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“This is an irresistible book that will spark a thousand arguments—and that's just on the day it's published. I'm already making my list. I haven't had so much fun with a work of criticism in years.”— Greil Marcus, author of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs Fifty years ago...

In 1985, four American musicians—members of a New England-based klezmer band that focused on Yiddish music—landed in Moscow. With little training in espionage, they risked their freedom and their lives to smuggle information to and from the West under the watchful eye of the KGB and to help...

From one of the world's most beloved and respected public intellectuals comes a sweeping work of musical criticism, examining the distance between the performer and their audience "Not since Virgil Thomson have we had a music critic with as wide ranging a view as Edward Said."—Studs Terkel...

In the U.K. in the early '70s, in response to the glitz of glam and the excess of prog there emerged a DIY, back to basics scene known as pub rock: No-fuss, grass roots rock'n'roll bands playing in tight, sweaty rooms to packed throngs in the Victorian pubs of north London. Pub rock was a relative flash in the pan, lasting only a handful of years, but it produced a seismic shift, bridging the gap between rock's Baroque period and the ensuing punk and new wave scene, and crucially, restoring the visceral connection between artist and audience.

Choosing significant stops of the Springsteen and E Street Band 2023 Tour as a narrative guideline, the book presents a thorough analysis of Springsteen’s album conceptions, song lyrics, show rituals, and interviews. Based on a discussion of the ever-growing Springsteen scholarship, Pethes introduces artist-fan-communication as a notion that is not based on mere illusions but rather on actual emotions and practices.

Conscious rap, a subgenre of hip-hop music that engages in dialogue about social and political issues and often challenges systems of oppression, ascended with pioneers like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, A Tribe Called Quest, and other acts at the helm. But in recent decades, it lost much of its favor in pop culture and mainstream hip-hop. Jeremy C. McCool and Earl Hopkins explore the evolution of the subgenre and chronicle the rise of Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole.

Minimalism as a genre is best defined not by any style or flavor but by its means. A still young genre with ancient roots, minimalism is much less any kind of style than a practice, a manner of making music. Reviving those means and applying them to contemporary sounds and experiences, the pioneers of minimalism created a new and avant-garde music that immediately communicated its power to listeners of all kinds.

Clad in black with dark shades, Roy Orbison had a mystique, style, and voice that were unmistakable and singularly different from his famous peers of the 1950s and '60s. Born in Vernon, Texas, Roy was the son of a guitar-playing oil worker. Already a music fan by age six, Roy went on to form a high school band. Honky-tonk gigs followed. Then a contract at Elvis Presley's label, Sun Records, where Roy found mentors and friends among the likes of Carl Perkins. Following a shift to Monument Records, he shared a bill with a group called the Beatles, who were huge fans of his.

We’ve had the time of our lives as Swifties, and now that story—full of joy, friendship, connection, clowning, and singing at the top of our lungs—is documented in this tribute to the fandom and the reason we’re all here, Taylor Swift. We all know how it started: a teenage girl from...

One of the world’s greatest bassists lays down the heart of Black music, revealing how its rhythmic structures and the long history of the African diaspora made it the world’s most popular form Why do Bob Marley, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone move us the way they do? What...

Standing at the bleeding edge of the new decade between the experimental Berlin Trilogy (Low, Heroes, and Lodger) and 1983’s wildly successful Let’s Dance, it was here Bowie sought to bury the ghosts of his past and the golden decade of the 1970s to become a global superstar reaching millions of new fans. Featuring fresh insights and exclusive interviews with close collaborators, Adam Steiner’s Silhouettes and Shadows uncovers the studio stories, meanings behind, and secret history of Scary Monsters...

A massively entertaining oral biography of the golden era of critically derided yet monumentally popular radio rock, when Journey, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Toto, and more ruled the airwaves Paul Rees’s Raised on Radio is, remarkably, the first biography of AOR (“Album-Oriented Rock”)...

By 1993, Guns N' Roses had hit practically every benchmark possible for a rock n' roll band. Their eight-year journey included an explosive and game-changing debut record, a self-indulgent but even more successful double album release, a handful of raucous global tours, and various front page controversies over their lyrics, drug addictions, and lead singer Axl Rose's rattlesnake temper. The most captivating part of the Guns N' Roses story was just beginning, however.

