effect on future generations of norm-breaking artists, but also on public perceptions of gender and its engagement with race and class politics. It’s an essential contribution to the modern music-book canon, made all the more intimate in Geffen’s hands. * Pitchfork, "Our 15 Favorite Music Books of 2020" *[Glitter Up the Dark] is a unique examination of gender fluidity and queerness across genres of popular music; a must-read for music lovers. * Ms. Magazine *[Glitter Up the Dark] doesn't just discuss various subversions of typical masculine and feminine gender roles—it discusses how we came to accept the full gender spectrum with non-binary and third gender identities. Geffen chronicles gender fluidity in music from the 20th century to the present, discussing everyone from early blues artists and David Bowie to Missy Elliot and riot grrrl bands. * Paste Magazine *From Little Richard and Elvis to David Bowie and Prince, Glitter Up The Dark shows how artists have used music and its accompanying fashion and technology to subvert traditionally accepted forms of sexual identity—including what Geffen calls “audio drag,” wherein musicians inhabit shifting personas through vocal manipulation. While Geffen is more than comfortable digging into headier gender theory, the book remains accessible and well-crafted. * The A.V. Club *Through deft yet largely accessible analysis, Glitter Up the Dark feels like a revelatory unearthing, as Geffen carefully exposes threads of queerness that typical histories may choose to ignore or erase. * them *Glitter Up the Dark is not just a chronicle of the transgressive possibilities of pop music but also a history of Geffen’s listening and a demand that we regard pop culture in explicitly political terms. * The Nation *Without attempting a comprehensive overview of queerness in music, Glitter Up the Dark nevertheless traces a clear path from the Beatles onwards...Whether it's the time-shifting energy of '70s New York clubs like the Loft, the 'sapphic androgyny' of Prince, or the gay masculine identification channeled through Grace Jones's 'I Need A Man,' Geffen makes clear that performers and their listeners have always been engaged in a lively, flirtatious exchange, constructing vibrant, expressive, and more fluid worlds in the space between each reverberating sound wave. * Nylon *An essential contribution to the modern music-book canon, made all the more intimate in Sasha Geffen’s hands. * Pitchfork *This slim yet sprawling volume...overturns traditional approaches to pop-music history by revisiting popular stars, songs and genres through a gender-expansive, queer lens * Westword *[Glitter Up the Dark] tells the story of queer artists and fans carving out space for their self-expression in an industry that capitalizes on pieces of the queer aesthetic, while simultaneously writing off those artists who are deemed too subversive or political. * Jezebel *[An] ambitious first book...with Geffen’s boundless love for music, deep listening skills, and expansive knowledge, they have queered the map of pop in language as accessible as a yellow brick road. * Lambda Literary *Geffen’s clear love and deep knowledge of the subject, along with insightful historical and critical arguments about the intertwining of gender and music, make this a deliciously necessary read for anyone interested in either pop culture or gender studies. * Library Journal, Starred Review *Glitter Up the Dark is Geffen's definitive love letter to the power of music to inspire acceptance and transformation—both within ourselves, and in the world around us. * Foreword Reviews *In an expansive and exuberant history Sasha Geffen celebrates music's liberatory potential to break down binary gender roles. * The Wire *Geffen drags a shimmering thread that connects transgressive music histories that have defined not just queer culture but all of pop culture for decades...Geffen’s book feels like the most fabulous tasting menu that will inspire readers to fall down the rabbit holes of so many of these stories. * Autostraddle *Geffen provides detailed insight into the ways queer and gender non-conforming artists shaped pop music—including punk and its antecedent, glam rock. * Chicago Reader *[Glitter Up the Dark] details, era by era, just how much popular music has done to break down the gender binary...one of the things I loved about the book is how Geffen celebrates the way that challenging the binary is inherent to the appeal of pop music for all people who approach it with open ears and hearts: it clears a space for all of us to more truly understand the human experience. * The Current *Geffen invokes canonical artists with wan mischief…and keeps finding curious historical details…Glitter Up the Dark lovingly describes the affinities drawn together by the act of listening. * Hazlitt *[An] incisive first book…[Geffen's] lucid prose is frequently enlivened by small, passing insights into music I’ve encountered a million times but will now forever hear refracted through their imagery and words…What I found most valuable about Glitter Up the Dark was the lens through which it looks back and invites us to notice how such seeming 'subversions' have always been present beneath the surface of even the most popular music...Reading this book often gave me the sensation that I was looking at a familiar scene through a kaleidoscope, suddenly seeing smeared borders and tiny, winking rainbows everywhere. * Bookforum *Glitter Up the Dark is less a straightforward narrative of pop music gender play and nonconformity than a spiraling, exhilarating dance through its more and less famous manifestations...This prism of a book reflects a rainbow on all it touches. * Boston Globe *Glitter Up the Dark helps readers understand and contextualize gender performance in popular music. It might change the way you listen to and engage with your favorite records. * The Arts Fuse *From disco to techno, punk rock to hip-hop, Geffen digs deep to explore the way popular music can facilitate exchange between listeners and performers, loosening the grip of gender roles and providing fertile ground for asking questions, seeking liberation and creating change. * NPR, "NPR's Best Books of 2020" *A brilliant, highly accessible, and timely testament to the power of music to shatter the status quo. * Library Journal, "Best Arts Books of 2020" *This exploration of queerness and pop is ridiculously comprehensive...Geffen’s examination of gender ambiguity’s relationship to artistic reinvention is a fascinating read. You’ll never listen to classic genre-staples in the same way again. * NME, "The 20 best music books of 2020" *Geffen's genuine enthusiasm for transgressive pop music is clear and infectious, and the chapters on punk and glam rock...are true standouts. [Glitter Up the Dark] is full of insightful observations, such as the pivotal role that Wendy Carlos and Pauline Oliveros played in the development of electronic music...A helpful guided tour that shows how music is the perfect art form in which to 'dance between genders.' * Kirkus *Glitter Up the Dark...asks a fascinating question, one the author turns over and over for 264 fascinating pages. What is it about popular music that makes it such a uniquely freeing space for artists to explore the gender spectrum? Geffen takes a fascinating walk through music history from the queer pioneers of rock and blues; to the Beatles and their matching mop tops; to 21st century artists like Perfume Genius and Fever Ray. * The Current, "Best music books of 2020" *From the castrati of mid-sixteenth century Italy to 'Ma' Rainey’s lesbian blues to SoundCloud’s shape-shifting stars, Geffen takes readers on an illuminating journey in lyrical, punkish prose. * Elle, "The 63 Best Books of 2020" *Table of ContentsIntroduction: An Alternate Ribbon of Time 1. Screaming the Beatles: The First Boy Band Breaks the Gender Mold 2. Oh! You Pretty Things: The Glitter Revolution 3. Whining Is Gender Neutral: Punk’s Adolescent Escapism 4. Wreckers of Civilization: Post-punk, Goth, and Industrial 5. Soft Machines: Women, Cyborgs, and Electronic Music 6. Not a Woman, Not a Man: Prince’s Sapphic Androgyny 7. The Fake Makes It Real: Synthpop and MTV 8. Infinite Utopia: Queer Time in Disco and House 9. Funky Cyborgs: Time, Technology, and Gender in Hip-Hop 10. Butch Throats: Women’s Music and Riot Grrrl 11. God Is Gay: The Grunge Eruption 12. No Shape: The Formless Internet Coda: Whole New World Acknowledgments Notes Index
£16.14
University of Texas Press Youre with Stupid
Book Synopsis2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, Association for Recorded Sound Collections An insider’s look at how Chicago’s underground music industry transformed indie rock in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Chicago was at the center of indie rock, propelling bands like the Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair to the national stage. The musical ecosystem from which these bands emerged, though, was expansive and diverse. Grunge players comingled with the electronic, jazz, psychedelic, and ambient music communities, and an inventive, collaborative group of local labels—kranky, Drag City, and Thrill Jockey, among others—embraced the new, evolving sound of indie “rock.” Bruce Adams, co-founder of kranky records, was there to bear witness. In You’re with Stupid, Adams offers an insider’s look at the role Chicago’s underground music industry played in the transformation of indTrade ReviewIndependent music from Chicago was absolutely essential to my developing sensibilities. My teenage mind was blown away by labels like Touch & Go, Drag City, and Thrill Jockey, but as I dug deeper, I zeroed in on the magical, shadowy kranky. It was pre-Internet, and I didn't get all the scene connections or timelines, I just happily listened in my shitty apartment and felt my world shift. You're with Stupid does something equally remarkable: It tells the history of that time and place without making any of that early, optimistic magic disappear. -- Brandon Stosuy, co-founder, The Creative IndependentYou're with Stupid serves as a primer on the independent record label boom of the late 1980s, the documenting of a city's diverse scene, and the quiet explosion of a new kind of music via kranky. Most importantly, it offers the backstories of some of your favorite bands and albums of the last thirty years. -- Mac McCaughan, coauthor of Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed SmallThis well-informed love letter to Chicago, a hub of DIY music and sonic explorations, allows the reader to witness the birth of a label and largely covert scene that continues to mutate and resonate. Bruce Adams, though, avoids pure homage, bringing the same acute critical eye, and yes, barbed tongue, that helped build this musical revolution. A funny, bullshit-free chronicle of life in underground music. -- Kevin Martin, The Bug, King Midas Sound, ZonalA story of passion and perseverance with a soundtrack that echoes from the pages...Dedicated fans of ’90s alt rock will find inspiration and lessons. * Publishers Weekly *[Adams'] prose efficiently wrings out important and nutsy-boltsy specifics that will trigger strong memories in those who were there, enrapture readers who bought the records in lieu of being there, and perhaps encourage the spawn of Those Who Came Before to bring back, aurally if not in person, artists like Labradford and Bowery Electric and