Genre: A 33 1/3 Series

Trip-hop described some of the 1990s’ best music, and it was one of the decade’s most revealing bad ideas. This book chronicles the music and its leading artists, packed with recommended listening, essential tracks, great remixes, and under-recognized albums. But the music at its best still sounds experimental and dramatic; and its influence lingers through artists like FKA twigs, Sevdaliza, James Blake, Billie Eilish, and Lana Del Rey. This short book is a guide to ’trip-hop’ in its context of the weird 1990s.

Bloomsbury presents Dance-Punk by Larissa Wodtke, read by Megan Gage. Beginning in the late 1970s as an offshoot of disco and punk, dance-punk is difficult to define. Also sometimes referred to as disco-punk and funk-punk, it skirts, overlaps, and blurs into other genres including post-punk...

Bloomsbury presents Krautrock by Marshall Gu, read by Adam Sims. Krautrock is not a music genre. Krautrock is a way of life. Its sonic diversity and global reach belie the common culture from where it emerged. This is a band-by-band history. In May 1945, the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, putting...

Bloomsbury presents '70s Teen Pop by Lucretia Tye Jasmine, read by Megan Gage. Teen pop is a sub-genre of popular music marketed to tweens and teens. Its melodic yearning and veneer of sincerity appeal to an emerging romantic eroticism and autonomy. But tweens and teens buy music that isn’t...

Bloomsbury presents Math Rock by Jeff Gomez, read by Hunter Johns. Math rock sounds like blueprints look: exact, precise, architectural. This trance-like progressive metal music with indie rock and jazz influences has been captivating and challenging listeners for decades. Bands associated with...

Folk music of the 1960s and 1970s was a genre that was always shifting and expanding, yet somehow never found room for so many. In the sounds of soul-folk, Black artists like Terry Callier and Linda Lewis began to reclaim their space in the genre, and use it to bring their own traditions to light— the jazz, the blues, the field hollers, the spirituals— and creating something wholly new, wholly theirs, wholly ours.

What the hell is shoegaze? A scene? A movement? A sound? Back in the Nineties, many would have said the so-called genre was entirely fabricated. The term itself, an offensive piss-take given by the notoriously catty and scene-obsessed British music press, was plainly rejected by the absurdly small collection of bands to which it supposedly applied. In this ambitious oral history of a genre that has eluded definition for three decades, Ryan Pinkard unearths the first wave of shoegaze, following the core bands, their sounds, their influence, and their journeys in and out of obscurity.

From the storied ache of mbube harmonies of the ‘40s to the electronic boom of kwaito and the amapiano and house explosion of the ‘00s, this book explores vignettes taken from across South Africa’s popular music history. There are moments in time where music can be a mighty weapon in the fight for freedom. Disguised in a danceable hook or shouted for the world to hear, artists have used songs to deliver important truths and bring listeners together in the face of a segregated reality.

Bloomsbury presents Death Metal by T Coles, read by Rob Crossan. Featuring exclusive interviews with key figures, from Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway to guitarist Bill Steer of Gentlemans Pistols, Carcass, and Napalm Death, this is your guide through the history of death metal. Guitars...

Bloomsbury presents Neue Deutsche Welle by Claudia Lonkin, read by Megan Gage. Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), or “German New Wave,” was made extraordinarily popular in the 1970s and 1980s by the likes of Nena's "99 Luftballons" and Trio's "Da Da Da"—and then left as quickly as it came...

Bloomsbury presents 20th Century Ambient by Dusty Henry, read by Sam Rushton. Through text and comics, 20th Century Ambient searches through ambient music’s recent history to unearth how the genre has evolved and the role it plays in our daily lives. Ambient music is a part of our daily lives...

Bloomsbury presents Plunderphonics by Matthew Blackwell, read by Sam Rushton. Featuring interviews with John Oswald, Negativland, and others and drawing on a wealth of research on copyright and intellectual property, Plunderphonics explores the impact of a genre that made illegality a point of...

The scene that bulldozed the path from prog and glam to punk and new wave, pub rock was a short-lived phenomenon in the U.K., emerging amidst the bloated landscape of prog rock and an increasingly oppressive economic outlook. In the U.K. in the early ‘70s, in response to the glitz of glam and...

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.

This book chronicles the movement's origins with the advent of punk in the 1980s, its commercial and creative pinnacle in the 1990s, and the transformations it faced due to the music industry crisis in the 2000s. It connects Alterlatino with the pioneering mixture of rock and traditional music in the 1970s and projects its influence into the indie scene that emerged in the 2010s, opening a door to the last great Latin American revolt.

When musique concrète first hit the airwaves, listeners reached for their earplugs. This strange genre didn’t sound like music at all! It ignored melody and meter. It didn’t even use instruments. Instead, musique concrète took recorded sound as its raw material. That could be anything from...