P-Funk keyboardist Daniel Bedrosian brings to life the recording and musical activity of Parliament-Funkadelic in 1975, an epoch-making year marked by the release of three seminal albums: Chocolate City , Let's Take It to the Stage , and Mothership Connection. By the end of it, George Clinton and P-Funk were catapulted into superstardom, becoming a massive platinum success with multiple hit singles.

Exploding on the music scene in the early 1970s, the rock group KISS combined raw energy with theatrical showmanship—not to mention face painting! Founding member Gene Simmons—an outrageous star whose superlong tongue, legendary sexual exploits, and demonic makeup have made him a rock icon—recounts his own story as well as the history of the band. In KISS and Make-Up, Simmons shares a wild, shocking, and unbelievable tale about an immigrant boy from Israel who studied to be a rabbi but was saved by rock and roll and became one of the most notorious rock stars in the world.

When we think of rock stars, we are entrained to think of them as having come from regular, working-class backgrounds, and having worked their way up the slippery pole to success through hard work and talent alone. The reality is that all household name musicians are selected for success. Barely a plumber in sight. But no shortage of generals, admirals, politicians, civil servants and spies. Mark Devlin offers further evidence to show how the corporate music industry exists solely for the mind-control of the masses, with artists becoming little more than hand-picked puppets.

From the joyous communal connections fostered through shared auditory experience to the devastating impact of noise pollution in the deep sea, musician and author Damon Krukowski urges readers to reconsider the significance of sound and its role in both our personal and collective well-being. He looks despairingly at how the multipronged efforts of urban dwellers to mitigate city noise have led to increased isolation, loss of community, and a sense of physical detachment from one’s surroundings.

يطرح هذا الكتاب أسئلةً أساسيةً حول طبيعة الموسيقى بوصفها ممارسةً بشريةً، فالعالم يمتلئ بأنواع مختلفة من الموسيقى: الشعبية، والكلاسيكية، والجاز، والروك، والبوب، والكثير غيرها. بيد أن الكتاب يركز على أبعادها الاجتماعية والثقافية، مستكشفاً تطورها عبر الحقب، وموضحاً تأثير التكنولوجيا فيها، ودورها في سياقات العمل الاجتماعي والسياسي. ويناقش الكتاب أيضاً وضع الموسيقى في زمن العولمة؛ من دورها في إنهاء الاستعمار إلى أهميتها بوصفها وسيلةً للتواصل بين الثقافات.

في هذا الكتاب، يستعرِض إيلايجا والد نوعاً موسيقياً هو في صميم الثقافة الأمريكية. ويتتبَّع جذورَ هذه الموسيقى في الحقول ومعسكرات العمل والأناشيد الدينية، ويُظهِر التحوُّلاتِ التي شهدتها على يدِ فنانين محترفين مثل وليام سي هاندي، الذي جعل موسيقى البلوز فناً شعبياً قبل قرنٍ مضى. ثم يتابع والد تطورَ هذه الموسيقى من ما رايني وبيسي سميث إلى بوب ديلان وجيمي هندريكس، ويوضِّح تأثير التسجيلات الريفية، ويستكشف دورَ البلـوز في تطوُّر موسيقى الكانتري وموسيقى الجاز، ويلقي نظرةً على اتجاهاتِ الإيقاع والبلوز التي راجت في أربعينيات القرن العشرين وخمسينياته. وأخيراً، ينتقل والد إلى الحاضر، ويتطرَّق إلى تأثيراتِ البلوز على الشِّعر الأمريكي وعلاقة هذا النوع الموسيقي بالأساليبِ الحديثة مثل الراب.

The Bastard Instrument chronicles the history of the electric bass and the musicians who played it, from the instrument’s invention through its widespread acceptance at the end of the 1960s. Although their contributions have often gone unsung, electric bassists helped shape the sound of a wide range of genres, including jazz, rhythm & blues, rock, country, soul, funk, and more.