Jessamine. * Backyard Industry *There was once a point when indie music tended to mean something with clear connections to rock music. Nowadays, that line is much more blurred, making for some stunning artistic feats — and the music scene in Chicago in the 1990s and 2000s played a big part in that. Bruce Adams’s new book offers an inside look at the evolution of that scene and its lasting impact. * InsideHook *You’re with Stupid proves [Adams] as adept at communicating what it was like to be immersed in a time and place of intense creativity as behind the scenes making it happen. * The Wire *You’re with Stupid is most successful when it contextualizes kranky inside the larger Chicago music scene—and indie as a whole. Chicago was and is such a vibrant city musically that the larger discussions of where the bands and labels fit into regional and national networks of groups, scenes, and zines were welcome and illuminating...this book got me interested in music that was new to me—I dug around online for Labradford and Stars Of The Lid—and gave me a greater sense of Chicago’s scene in the ’90s. * Razorcake *Adams’ book is a story about both a Chicago and a world that doesn’t exist anymore…[You're with Stupid is] a first-hand account of a fascinating time in music history to motivate us into some truly focused, immersive, offline activity. * Bandcamp Daily *[Adams] does a great service in sketching out the different rosters and aesthetic approaches [indie record labels in Chicago] took...You’re with Stupid is both a cultural history of the Chicago music world at that time, as told through the record labels and distributors that Adams worked for, and a how-to road map to founding a DIY operation. * Bookforum *[You’re with Stupid] succeeds as both a memoir and a cultural history of a brief wrinkle in time when a few Chicago neighborhoods seemed to comprise the center of a then-flourishing underground rock universe. * Aquarium Drunkard *You’re with Stupid is a thoroughly entertaining read...Reading the book feels like sitting next to [Adams] on a bar stool, hearing memories of a bygone but beloved musical era straight from the horse’s mouth. * Aquarium Drunkard *You're With Stupid is every self-described Gen X music nerd's dream come true. * The Stranger *kranky co-founder Bruce Adams provides behind-the-scenes insight on the Windy City’s music labels (with Touch & Go and Wax Trax! leading the charge) and how they contributed to the meteoric rise of Gen X stars such as Liz Phair, Nirvana, and Smashing Pumpkins...this book nurtures our sense of nostalgia for a tremendous decade of music, especially in kranky’s pursuit to 'release music that transcended the moment,' and reminds us of simpler, pre-Internet times where radio airplay, touring, and fanzines heavily influenced the success of music’s breakout stars. * SPIN, "Best Music Books of 2022" *The best kranky releases sound refreshingly different, not just from other indie rock of the ‘90s but from nearly everything on the radio, or off it, in 2022. They’re well worth a listen. And You’re with Stupid is worth a read, especially if you belong to the generation that stayed up late to catch '120 Minutes' on MTV and attended Yo La Tengo shows in multiple millennia. * Washington Independent Review of Books *[Adams] proves to be an incisive and wry observer of the Windy City's paradigm-shifting musical ecosystem and his role in shaping rock's vanguard...You're with Stupid abounds with interesting insights about musical and cultural niches that deserve more attention and, more importantly, it reveals the inner workings of one of history's greatest record companies. * The Stranger *An amazing and insightful read into one of the more low-key scenes of [the 1990s]. * The Recoup *Table of Contents Introduction 1. Hey Chicago 2. Honk if You Hate People, Too 3. That That Is . . . Is (Not): 1991–1992 4. Accelerating on a Smoother Road: 1992–1993 5. Analog Technology Makes Space Travel Possible: 1994 6. Slow Thrills: 1995 7. The Taut and the Tame: 1996 8. London Was Ridiculous: 1997 9. An Audience Hungry to Hear What Would Happen Next: 1998 10. Both Ends Fixed: 1999 11. After This They Chose Silence: 2000–2002 Epilogue: Specifically Dissatisfied Since 1993 Acknowledgments Author’s Notes Index
£19.94
University of Texas Press Woman Walk the Line
Book Synopsis Full-tilt, hardcore, down-home, and groundbreaking, the women of country music speak volumes with every song. From Maybelle Carter to Dolly Parton, k.d. lang to Taylor Swift—these artists provided pivot points, truths, and doses of courage for women writers at every stage of their lives. Whether it’s Rosanne Cash eulogizing June Carter Cash or a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift considering the golden glimmer of another precocious superstar, Brenda Lee, it’s the humanity beneath the music that resonates. Here are deeply personal essays from award-winning writers on femme fatales, feminists, groundbreakers, and truth tellers. Acclaimed historian Holly George Warren captures the spark of the rockabilly sensation Wanda Jackson; Entertainment Weekly’s Madison Vain considers Loretta Lynn’s girl-power anthem “The Pill”; and rocker Grace Potter embraces Linda Ronstadt’s unabashed visual and musical influence. Patty Griffin act Trade ReviewNot only will readers find some of the finest music writing in the business here, but they’ll also learn how the musicians’ evolution influenced each essayist’s own creative process. The result? Incredibly empowering writing about what it means to be an artist and a human being. . . .Woman Walk the Line will touch readers to their cores — reminding them of their first musical loves and the difference between a musician and a star. * Nashville Scene *Each of the 27 essays focuses on the experience of when music was a savior, an inspiration or an acknowledgment of a deep and personal truth. * New York Times *A rhapsodic, moving look at music's transformative power. * People *...truly stunning... * PASTE *...a new collection of personal essays on the transformative impact of women in country music aims to change the narrative. * The Washington Post *Best Music Books of the Fall * Publisher's Weekly *30 Must Read Music Books This Fall—The deeply personal pieces often feel like the authors are cracking open a secret chest, sharing treasured glimpses into their true selves. * Salon.com *Much has happened to shape the national discourse in the 18 months since Holly Gleason began working on Woman Walk The Line...Much has happened in the last 18 days to make it essential reading. * Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel *The essays in Woman Walk the Line are multidimensional, living, breathing cases for the importance of each of these female country artists, including aurally and visually. As an edited anthology of multiple authors, this book is surprisingly cohesive. * Pop Matters *Table of Contents Introduction Maybelle Carter: The Root of It All (Caryn Rose) Lil Hardin: That's How I Got to Memphis (Alice Randall) Wanda Jackson: When She Starts Eruptin' (Holly George-Warren ) Hazel Dickens: The Plangent Bone (Ronni Lundy) June Carter Cash: Eulogy for a Mother (Rosanne Cash) Brenda Lee: Rare Peer (Taylor Swift) Bobbie Gentry: Let the Mystery Be (Meredith Ochs) Loretta Lynn: The Pill (Madison Vain) Dolly Parton: Long Island Down Home Blues (Nancy Harrison) Emmylou Harris: Common Ground in an Uncommon Love (Ali Berlow) Barbara Mandrell: Lubbock in the Rearview Mirror (Shelby Morrison) Tanya Tucker: Punk Country and Sex Wide Open (Holly Gleason) Rita Coolidge: A Dark-Eyed Cherokee Country Gal (Kandia Crazy Horse) Linda Ronstadt: Canciones di Corazon Salvage (Grace Potter) Rosanne Cash: Expectations and Letting Go (Deborah Sprague) The Judds: Comfort Far from Home (Courtney E. Smith) k.d. lang: Flawless, Fearless (Kelly McCartney) Lucinda Williams, Flesh & Ghosts, Dreams + Marrow (Lady Goodman) Mary Chapin Carpenter: Every Hometown Girl (Cynthia Sanz) Patty Loveless: Beyond What You Know (Wendy Pearl) Shania Twain: But the Little Girls Understand (Emily Yahr) Alison Krauss: Draw Your Own Map (Aubrie Sellers) Terri Clark: Better Things to Do (Amy Elizabeth McCarthy) Taylor Swift: Through the Eyes of a Critic, of a Mom (Elysa Gardner) Kacey Musgraves: Follow Your Arrow (Dacey Orr) Rhiannon Giddens: A Gift Past the Songs (Caroline Randall Williams) Patty Griffin: Remembering to Breathe (Kim Ruehl) Thank Yous Contributors
£14.24
University of Texas Press Why Tammy Wynette Matters
Book SynopsisHow Tammy Wynette channeled the conflicts of her life into her music and performance. With hits such as “Stand By Your Man” and “Golden Ring,” Tammy Wynette was an icon of American domesticity and femininity. But there were other sides to the first lady of country. Steacy Easton places the complications of Wynette’s music and her biography in sharp-edged relief, exploring how she made her sometimes-tumultuous life into her work, a transformation that was itself art. Wynette created a persona of high femininity to match the themes she sang about—fawning devotion, redemption in heterosexual romance, the heartbreak of loneliness. Behind the scenes, her life was marked by persistent class anxieties; despite wealth and fame, she kept her beautician’s license. Easton argues that the struggle to meet expectations of southernness, womanhood, and southern womanhood, finds subtle expression in Wynette’s performance of “Apartment #9”—and it’s because of these vocal subtleties that it came to be called the saddest song ever written. Wynette similarly took on elements of camp and political critique in her artistry, demonstrating an underappreciated genius. Why Tammy Wynette Matters reveals a musician who doubled back on herself, her façade of earnestness cracked by a melodrama that weaponized femininity and upended feminist expectations, while scoring twenty number-one hits. Trade Review[An] illuminating debut...Easton paints a riveting portrait of an oft-misunderstood star. Country music fans won’t be disappointed. * Publishers Weekly *Easton’s book incorporates the author’s relationship to Wynette’s music and vocal performances in a critical biography that focuses on the artist’s musical talents...Fans of Wynette and country music will be drawn to this reappraisal. * Library Journal *Why Tammy Wynette Matters ventures beyond the usual narrative of Tammy Wynette as a tragic country star whose numerous marriages and early death have often defined her. In this slim yet rich book of criticism, Steacy Easton considers the singer’s 'ambitious, transparent, and haunted work' in a feminist context, drawing out Wynette’s artistry and paying respect to her impact on country music...What makes Why Tammy Wynette Matters exceptional is that it considers how [Wynette's life] experiences gave her work its power...Easton is 'deeply committed to Wynette as a performer and writer.' They approach their subject with curiosity, generosity, and love. * Chapter 16 *[An] exemplary deep-dive into the life of Tammy Wynette...Country fans will be delighted with this short but incisive and fond remembrance. * Bay Area Reporter *Easton’s arguments are compelling…Reading Easton’s book you start to understand how Wynette may well have used the perceptions of her and her position as an icon of domestic femininity in a quite subversive way, and that she was far less of a victim than she herself often encouraged people to believe...Read this book; it’s unlike anything else you might have read about this artist and it will change your perception of who you think Tammy Wynette was. * Americana UK *[Why Tammy Wynette Matters] weaves the stress of maintaining stereotypical Southern womanhood into the country legend's complex legacy. * The Tennessean *[A] brilliant new book...Why Tammy Wynette Matters is a tour-de-force work of critical genius, and Easton’s book prompts us to listen once again to Wynette and to hear her performances in fresh ways. Their book is revelatory, offering insightful and illuminating readings of the ways that Wynette’s life and work intersect. * No Depression *The book is full of beautiful sentences. . . as Easton waxes poetic about why Wynette matters. . . As Easton explores all the layers to Wynette’s gendered, larger-than-life persona, they allow us to expand the way we interpret and understand the world, and to expand our understanding of queerness itself. * Autostraddle *A slim but thoughtful new book...Easton effectively makes the case that Wynette is underappreciated and worthy of a serious critical reappraisal. * New York Times *One thing is certain: wherever one falls on the Tammy Wynette continuum — fan, casual observer, or someone simply interested in how art gets made and how gender, for better or worse, influences both its creation and perception — is going to be knocked out by Why Tammy Wynette Matters . . . Their endlessly compelling book succeeds in proving its title beyond a doubt. No small feat. * Parton & Pearl *Table of Contents Introduction Domesticity High Femme Armor Soft Politics Pain Melodrama Sex Fame Tradition Reprieve Camp Funeral Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography
