Search results for ""Author Michaelangelo Matos""

Everybody knows the hits of 1984-pop music's greatest year. From "Thriller" to "Purple Rain," "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" to "Like a Virgin," "Hello" to "Against All Odds," "Sister Christian" to "Love Is a Battlefield," "What's Love Got to Do with It" to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," they continue to dominate advertising, karaoke nights, and the soundtracks for film classics (Boogie Nights) and TV hits (Stranger Things). But the story of that thrilling, turbulent time, an era when Top 40 radio was both the leading edge of popular culture and a moral battleground, has never been told with the full detail it deserves-until now.Can't Slow Down is the definitive portrait of the exploding world of mid-eighties pop and the time it defined, from Cold War anxiety to the home-computer revolution. Big acts like Michael Jackson (Thriller), Prince (Purple Rain), Madonna (Like a Virgin), Bruce Springsteen (Born in the U.S.A.), and George Michael (Wham!'s Make It Big) rubbed shoulders with the fermenting scenes of hip-hop, indie rock, and club music.Rigorously researched, mapping the entire terrain of American pop, with crucial side trips to the UK and Jamaica, from the biz to the stars to the upstarts and beyond, Can't Slow Down is a vivid trip to a thrilling, turbulent time when pop was remaking itself, and the culture at large, one hit at a time. Let's go crazy!

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Joining the ranks of Please Kill Me and Can't Stop Won't Stop comes this definitive chronicle of one of the hottest trends in popular culture-electronic dance music-from the noted authority covering the scene. It is the sound of the millennial generation, the music "defining youth culture of the 2010s" (Rolling Stone). Rooted in American techno/house and '90s rave culture, electronic dance music has evolved into the biggest moneymaker on the concert circuit. Music journalist Michaelangelo Matos has been covering this beat since its genesis, and in The Underground Is Massive, charts for the first time the birth and rise of this last great outlaw musical subculture. Drawing on a vast array of resources, including hundreds of interviews and a library of rare artifacts, from rave fanzines to online mailing-list archives, Matos reveals how EDM blossomed in tandem with the nascent Internet-message boards and chat lines connected partiers from town to town. In turn, these ravers, many early technology adopters, helped spearhead the information revolution. As tech was the tool, Ecstasy-(Molly, as it's know today) an empathic drug that heightens sensory pleasure-was the narcotic fueling this alternative movement. Full of unique insights, lively details, entertaining stories, dozens of photos, and unforgettable misfits and stars-from early break-in parties to Skrillex and Daft Punk-The Underground Is Massive captures this fascinating trend in American pop culture history, a grassroots movement that would help define the future of music and the modern tech world we live in.

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33 1/3 is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an artist's entire output, the books dispense with the standard biographical background that fans know already, and cut to the heart of the music on each album. The authors provide fresh, original perspectives - often through their access to and relationships with the key figures involved in the recording of these albums. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music. (A task which can be, as Elvis Costello famously observed, as tricky as dancing about architecture.) What binds this series together, and what brings it to life, is that all of the authors - musicians, scholars, and writers - are deeply in love with the album they have chosen.

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