£18.04
University of Texas Press A Curious Mix of People
Book SynopsisA twisting path through Austin's underground music scene in the twentieth century's last decade, narrated by the people who were there.Trade ReviewFeaturing members of the Big Boys, Butthole Surfers, Spoon, and more – including the unsung ladies who made Austin DIY more than a boys club – this new oral history should be required reading for all contemporary scenesters interested in learning more about the slacker generation. * The Austin Chronicle *Table of Contents Introduction. Nobody Here but Us Wounded Chickens The Cavity: The Cavity Creeps Emo’s: Johnny Cash Sat Here Radio: None of the Hits, All of the Time Hole in the Wall: Cheap Music, Fast Drinks, Live Women Blue Flamingo: Those Horses Do Bite! Chances: We’ll Just Rock for Ourselves Sweatbox Studios: Sweatbox Is Burning (or, Honk If Dick Cheney Shot Your Landlord in the Face) TV and Video: Raw Meat in the Studio Zines, Flyers, and the Press: Putting the Word in the Streets Sound Exchange: Bitter People with No Future Selling Music Record Labels: Bitter People with No Future Starting Labels Trance Syndicate: Love and Napalm Electric Lounge: My Childhood Hero Is Getting Pelted with Roses Liberty Lunch: By the ’90s, We Were Rocking The End: It Doesn’t Go On Forever Acknowledgments Cast of Characters Chronology 100 Essential Underground Releases of the 1990s (in Chronological Order) A Curious Mix of the Departed: In Memoriam Notes Index
£19.79
Duke University Press Henry Cow
Book SynopsisBenjamin Piekut tells the story of the English experimental rock band Henry Cow and how it linked its improvisational musical aesthetic with a collectivist, progressive politics.Trade Review“What was it all about, to me? Thinking. Henry Cow really thought about the why, the what, the appropriate methods of making music. Their riveting music was the sound of thinking out loud: Henry Cow seemed to be asking, ‘So, what is the significance of these sounds in our heads?’ And they were always witty: just look at the name of the band and the unwearable sock representing ‘the Henry Cow legend.’ I am very glad this book exists. Henry Cow’s history—in all its inevitable turbulence—tells an inspiring story.” -- Robert Wyatt“In this landmark monograph, Benjamin Piekut offers a stunning new theoretical framework for writing the history of ‘adventurous’ music in the late twentieth century, realizing that theory in practice by replicating in his graceful prose the improvised relation to the world he seeks to illuminate. Through his gripping account of the band Henry Cow, he reconstructs the cultural space of what he calls the ‘vernacular avant-garde,’ where musicians learn from records rather than in institutions, live uncertainty, cross genres, improvise responses to novel situations, work with and against record companies, and embrace avant-gardism without negation. It is rare to finish a monumental monograph with a gasp. A must-read intervention and instant classic!” -- Tamara Levitz, Professor of Musicology and Comparative Literature, University of California Los Angeles"Henry Cow: The World Is A Problem provides an exhaustive account of an incomparable group pushing music to its limits, on a linear mission to change civilization and its culture forever." * Jazzwise *"A fascinating and pacey read, stitched together painstakingly from over 90 original interviews and both public and private texts including Hodgkinson's extensive diaries. The combination of narrative background, musical analysis and critical insight should open the door for a new generation of listeners." -- Phil England * The Wire *"Exhaustive and illuminating." -- Kurt Gottschalk * New York City Jazz Record *"Mixing a highly readable musicological analysis with fascinating details about the band's often-turbulent existence, Piekut's book is a fitting tribute to Henry Cow's importance and legacy in a notable but marginalised movement of 20th century music." -- Sid Smith * Prog Magazine *"This biography is many things but its main strength is as a chronicle of the band’s extraordinary history which spanned barely a decade, meticulously researched from a vast array of sources, not just from the music papers of the times but via interviews with the musicians, plus access to private musicians’ notes, diaries and minutes from the band’s many documented meetings. . . . A remarkable project: compelling, unique and requiring considerable powers of concentration and assiduousness—somewhat like the band themselves." -- Phil Howitt * Facelift *"It's hard to think of another group that did as much as Henry Cow to distance themselves from the usual Dionysian image and activities of your typical rock band. . . . All things considered, it doesn't sound like it was much fun at all. But this book is." -- Daniel Spicer * Jazzwise *"Why would this book appeal to anyone had never heard of Henry Cow? Well, I think that anyone that is interested in the development of British underground or counter-cultural music through the late sixties and seventies will find this book fascinating. As will anyone that is interested in the working out of a musical response to prevailing sociopolitical circumstances. And, as much as anything, it provides universal insights into a group of people and managing complex relationships where, at times, it seems that what would help most would be a psychological understanding of intergroup processes." -- Phil Stringer * Free Jazz Collective *"Piekut engages in continuous reflection as he narrates. In this sense, the book is also a sort of ethnography, with Henry Cow as an object of study serving to elucidate a range of matters both historical (music and art as cultural practices) and theoretical (larger issues of politics, musicology, and sociality). The research is impeccably thorough—not just by measure of the requisite bibliography but also the extensive, rigorous interviews with the people involved in the Henry Cow project. This original research on its own is a real treasure." -- Stathis Gourgouris * Los Angeles Review of Books *"Piekut's richly nuanced account of [Henry Cow] is, as far as I am aware, an unprecedently detailed case study of the life of a rock group" -- Chris Atton * Popular Music *"Piekut's book is one of the best dissections of a group I have ever read. It is lengthy, well-written, explores the musical and social milieu in depth, and is an excellent primer for listening to the music. Just don't do it at the same time. Each process: reading about and listening to Henry Cow deserve your full undivided attention." -- Robert Iannapollo * Association for Recorded Sound Collection *Table of ContentsPreface vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Feral Experimentalism 1 1. You Can't Play This Music at Cambridge | 1968–73 29 2. Faust and the Virgins | 1973 76 3. Contentment Is Hopeless, Unrest Is Progress | 1974 119 4. Death to the Individual: Slapp Happy | 1974–75 157 5. Europa | 1975–76 199 6. The Roads Leading to Rome | 1976–77 242 7. No Joy Anymore | London 1977 293 8. Henry Cow Always Had to Be Henry Cow | 1978 345 Afterword. The Vernacular Avant-Garde 387 Notes 409 Bibliography 455 Index 479
£87.55
Duke University Press Playing for Keeps
Book SynopsisThe contributors to Playing for Keeps examine the ways in which musical improvisation can serve as a way to negotiate violence, trauma, systemic inequality, and the aftermaths of war and colonialism.Trade Review“Casting an eye on the world of improvisation, Playing for Keeps is a major corrective to the latent ethnocentrism of improvisation studies and shifts the field's focus in a revolutionary way. The volume challenges readers to think more carefully and critically about the status of improvisation in various traditional cultural contexts and the intersection of those contexts found in contemporary society. A smart, decisive statement on globalism and improvisation.” -- John Corbett, author of * Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium *"This is a rewarding project that is already extended by a special edition of the Journal Critical Studies In Improvisation and is to be further extended in a companion book now in progress." -- Phil England * The Wire *"A major academic achievement, Playing for Keeps: Improvisation In The Aftermath is an enlightening examination of different manifestations of improvisation, their transforming possibilities, and of the ethics of listening." -- Ian Patterson * All About Jazz *"I was deeply touched by the description of your experience of our visit to Ramallah and the camps together. I would sincerely hope that your book will be read by more than the academics and intelligentsia, it’s very important." -- John McLaughlin"Playing for Keeps collects critical, thoughtfully selected on how musical improvisation can respond to and through trauma. . . . Case studies in this collection illustrate global improvisatory practices, framing them as solutions to encounters with difference that have failed in the past. These solutions seem especially timely for a world reckoning with dual crises: racism and disease. Each case study testifies to improvisation’s power to maintain and restore dignity through dialogic exchanges of creative response to horrific injustices, exchanges that facilitate co-creation of new community identities with an eye toward nurturing rather than perpetuating destruction. . . . Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals." -- S. Schmalenberger * Choice *“With beautifully written individual chapters on different musical events and communities, and each writer’s interpretation of improvisation in their research topic, [Playing for Keeps] is significant as a collection of essays, and builds upon the growing field of interdisciplinary critical research on improvisation.” -- Rebecca Zola * Jazz Perspectives *“[Playing for a Keeps] is a beacon of hope in times of crisis and will continue to be a reference point as the aftermaths of current crises persist in the years to come. The authors all outline ways in which improvisatory musics—and, more fundamentally, improvisation itself—can help those who suffer through and navigate crises and, afterward, salve the psychological wounds of the survivors.” -- Mike Ford * Current Musicology *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Playing for Keeps: An Introduction / Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter 1 1. manifesto / Matana Roberts 25 2. The Exhibition of Vandalizim: Improvising Healing, Politics, and Film in South Africa / Stephanie Vos 29 3. The Rigors of Afro/Canarian Jazz: Sounding Peripheral Vision with Severed Tongues / Mark Lomanno 55 4. "Opening Up a Space That Maybe Wouldn't Exist Otherwise" / Holding It Down in the Aftermath / Vijay Iyer in conversation with Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter 81 5. Experimental and Improvised Norths: The Sonic Geographies of Tanya Tagaq's Collaborations with Derek Charke and the Kronos Quartet / Kate Galloway 94 6. Nina Simone: CIVIL JAZZ! / Randy DuBurke 121 7. Free Improvised Music in Postwar Beirut: Differential Sounds, Intersectarian Collaborations, and Critical Collective Memory / Rana El Kadi 129 8. Street Concerts and Sexual Harassment in Post-Mubarak Egypt: Tarab as Affective Politics / Darci Sprengel 160 9. Improvisation, Grounded Humanity, and Witnessing in Palestine: An Interview with Al-Mada's Odeh Turjman and Reem Abdul Hadi / Daniel Fischlin 191 10. Silsulim (Improvised "Curls") in the Vocal Performance of Israeli Popular Music: Identity, Power, and Politics / Moshe Morad 250 11. Three Moments in Kī Hō`alu (Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar): Improvising as a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) Adaptive Strategy / Kevin Fellezs 275 12. From Prepeace to Postconflict: The Ethics of (Non) Listening and Cocreation in a Divided Society / Sara Ramshaw and Paul Stapleton 300 Contributors 325 Index 331
£112.20
Duke University Press Playing for Keeps
Book SynopsisThe contributors to Playing for Keeps examine the ways in which musical improvisation can serve as a way to negotiate violence, trauma, systemic inequality, and the aftermaths of war and colonialism.Trade Review“Casting an eye on the world of improvisation, Playing for Keeps is a major corrective to the latent ethnocentrism of improvisation studies and shifts the field's focus in a revolutionary way. The volume challenges readers to think more carefully and critically about the status of improvisation in various traditional cultural contexts and the intersection of those contexts found in contemporary society. A smart, decisive statement on globalism and improvisation.” -- John Corbett, author of * Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium *"This is a rewarding project that is already extended by a special edition of the Journal Critical Studies In Improvisation and is to be further extended in a companion book now in progress." -- Phil England * The Wire *"A major academic achievement, Playing for Keeps: Improvisation In The Aftermath is an enlightening examination of different manifestations of improvisation, their transforming possibilities, and of the ethics of listening." -- Ian Patterson * All About Jazz *"I was deeply touched by the description of your experience of our visit to Ramallah and the camps together. I would sincerely hope that your book will be read by more than the academics and intelligentsia, it’s very important." -- John McLaughlin"Playing for Keeps collects critical, thoughtfully selected on how musical improvisation can respond to and through trauma. . . . Case studies in this collection illustrate global improvisatory practices, framing them as solutions to encounters with difference that have failed in the past. These solutions seem especially timely for a world reckoning with dual crises: racism and disease. Each case study testifies to improvisation’s power to maintain and restore dignity through dialogic exchanges of creative response to horrific injustices, exchanges that facilitate co-creation of new community identities with an eye toward nurturing rather than perpetuating destruction. . . . Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals." -- S. Schmalenberger * Choice *“With beautifully written individual chapters on different musical events and communities, and each writer’s interpretation of improvisation in their research topic, [Playing for Keeps] is significant as a collection of essays, and builds upon the growing field of interdisciplinary critical research on improvisation.” -- Rebecca Zola * Jazz Perspectives *“[Playing for a Keeps] is a beacon of hope in times of crisis and will continue to be a reference point as the aftermaths of current crises persist in the years to come. The authors all outline ways in which improvisatory musics—and, more fundamentally, improvisation itself—can help those who suffer through and navigate crises and, afterward, salve the psychological wounds of the survivors.” -- Mike Ford * Current Musicology *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Playing for Keeps: An Introduction / Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter 1 1. manifesto / Matana Roberts 25 2. The Exhibition of Vandalizim: Improvising Healing, Politics, and Film in South Africa / Stephanie Vos 29 3. The Rigors of Afro/Canarian Jazz: Sounding Peripheral Vision with Severed Tongues / Mark Lomanno 55 4. "Opening Up a Space That Maybe Wouldn't Exist Otherwise" / Holding It Down in the Aftermath / Vijay Iyer in conversation with Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter 81 5. Experimental and Improvised Norths: The Sonic Geographies of Tanya Tagaq's Collaborations with Derek Charke and the Kronos Quartet / Kate Galloway 94 6. Nina Simone: CIVIL JAZZ! / Randy DuBurke 121 7. Free Improvised Music in Postwar Beirut: Differential Sounds, Intersectarian Collaborations, and Critical Collective Memory / Rana El Kadi 129 8. Street Concerts and Sexual Harassment in Post-Mubarak Egypt: Tarab as Affective Politics / Darci Sprengel 160 9. Improvisation, Grounded Humanity, and Witnessing in Palestine: An Interview with Al-Mada's Odeh Turjman and Reem Abdul Hadi / Daniel Fischlin 191 10. Silsulim (Improvised "Curls") in the Vocal Performance of Israeli Popular Music: Identity, Power, and Politics / Moshe Morad 250 11. Three Moments in Kī Hō`alu (Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar): Improvising as a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) Adaptive Strategy / Kevin Fellezs 275 12. From Prepeace to Postconflict: The Ethics of (Non) Listening and Cocreation in a Divided Society / Sara Ramshaw and Paul Stapleton 300 Contributors 325 Index 331
£27.90
Duke University Press The Meaning of Soul
Book SynopsisIn The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role playedTrade Review“Emily J. Lordi’s The Meaning of Soul will likely be the most important book I'll read this decade. Lordi reminds us that to hear soul, one must actively listen to the winding ways of black folk. Lordi is the greatest listener this nation has created, and this book will remind us that liberation starts with black sound.” -- Kiese Laymon“An exquisite work of sound scholarship, The Meaning of Soul offers a new narrative of soul music that compels us to rethink what we have missed about the genre and the political moment it inhabited. It at last articulates a usable, inclusive definition of soul, filling a critical gap in our understanding of black music and sociopolitical experiences in the United States and across the diaspora." -- Zandria F. Robinson“Emily J. Lordi incisively and insightfully takes up the daunting task of resurrecting, dissecting, and disentangling soul’s wide-ranging legacy, spillage, and overlap in black popular culture, black academia, and radical black politics. Her generation-leaping contrasts of the soul and ‘post-soul’ era’s most spiritualized and radicalized avatars from James Brown to Beyoncé serve up poignant and often piquant musicological reveals about classic, epochal recordings of Civil Rights-era and contemporary vintage. Lordi illuminates the evolutionary artistry that ensures the poetics, production, and ethos of soul kulcha sustain staying power as a haunted (and hainted) arbiter of black resilience, resistance, and embattled maroon futurism. With wit, detail, and ruminative verve Lordi narrates and interrogates how the journey of the soul meme’s movements within musical blackness navigates a crossroads full of split desire for both incendiary grassroots action and an infinity of intimate release.” -- Greg Tate"Lordi’s distinct takes on the genre are refreshing, built on close listening to artists like Riperton and Donny Hathaway and explorations of albums that reside outside the soul canon." * Kirkus Reviews *"The Meaning of Soul is a thoughtful, lively journey through rich musical archives that expands the definition of what it means to be a soul artist." -- Rachel Jagareski * Foreword Reviews *"Lordi vividly illustrates that soul artists offer models of black resistance, joy, and community through their songs. This is a must-read for musicologists, critics, and fans of soul." (Starred Review) * Publishers Weekly *"Lordi’s book is essential reading, for she brilliantly guides us to reconsider the meaning of soul and to redefine it." -- Henry Carrigan * No Depression *"A strong choice for libraries supporting African American studies or popular American music programs." -- Jeffrey Hastings * Library Journal *"Detailing not only the evolution of the genre but of the criticism surrounding it, The Meaning Of Soul is a heartfelt appreciation as well as a welcome addition to the scholarly soul canon." -- Michael A Gonzales * The Wire *"Few cultural theorists listen to music this well or joyfully; few critics place their judgments and pleasures within as persuasive a theoretical framework." -- Keith Harris * CityPages *"With welcoming prose that belies its density, The Meaning of Soul focuses on ostensibly unconventional creative choices: soul singers’ covers of songs written by white artists; ad-libs, improvisations, and mistakes; the uses of falsetto and the 'false endings' that trickle throughout the oeuvres of many Black artists. She is attentive to the significant contributions of the female architects of the genre. . . . Lordi gives a deft, concise accounting of soul music’s political and social milieu." -- Danielle A. Jackson * Bookforum *“Meaning of Soul is a needed corrective, challenging how scholarship and much of popular culture remembers the soul music era. Lordi refuses descriptions of the era that only allow its brightest stars and biggest names full consideration.... Her work serves as an exemplar for inclusive genre analysis that makes room for musical possibility.” -- Fredara Mareva Hadley * Journal of Musicological Research *"Lordi’s love for soul music, vibrant writing, and analytical acumen coalesce in a book that is difficult to put down. Readers are unlikely to hear soul music the same way ever again. Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers." -- S. Graham * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Keeping On 1 1. From Soul to Post-soul: A Literary and Musical History 19 2. We Shall Overcome, Shelter, and Veil: Soul Covers 46 3. Rescripted Relations: Soul Ad-libs 74 4. Emergent Interiors: Soul Falsettos 101 5. Never Catch Me: False Endings from Soul to Post-soul 126 Conclusion. "I'm Tired of Marvin Asking Me What's Going On": Soul Legacies and the Work of Afropresentism 150 Notes 165 Index 205
£18.89
Duke University Press How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind
Book Synopsis“Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly.” So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce''s urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as “rage,” and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, and beyond. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes a set of interpretive practices, affective dispositTrade Review“This lyrical and profound tour de force explores the intersection of race and derailment, or ‘madness as methodology.’ We know that the traumatic discordance of slavery's enduring legacy manifests as both private sorrow and public health emergency. Yet that unyielding stress is sometimes also the forge of a radical black creativity vividly exceeding the shapeshifting states of un-Reason into which raced and nonnormative bodies are too relentlessly imagined and compressed. La Marr Jurelle Bruce has given a gift in this powerful recontextualization of black creative ‘madness’ as liberatory demand for expressive life—to wit, an aesthetic practice by which, ultimately, ‘what is stolen is returned, and what is unwritten is at last inscribed.’” -- Patricia J. Williams, columnist for "Diary of a Mad Law Professor" in The Nation"The sheer range of academic discourses that Bruce engages—from disability studies and psychoanalysis to affect theory and black studies—is impressive enough. What Bruce does within their intersections, however, is create a kind of poetics of black madness—a way of looking that is itself a way a making; or maybe it’s the converse—a way of making that is itself a way of looking. . . I can’t predict the future, but it’s so obvious to me that scholars will long be grateful for Bruce’s expansive imagination and the careful attention paid to radical black creativity in this wildly astute and socially and emotionally conscious work." -- Dawn Lundy Martin * 4Columns *"Bruce’s deft and thoughtful touch invites readers to dream loudly among a compendium of radical Black artists that few others would think about collectively. With subjects that range from early-twentieth-century jazz cornet player Buddy Bolden to contemporary rapper and composer Lauryn Hill (and many in between), Bruce’s archive reflects the mindful mayhem at the center of his methodology. . . . Bruce’s work closes with [this] imperative direction: 'Now let go.' But letting go of a book that feels both so present and so prescient may prove impossible." -- Omari Weekes * Bookforum *"In La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, we find ourselves in a dance with the mad. . . . [The] book is an analysis of praxis, a snap, a click, a break, an opening, a closing, the middle, the beyond, the here, the now, the then, and the there." -- Michael Cordov * E3W Review of Books *"A paradigm-shaping book for future scholarship around mental difference. Bruce’s book not only helps announce the emergence of [mad studies] but significantly advances the analytic, cultural, historical, and theoretical sophistication of mad scholarship...As a result, How to Go Mad is a must-read for those of us engaged in the intersectional politics and scholarship of difference." -- Bradley E. Lewis * Journal of Medical Humanities *"Bruce articulates understandings of madness that encompass the lived experiences of Black, queer, and disabled people, putting forth a 'mad methodology' that capsizes dominant notions of social, political, economic normalcy, and ethics, and invites, for me, a new possibility of Afrofuturistic imagining. . . . [A] dynamic critical analysis of madcrazyBlackness that spans genre, medium, and epoch." -- Victoria R. Collins * Electric Literature *"This melodic volume explores relationships between the surreal, impossible conditions (and conditions of impossibility) experienced by Black people and our radical, imaginative 'mad Black creativity.' Showing us 'lessons [we can] learn from those who make homeland in wasteland' as blueprints for freedom dreaming, Bruce picks apart the self-obscuring cultural and political forces that shape understandings of madness to disempower, disenfranchise, and control Black life and Being...It is ratchet. It is unruly. It is gorgeous." -- Kia Darling-Hammond * Nonprofit Quarterly *"With a Walt Whitman-style expansiveness, Bruce wraps his arms around a multitude of creative genres and Black artists and then pulls us into his project of 'radical compassion' with mad subjects. Bruce’s writing is both critical and compelling, analytical and yet intimate. . . . How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind invites readers to sit with madness for a while, to explore its radical liberatory potential, and to become mad methodologists with radical compassion. Hold tight. Let go. And let this book take you there.” -- Elizabeth Donaldson * Disability Studies Quarterly *"How to Go Mad is a love story, a potent reflection on a few of the many Black creative minds who have innovated art forms and fashioned the trajectory of history, while having their 'sanity' called into question by normative, white, anti-Black, anti-Mad audiences and institutions." -- Liz Miller * Lateral *“How to Go Mad will undoubtedly influence conversations in black studies, science and technology studies, disability studies, and other fields. It is a lyrical, nuanced model of how radical care produces new approaches beyond the rehearsal of pathology.” -- Jacob Hood * Catalyst *"If we imagine Black studies to be a space of creativity where Black scholars break from disciplinary strictures and form, then this text is an exemplary practice...The writing is evocative and accessible for any of us who have felt searing rage and those whose waking hours are haunted by madness." -- Hugo ka Canham * The Black Scholar *"One cannot read this work without also assembling its madness with the mad blue notes of Buddy Bolden, the crazy blues of Bessie Smith, the 'good at' madness of Ntozake Shange’s Hyacinthe, the maddening black genius of Ms. Lauryn Hill, the unruly madness of Kanye West, or the 'mad real world' of Dave Chappelle. Bruce is not simply using these creative artists as case studies of madness dipped in black, but is presenting a terrain where the expanse of madness and blackness can only be read together—in this push and push, the fracture of Reason is revealed." -- Dana Francisco Miranda * Blog of the APA *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix 1. Mad Is a Place 1 2. "He Blew His Brains Out through the Trumpet": Buddy Bolden and the Impossible Sound of Madness 36 Interlude. "No Wiggles in the Dark of Her Soul": Black Madness, Metaphor, and "Murder!" 71 3. The Blood-Stained Bed 79 4. A Portrait of the Artist as a Mad Black Woman 110 5. "The People inside My Head, Too": Ms. Lauryn Hill Sings Truth to Power in the Key of Madness 139 6. The Joker's Wild but That Nigga's Crazy: Dave Chappelle Laughs until It Hurts 172 7. Songs in Madtime: Black Music, Madness, and Metaphysical Syncopation 201 Afterword. The Nutty Professor (A Confession) 231 Notes 239 Bibliography 303 Index 333
£75.65
Duke University Press Universal Tonality
Book SynopsisJazz critic and historian Cisco Bradley tells the story of the life and music of bassist and composer William Parker, who for fifty years has been a monumental figure in free jazz.Trade Review“Writing elegantly about the music as well as William Parker's work as an activist and organizer, Cisco Bradley gives a full sense of Parker's centrality to the development and maintenance of the free jazz scene in New York as well as his efforts in presenting the music across the globe. Universal Tonality is a book worthy of its object.” -- Fred Moten, author of * Black and Blur *“We have precious few monographic works on creative musicians, fewer still on living ones, and none quite like Cisco Bradley's fascinating biography of bassist, bandleader, organizer, and composer William Parker. Bradley situates Parker as part of a historical legacy, skillfully illuminating Parker's career—including his crucial term with Cecil Taylor—as well as the entire underground scene, including the groundbreaking Sound Unity Festival, the enduring Vision Festival, and manifold developments in the New York creative music community. An essential entry in the critical culture reading list.” -- John Corbett, author of * Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium *"Each of [Parker's] own major projects, including the quartet, Raining On The Moon, Little Huey, and In Order To Survive, is discussed and analyzed in depth; his family history and personal life are documented in detail; and ultimately as full a portrait as possible of William Parker, artist and human being, is painted. Essential reading." -- Phil Freeman * Stereogum *"Cisco Bradley endeavors to pull the diverse parts of the artist's life together in this first ever biography of Parker. It is a monumental task, and like the dozens of biographies of Louis Armstrong that have been published, it is a good start." -- Mark Corroto * All About Jazz *"This is long overdue respect and praise for one of the finest and hardest working musicians of the post-war era. William Parker is a national treasure, as this book is a testament to his perseverance." -- Tim Niland * Music and More *"Bradley's work, currently only in English, really deserves to be translated into multiple languages." (translated from Italian) -- Giuseppe Segala * All About Jazz *"As with the best of jazz biographies, there are excellent descriptions of the music to be found on the key albums of Parker’s various groups. And these vivid words send the curious listener scurrying off to hear the music. . . . The biography is an excellent introduction to William Parker’s music and to his role in the free jazz community in New York and the USA." -- Tony Dudley-Evans * London Jazz News *"A timely and dynamic picture of the great artist’s travels, to date. Bradley’s book charts a past that also provides many clues and contextual narratives that tell us much about where Parker may be heading." -- Lee Rice Epstein * Free Jazz Collective *"Parker’s art and family history get explored at length in Cisco Bradley’s illuminating new critical study Universal Tonality, the first William Parker book that William Parker didn’t have to write himself. Parker appreciates the attention—he called it the story of how he rose 'from rags to enlightenment. Note that I didn’t say riches'—but still encourages musicians to tell their own stories, and not just because critics can be slow to catch up." -- Alan Scherstuhl * New York Times *"Excellent and overdue. . . ." -- Angus Batey * The Quietus *"The book, while essentially a biography, explains aspects of his musical vision that are exemplified by these recordings. There is an emphasis on vocals and lyrics, and the book goes in some depth with regard to Parker’s interest in poetry and literature, and his love of music from other cultures as well. . . . An important takeaway from Universal Tonality is Parker’s belief that music is in and of itself a revolutionary act, a rebellion against the hatred which he sees as inherent in the current organization of the world." -- Todd Manning * Rock and Roll Globe *"Cisco Bradley's insightful, detailed and beautifully illustrated biography is a labour of love. . . . Universal Tonality made me realise that, much as I've always loved his music, I hadn't begun to appreciate William Parker's achievement." -- Andy Hamilton * The Wire *"Bradley's book is a full-on biography, both personal and musical, that never gets lost in academic jargon. . . . The book succeeds in its sheer storytelling of a life, through interviews with Parker and his fellow musicians, who consistently connect Parker's music to his life and to the politics of community. One comes away from Bradley's book quite humbled by a journey that seems never to have compromised on creativity or its possibility to bring more justice to the world. The musician that emerges from Universal Tonality is also a poet and a political activist- or maybe it's clearer to say that we come to see Parker as having erased the lines separating those different roles." -- Will Layman * Popmatters *"An instant classic of jazz biography, Universal Tonality is a genuinely inspirational read, testament to the transformative power of art." -- Stewart Smith * Tribune *"If an antidote to apathy consists of work and proselytizing, then bassist/composer/bandleader, activist and organizer William Parker embodies that antidote. Cisco Bradley has achieved much in simply documenting the extent of his subject’s activities, but he also highlights the spiritual and social dimensions of Parker’s work, all of which is set within music at the free / demanding end of the spectrum, as opposed to the aural balm that jazz in the 21st century often seems to be." -- Nic Jones * Jazz Journal *"With sources that include Parker himself, poetry and excerpts from his journals, and insights from friends and peers, Cisco Bradley explains how the artist has maintained his focus. In the process, he discusses free/avant-garde jazz perceptively, helping to clear away hyperbole and misunderstanding." -- Mike Shanley * Jazz Times *"The publication of Universal Tonality . . . is both long overdue and richly appreciated. . . . Anyone interested in the state of the free improvising scene needs to read this book." -- Robert Bush * New York City Jazz Record *"Parker is one of the foremost practitioners of what is arguably the greatest Black-led American artistic tradition, i.e. jazz, and Universal Tonality casts him in the full light his work deserves." -- Patrick James Dunagan * Rain Taxi *"This meticulously researched, affectionate biography analyzes Parker’s impact as a musician, a composer, and a political revolutionary. An important work that will appeal to jazz historians, scholars of Black history, and music lovers." -- Lisa Henry * Library Journal *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. "Flowers Grow in My Room": Realizing a Vision 1 I. Origins 1. Enslavement and Resistance: From West Africa to the Carolinas to Harlem 15 2. Struggle, Beauty, and Survival: Childhood in the South Bronx 41 3. Consciousness: Art, Politics, and Self in the Mind of a Young Man 61 II. Early Work 4. The Loft Scene: Art, Community, and Self-Determination 93 5. "Music That Will Give People Hope": Centering Dance Music with Patricia Nicholson 124 6. "Music Is Supposed to Change People": Working with Cecil Taylor 148 III. Toward the Universal 7. "It Is the Job of the Artist to Incite Political Revolution": In Order to Survive 173 8. Into the Tone World: Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra 194 9. Toward a Universal Sound: William Parker Quartet and Raining on the Moon 216 10. Honoring the Elders: Tribute Projects and Other Bands 239 11. All People Need Truth to Survive: Recent Work and Legacy 261 Appendix: William Parker Discography 279 Notes 291 Bibliography 359 Index 385
£80.75
Duke University Press Black Diamond Queens
Book SynopsisMaureen Mahon documents the major contributions African American women vocalists such as Big Mama Thornton, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, and Merry Clayton have made to rock and roll throughout its history.Trade Review“We've got to know where we came from in order to get where we want to go, and there's no doubt that Maureen knows where she is headed! You can absolutely feel the passion in every word she speaks, whether in person or on paper, and Black Diamond Queens is no exception.” -- Quincy Jones“I thought I knew the stories of the women who populate this stellar revisioning of rock and roll history. Now I realize how much I had to learn. A revolutionary read that should chasten rock historians and will delight anyone who wants the full picture of how black women shaped a culture that pushed them to the side and how they survived.” -- Ann Powers, author of * Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music *"... Mahon has done plenty to expose how Black women rockers have been marginalized by musicians, audiences, historians, and critics. A well-researched, sociologically savvy effort to expand the rock canon." * Kirkus Reviews *“The book that's poised to set rock history free. Maureen Mahon's Black Diamond Queens sets the record straight by offering a meticulously detailed study of the ways in which Black women musicians and entertainers played pivotal roles in the birth of the genre and fearlessly revolutionized the form. Essential reading for anyone who cares about popular music culture.” -- Daphne A. Brooks, author of * Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 *Starred Review. "With depth and breadth, Mahon’s work centers the many African American women who heavily influence rock and roll, from LaVern Baker to Tina Turner. Rock and roll emerged neither from a vacuum nor from the minds of white, male performers alone. Mahon’s comprehensive research and intelligent thinking are captured in her compelling writing." -- Emily Dziuban * Booklist *"If you are curious about music and its development across genres or would like more examples of Black women’s exquisite impact on every aspect of life, Black Diamond Queens is for you. You won’t find many of these queens on the walls of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or in canonical texts discussing the origins of rock and roll. Still, crucially and inspiringly, you might see yourself in this group of Black women whose manicured fingers are all over rock and roll. At the very least, you will be exposed to some incredible new songs." -- Briana Spivey * Women's Review of Books *"A rare gem. . . . this meticulously researched book is a key entry in the ongoing record-correction of 20th-century popular music history, one that recenters women, and most crucially, women of color. . . . The collective telling of their complex stories, within an intersectional feminist framework, is the kind of illuminating scholarship that rock really needs." -- Jillian Mapes * Pitchfork *"As I read each page of Black Diamond Queens, learning about the Black women who contributed to not only the sound but the ethos of rock and roll, I felt like I was also learning about myself. In the end, the stories felt less like a permission slip to feel at home in a genre I most resonate with, but a reminder that, like these women, I should never feel the need to ask for permission at all." -- Erica Campbell * UPROXX *"Black Diamond Queens does what the best music books do: It urges us to play this music again — or for the first time — and to listen to it. Mahon’s brilliant book repays careful reading and challenges us to think anew about the history of rock and roll and the ways we might have traditionally understood it." -- Henry Carrigan * No Depression *"[H]ighly recommended for anyone who is interested in deepening their knowledge of the legacies and profoundness of Black women in music.' -- Jordannah Elizabeth * Amsterdam News *"This monograph is not only a welcome addition to works on genre, gender, and race but contributes a unique insight into Black-middle-class respectability politics in twentieth-century America. Black Diamond Queens is a great jumping-off point for contemporary Black feminist theorists, musicologically trained or not. Mahon has gifted scholars with a mantle, leaving room for others to take it up and continue the work of re-storing music history through the investigation of race, gender, and genre." -- Larissa A. Irizarry * Notes *"Mahon’s use of contemporaneous accounts, interviews, and illustrations contributes immensely to 'setting the record straight' regarding the impact, role, and significance of a group of historic figures often subverted by a male-dominated record industry and largely overlooked in the standard literature on the evolution of rock 'n' roll. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers." -- D. V. Moskowitz * Choice *"Rich, engrossing, and profoundly important. . . . Black Diamond Queens offers a long-overdue correction of the rock and roll historical record. And the final verdict? Black women rock." -- Kimberly Mack * Journal of Popular Music Studies *Table of ContentsIllustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Rocking and Rolling with Big Mama Thornton 29 2. LaVern Baker, the Incredible Disappearing Queen of Rock and Roll 52 3. Remembering the Shirelles 76 4. Call and Response 105 5. Negotiating "Brown Sugar" 141 6. The Revolutionary Sisterhood of Labelle 182 7. The Fearless Funk of Betty Davis 213 8. Tina Turner's Turn to Rock 240 Epilogue 273 Notes 285 Bibliography 349 Index 375
£80.75
Duke University Press Soundworks
Book SynopsisAnthony Reed takes the recorded collaborations between African American poets and musicians such as Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Cecil Taylor, and Charles Mingus to trace the overlaps between experimental music and poetry and the ways in which intellectuals, poets, and musicians define black sound as a radical aesthetic practice.Trade Review“Offering a new way of thinking about black soundwork as an understanding of text, Anthony Reed makes a deep theoretical intervention in black studies by opening up the role of recordings in the black aesthetic avant-garde. The beauty and appeal of Soundworks lies in Reed's fresh focus on the records that allow us to hear the more ephemeral and unrecordable situation of blackness.” -- Margo Natalie Crawford, author of * Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics *“Anthony Reed adds his instrument to the slowly swelling chorus of intently listening, jazzed readers and critics. We've gone from the veritable whisper to a scream, and now is the time to consider the black media concept we have been inhabiting. Reed argues for an ‘overhearing,’ a phonographic mode of what he terms disalienation. Baraka called it ‘word-music’ form. Whatever we term it, it remains Black soundwork. Give it a listen.” -- Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of * Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation *"Reed’s work . . . clears needed space to think through Black creative production on its own terms, and likewise, to see its revolutionary and radical ambitions as immanent expressions of Black soundwork. Overall, Soundworks offers a rich and nuanced account of media and materiality that will aid scholars in rethinking the conceptual tools and labor with which we approach Black music." -- Celeste Day Moore * Journal of Musicological Research *"[T]his book is a vital addition to the growing secondary literature about the jazz-poetry interface. . . . Reed is certainly qualified to address this topic, because in addition to being an established scholar he writes poetry and is a musician. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- B. Wallenstein * Choice *"The most satisfying aspects of Soundworks are found in Reed’s analysis of the recordings and performances he examines. Moreover, it is these sections that contain Reed’s best writing. He seems able to match the tone of his analysis and description of the musical and poetic personalities of these artists, and his enthusiasm for their art is evident." -- Duncan Heining * Popular Music *"A critical contribution to music, jazz, and Black studies in particular. . . . A richly poetic text, whose depth and subtlety rewards patient, repeated engagement." -- Dan DiPiero * Journal of Popular Music Studies *“It is significant that Reed describes this work as recreation, and that he highlights the significance of remediation in Black soundwork. One of this book’s key innovations is that it is a media history of poetry, and an examination of poetry’s work as mediation.” -- Sarah Dowling * Poetics *"The conceptualization of soundwork as both a textual and auditory practice is perhaps the most revelatory contribution made by Reed’s book, for it is a concept whose salience extends beyond phonographic poetry or black radical performance. . . . Across the book, Reed balances heady theoretical imaginings of contingent practices of freedom with attentive close listening to mediated forms of black sound." -- Jessica E. Teague * Contemporary Literature *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Black Sonic: Textuality 1 1. Voice Prints: Toward a Black Media Concept 23 2. Communities in Transition: A Poetics of Black Communism 61 3. Tomorrow is the Question! Amiri Baraka's Poetics for a Post-Revolutionary Age 103 4. Body/Language: The Semiotics and Poetics of Improvisation and Black Embodiment 143 Coda. No Simple Explanations 181 Notes 195 Bibliography 235 Index 251
£72.25
Duke University Press Universal Tonality
Book SynopsisJazz critic and historian Cisco Bradley tells the story of the life and music of bassist and composer William Parker, who for fifty years has been a monumental figure in free jazz.Trade Review“Writing elegantly about the music as well as William Parker's work as an activist and organizer, Cisco Bradley gives a full sense of Parker's centrality to the development and maintenance of the free jazz scene in New York as well as his efforts in presenting the music across the globe. Universal Tonality is a book worthy of its object.” -- Fred Moten, author of * Black and Blur *“We have precious few monographic works on creative musicians, fewer still on living ones, and none quite like Cisco Bradley's fascinating biography of bassist, bandleader, organizer, and composer William Parker. Bradley situates Parker as part of a historical legacy, skillfully illuminating Parker's career—including his crucial term with Cecil Taylor—as well as the entire underground scene, including the groundbreaking Sound Unity Festival, the enduring Vision Festival, and manifold developments in the New York creative music community. An essential entry in the critical culture reading list.” -- John Corbett, author of * Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium *"Each of [Parker's] own major projects, including the quartet, Raining On The Moon, Little Huey, and In Order To Survive, is discussed and analyzed in depth; his family history and personal life are documented in detail; and ultimately as full a portrait as possible of William Parker, artist and human being, is painted. Essential reading." -- Phil Freeman * Stereogum *"Cisco Bradley endeavors to pull the diverse parts of the artist's life together in this first ever biography of Parker. It is a monumental task, and like the dozens of biographies of Louis Armstrong that have been published, it is a good start." -- Mark Corroto * All About Jazz *"This is long overdue respect and praise for one of the finest and hardest working musicians of the post-war era. William Parker is a national treasure, as this book is a testament to his perseverance." -- Tim Niland * Music and More *"Bradley's work, currently only in English, really deserves to be translated into multiple languages." (translated from Italian) -- Giuseppe Segala * All About Jazz *"As with the best of jazz biographies, there are excellent descriptions of the music to be found on the key albums of Parker’s various groups. And these vivid words send the curious listener scurrying off to hear the music. . . . The biography is an excellent introduction to William Parker’s music and to his role in the free jazz community in New York and the USA." -- Tony Dudley-Evans * London Jazz News *"A timely and dynamic picture of the great artist’s travels, to date. Bradley’s book charts a past that also provides many clues and contextual narratives that tell us much about where Parker may be heading." -- Lee Rice Epstein * Free Jazz Collective *"Parker’s art and family history get explored at length in Cisco Bradley’s illuminating new critical study Universal Tonality, the first William Parker book that William Parker didn’t have to write himself. Parker appreciates the attention—he called it the story of how he rose 'from rags to enlightenment. Note that I didn’t say riches'—but still encourages musicians to tell their own stories, and not just because critics can be slow to catch up." -- Alan Scherstuhl * New York Times *"Excellent and overdue. . . ." -- Angus Batey * The Quietus *"The book, while essentially a biography, explains aspects of his musical vision that are exemplified by these recordings. There is an emphasis on vocals and lyrics, and the book goes in some depth with regard to Parker’s interest in poetry and literature, and his love of music from other cultures as well. . . . An important takeaway from Universal Tonality is Parker’s belief that music is in and of itself a revolutionary act, a rebellion against the hatred which he sees as inherent in the current organization of the world." -- Todd Manning * Rock and Roll Globe *"Cisco Bradley's insightful, detailed and beautifully illustrated biography is a labour of love. . . . Universal Tonality made me realise that, much as I've always loved his music, I hadn't begun to appreciate William Parker's achievement." -- Andy Hamilton * The Wire *"Bradley's book is a full-on biography, both personal and musical, that never gets lost in academic jargon. . . . The book succeeds in its sheer storytelling of a life, through interviews with Parker and his fellow musicians, who consistently connect Parker's music to his life and to the politics of community. One comes away from Bradley's book quite humbled by a journey that seems never to have compromised on creativity or its possibility to bring more justice to the world. The musician that emerges from Universal Tonality is also a poet and a political activist- or maybe it's clearer to say that we come to see Parker as having erased the lines separating those different roles." -- Will Layman * Popmatters *"An instant classic of jazz biography, Universal Tonality is a genuinely inspirational read, testament to the transformative power of art." -- Stewart Smith * Tribune *"If an antidote to apathy consists of work and proselytizing, then bassist/composer/bandleader, activist and organizer William Parker embodies that antidote. Cisco Bradley has achieved much in simply documenting the extent of his subject’s activities, but he also highlights the spiritual and social dimensions of Parker’s work, all of which is set within music at the free / demanding end of the spectrum, as opposed to the aural balm that jazz in the 21st century often seems to be." -- Nic Jones * Jazz Journal *"With sources that include Parker himself, poetry and excerpts from his journals, and insights from friends and peers, Cisco Bradley explains how the artist has maintained his focus. In the process, he discusses free/avant-garde jazz perceptively, helping to clear away hyperbole and misunderstanding." -- Mike Shanley * Jazz Times *"The publication of Universal Tonality . . . is both long overdue and richly appreciated. . . . Anyone interested in the state of the free improvising scene needs to read this book." -- Robert Bush * New York City Jazz Record *"Parker is one of the foremost practitioners of what is arguably the greatest Black-led American artistic tradition, i.e. jazz, and Universal Tonality casts him in the full light his work deserves." -- Patrick James Dunagan * Rain Taxi *"This meticulously researched, affectionate biography analyzes Parker’s impact as a musician, a composer, and a political revolutionary. An important work that will appeal to jazz historians, scholars of Black history, and music lovers." -- Lisa Henry * Library Journal *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. "Flowers Grow in My Room": Realizing a Vision 1 I. Origins 1. Enslavement and Resistance: From West Africa to the Carolinas to Harlem 15 2. Struggle, Beauty, and Survival: Childhood in the South Bronx 41 3. Consciousness: Art, Politics, and Self in the Mind of a Young Man 61 II. Early Work 4. The Loft Scene: Art, Community, and Self-Determination 93 5. "Music That Will Give People Hope": Centering Dance Music with Patricia Nicholson 124 6. "Music Is Supposed to Change People": Working with Cecil Taylor 148 III. Toward the Universal 7. "It Is the Job of the Artist to Incite Political Revolution": In Order to Survive 173 8. Into the Tone World: Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra 194 9. Toward a Universal Sound: William Parker Quartet and Raining on the Moon 216 10. Honoring the Elders: Tribute Projects and Other Bands 239 11. All People Need Truth to Survive: Recent Work and Legacy 261 Appendix: William Parker Discography 279 Notes 291 Bibliography 359 Index 385
£22.79
Duke University Press Black Diamond Queens
Book SynopsisAfrican American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre''s most iconic acts. Despite this, black women''s importance to the music''s history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.Trade Review“We've got to know where we came from in order to get where we want to go, and there's no doubt that Maureen knows where she is headed! You can absolutely feel the passion in every word she speaks, whether in person or on paper, and Black Diamond Queens is no exception.” -- Quincy Jones“I thought I knew the stories of the women who populate this stellar revisioning of rock and roll history. Now I realize how much I had to learn. A revolutionary read that should chasten rock historians and will delight anyone who wants the full picture of how black women shaped a culture that pushed them to the side and how they survived.” -- Ann Powers, author of * Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music *"... Mahon has done plenty to expose how Black women rockers have been marginalized by musicians, audiences, historians, and critics. A well-researched, sociologically savvy effort to expand the rock canon." * Kirkus Reviews *“The book that's poised to set rock history free. Maureen Mahon's Black Diamond Queens sets the record straight by offering a meticulously detailed study of the ways in which Black women musicians and entertainers played pivotal roles in the birth of the genre and fearlessly revolutionized the form. Essential reading for anyone who cares about popular music culture.” -- Daphne A. Brooks, author of * Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 *Starred Review. "With depth and breadth, Mahon’s work centers the many African American women who heavily influence rock and roll, from LaVern Baker to Tina Turner. Rock and roll emerged neither from a vacuum nor from the minds of white, male performers alone. Mahon’s comprehensive research and intelligent thinking are captured in her compelling writing." -- Emily Dziuban * Booklist *"If you are curious about music and its development across genres or would like more examples of Black women’s exquisite impact on every aspect of life, Black Diamond Queens is for you. You won’t find many of these queens on the walls of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or in canonical texts discussing the origins of rock and roll. Still, crucially and inspiringly, you might see yourself in this group of Black women whose manicured fingers are all over rock and roll. At the very least, you will be exposed to some incredible new songs." -- Briana Spivey * Women's Review of Books *"A rare gem. . . . this meticulously researched book is a key entry in the ongoing record-correction of 20th-century popular music history, one that recenters women, and most crucially, women of color. . . . The collective telling of their complex stories, within an intersectional feminist framework, is the kind of illuminating scholarship that rock really needs." -- Jillian Mapes * Pitchfork *"As I read each page of Black Diamond Queens, learning about the Black women who contributed to not only the sound but the ethos of rock and roll, I felt like I was also learning about myself. In the end, the stories felt less like a permission slip to feel at home in a genre I most resonate with, but a reminder that, like these women, I should never feel the need to ask for permission at all." -- Erica Campbell * UPROXX *"Black Diamond Queens does what the best music books do: It urges us to play this music again — or for the first time — and to listen to it. Mahon’s brilliant book repays careful reading and challenges us to think anew about the history of rock and roll and the ways we might have traditionally understood it." -- Henry Carrigan * No Depression *"[H]ighly recommended for anyone who is interested in deepening their knowledge of the legacies and profoundness of Black women in music.' -- Jordannah Elizabeth * Amsterdam News *"This monograph is not only a welcome addition to works on genre, gender, and race but contributes a unique insight into Black-middle-class respectability politics in twentieth-century America. Black Diamond Queens is a great jumping-off point for contemporary Black feminist theorists, musicologically trained or not. Mahon has gifted scholars with a mantle, leaving room for others to take it up and continue the work of re-storing music history through the investigation of race, gender, and genre." -- Larissa A. Irizarry * Notes *"Mahon’s use of contemporaneous accounts, interviews, and illustrations contributes immensely to 'setting the record straight' regarding the impact, role, and significance of a group of historic figures often subverted by a male-dominated record industry and largely overlooked in the standard literature on the evolution of rock 'n' roll. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers." -- D. V. Moskowitz * Choice *"Rich, engrossing, and profoundly important. . . . Black Diamond Queens offers a long-overdue correction of the rock and roll historical record. And the final verdict? Black women rock." -- Kimberly Mack * Journal of Popular Music Studies *Table of ContentsIllustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Rocking and Rolling with Big Mama Thornton 29 2. LaVern Baker, the Incredible Disappearing Queen of Rock and Roll 52 3. Remembering the Shirelles 76 4. Call and Response 105 5. Negotiating "Brown Sugar" 141 6. The Revolutionary Sisterhood of Labelle 182 7. The Fearless Funk of Betty Davis 213 8. Tina Turner's Turn to Rock 240 Epilogue 273 Notes 285 Bibliography 349 Index 375
£22.79
Duke University Press Soundworks
Book SynopsisIn Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requTrade Review“Offering a new way of thinking about black soundwork as an understanding of text, Anthony Reed makes a deep theoretical intervention in black studies by opening up the role of recordings in the black aesthetic avant-garde. The beauty and appeal of Soundworks lies in Reed's fresh focus on the records that allow us to hear the more ephemeral and unrecordable situation of blackness.” -- Margo Natalie Crawford, author of * Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics *“Anthony Reed adds his instrument to the slowly swelling chorus of intently listening, jazzed readers and critics. We've gone from the veritable whisper to a scream, and now is the time to consider the black media concept we have been inhabiting. Reed argues for an ‘overhearing,’ a phonographic mode of what he terms disalienation. Baraka called it ‘word-music’ form. Whatever we term it, it remains Black soundwork. Give it a listen.” -- Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of * Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation *"Reed’s work . . . clears needed space to think through Black creative production on its own terms, and likewise, to see its revolutionary and radical ambitions as immanent expressions of Black soundwork. Overall, Soundworks offers a rich and nuanced account of media and materiality that will aid scholars in rethinking the conceptual tools and labor with which we approach Black music." -- Celeste Day Moore * Journal of Musicological Research *"[T]his book is a vital addition to the growing secondary literature about the jazz-poetry interface. . . . Reed is certainly qualified to address this topic, because in addition to being an established scholar he writes poetry and is a musician. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- B. Wallenstein * Choice *"The most satisfying aspects of Soundworks are found in Reed’s analysis of the recordings and performances he examines. Moreover, it is these sections that contain Reed’s best writing. He seems able to match the tone of his analysis and description of the musical and poetic personalities of these artists, and his enthusiasm for their art is evident." -- Duncan Heining * Popular Music *"A critical contribution to music, jazz, and Black studies in particular. . . . A richly poetic text, whose depth and subtlety rewards patient, repeated engagement." -- Dan DiPiero * Journal of Popular Music Studies *“It is significant that Reed describes this work as recreation, and that he highlights the significance of remediation in Black soundwork. One of this book’s key innovations is that it is a media history of poetry, and an examination of poetry’s work as mediation.” -- Sarah Dowling * Poetics *"The conceptualization of soundwork as both a textual and auditory practice is perhaps the most revelatory contribution made by Reed’s book, for it is a concept whose salience extends beyond phonographic poetry or black radical performance. . . . Across the book, Reed balances heady theoretical imaginings of contingent practices of freedom with attentive close listening to mediated forms of black sound." -- Jessica E. Teague * Contemporary Literature *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Black Sonic: Textuality 1 1. Voice Prints: Toward a Black Media Concept 23 2. Communities in Transition: A Poetics of Black Communism 61 3. Tomorrow is the Question! Amiri Baraka's Poetics for a Post-Revolutionary Age 103 4. Body/Language: The Semiotics and Poetics of Improvisation and Black Embodiment 143 Coda. No Simple Explanations 181 Notes 195 Bibliography 235 Index 251
£19.79
Duke University Press Roadrunner A Song by Jonathan Richman and the
Book SynopsisCultural theorist and poet Joshua Clover examines Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' 1972 song “Roadrunner,” charting its place in rock & roll history and American culture.Trade Review“Roadrunner is a wonderful book: unique, passionate, sardonic, and as intellectually playful as it is rigorous. It is thrilling to be in the presence of a writer realizing all of his gifts—and yet he and the reader never lose sight of the song or cease to hear it. In that sense, Joshua Clover has not only realized himself as a writer; he has realized the song.” -- Greil Marcus, author of * The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs *“Roadrunner is incisive, poetic, and full of life, a beautifully circuitous meditation that mirrors how obsessive music fandom feels. Joshua Clover is in his finest critical form here.” -- Jessica Hopper, author of * The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic *"In this fascinating discursive journey, Clover discusses Boston-area car culture’s impact on the lyrics and music of 'Roadrunner' and other road and highway songs; he also laments social changes wrought by the emphasis on industrialization and, more recently, financialization, at the expense of substantive production. . . . Clover demonstrates a sweeping command of his material. . . ." -- Barry Zaslow * Library Journal *"In a brisk 100-plus pages, he pulls off a kind of critical jiujitsu, linking a song about driving past the Stop & Shop 'with the radio on' back to Chuck Berry's classic songs about riding along in an automobile, and forward to Cornershop's 'Brimful of Asha' and M.I.A.'s 'Paper Planes,' both of which reference 'Roadrunner.' . . . Like the song, Clover's lengthy essay steps on the gas from the on-ramp and keeps pushing." -- James Sullivan * Boston Globe *"Roadrunner, Clover's book, has plenty of warmth; in fact, it runs positively hot as the poet and cultural theorist veers off onto one exit ramp after another." -- Jay Gabler * The Current *"It’s heady stuff, for sure, but it’s also as ecstatic as the music it celebrates—an inspired, inspiring tribute to what Greil Marcus once called 'the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest.'" -- Marc Hogan * Pitchfork, Best Music Books of 2021 *"Poet and critic Joshua Clover’s book-length exploration of 'Roadrunner' stays true to Richman’s “faster miles an hour” gospel, thrillingly pursuing connections backward and forward, from Chuck Berry to Cornershop to M.I.A. . . . Even if you’ve heard 'Roadunner' a million times, this book will make it sound newly present and alive." -- Jon Dolan * Rolling Stone, Best Music Books of 2021 *"Clover perceptively emphasizes how postwar suburbanization changed the face of American life forever, spreading it out from the density and unease of the city into the kinds of spacious highways Richman celebrates. . . . Clover’s radical politics make him especially sensitive to the ways in which capital and urban planning changed the landscape of America during the postwar boom. In some ways, Clover’s historical analysis is quite sharp and certainly relevant to today’s concerns." -- Matt Hanson * The Smart Set *Table of Contents1. Rock & Roll Radio, 1980 1 2. Faster Miles an Hour, 1972 7 3. The Highway Sound, 1955 29 4. The Main Streets and the Cinema Aisles, 1997 61 5. World Runner, 2007 81 6. In Love with the Modern World, 1972 105 Acknowledgments 121 Notes 123 Bibliography 125 Index 127
£66.60
