It was the strange and mystical "Another Green World" (1975) that was the cosmic bridge between Old Eno and New Eno, between Rock and Ambient, between the guitar and the synthesizer, between the old world and electronic music as we know it. This book excavates the album's past, and untangles how it was a link to the future of electronic music.
The album that Brian Wilson created in an attempt to outdo the Beatles' Rubber Soul album. Worshipped by music lovers for its harmonies it is also regarded as an early demonstration of how to use the recording studio as an instrument. Brian Wilson has recently been touring the album again, playing it to thousands of devoted fans.
The author of the cult book "Techgnosis" writes about the big, big Led Zeppelin album. Featuring every heavy metal fan's favourite epic Stairway to Heaven, the huge sound of this album has set the template for rock. Also includes Black Dog and Rock 'n' Roll.
A factional novella: a place where fictional characters rub shoulders with real people, and where actual documented events thread their way through the text alongside imagined scenarios. Through the eyes of 23-year-old Greg Keltner, drug dealer, wannabe musician, and hanger-on, here, we witness the gestation and birth of an entertaining album.
Slayer's Reign in Blood remains the gold standard for extreme heavy metal: a seamless procession of ten blindingly fast songs in just twenty-eight minutes, delivered in furious bursts of instrumental precision, with lyrics so striking that Tori Amos was moved to record a cover. This book explores the creation of this album.
Uses the Seven Deadly Sins as a structuring device to look at the album, "The Gilded Palace of Sin", that plays as fast and loose with its religious images as it does with its genre-borrowing.
Described, variously, as the perfect fusion of poetry and garage band rock and roll, Horses belongs as much to the world of literary and cultural criticism as it does to the realm of musicology. This book demonstrates how Horses transformed the possibilities of both poetry and rock music.
A surrealist text loosely based on the life, suffering and reincarnation of Anne Frank, with guest appearances from a pair of Siamese twins menaced by the cold and carnivores, a two-headed boy bobbing in a jar, anthropomorphic vegetables and a variety of immature erotic horrors.
David Bowie is holed up in his Bel-Air mansion, drifting into paranoia and confusion. Bowie has long been haunted by the emotional work of the Die Brucke movement and the Expressionists. Berlin is their spiritual home, and Bowie adopts this city as his new sanctuary. Immediately he sets to work on "Low", his own expressionist mood-piece.
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.
Andy Miller traces the circumstances surrounding "The Village Green Preservation Society" released in November 1968, and celebrates the songs pieced together by a band who were on the verge of disintegration and who refused to follow fashion.
Through a series of interviews with a wide range of people connected to Pink Floyd in their earliest days, John Cavanagh paints a vivid picture of how this remarkable debut album was created. He brings to life the stories behind each track, as well as Pink Floyd's live performances.
Vs. is the sound of a band on fire. The same confluence of talent, passion, timing, and fate that made "grunge" the world's soundtrack also lit a short fuse beneath Pearl Jam. The band combusted between late 1992 and mid-1994, the span during which they planned, recorded, and supported their sophomore record. The spotlight, the pressure, the pace-it all nearly turned the thriving act to ash.Eddie Vedder, the reluctant public face of the band, responded by lashing out lyrically. Jeff Ament, Mike McCready, and Stone Gossard, who beheld success with varying degrees of anxious satisfaction, attacked their instruments in solidarity. Dave Abbruzzese welcomed the rock-star lifestyle, and left his mark on the record with more than just potent percussion.Vs. roils with fury-and at times, gently steams-over the trappings of fame, human faults, and societal injustice. The record is a thrashing testament to Pearl Jam's urgent creativity and greater-good interests, and the band's logistical calculations behind it drew a career-defining line in the sand. It promised the world that Pearl Jam would neither burn out nor fade away. This book weaves research, little-known details, and band members' memories into a definitive account of how Vs. set them on a path toward enduring integrity and relevance.
From a Los Angeles hospital bed, equipped with little more than a laptop and a stack of records, James "J Dilla" Yancey crafted a set of tracks that would forever change the way beatmakers viewed their artform. The songs on Donuts are not hip hop music as "hip hop music" is typically defined; they careen and crash into each other, in one moment noisy and abrasive, gorgeous and heartbreaking the next. The samples and melodies tell the story of a man coming to terms with his declining health, a final love letter to the family and friends he was leaving behind. As a prolific producer with a voracious appetite for the history and mechanics of the music he loved, J Dilla knew the records that went into constructing Donuts inside and out. He could have taken them all and made a much different, more accessible album. If the widely accepted view is that his final work is a record about dying, the question becomes why did he make this record about dying?Drawing from philosophy, critical theory and musicology, as well as Dilla's own musical catalogue, Jordan Ferguson shows that the contradictory, irascible and confrontational music found on Donuts is as much a result of an artist's declining health as it is an example of what scholars call "late style," placing the album in a musical tradition that stretches back centuries.
An in-depth study of the visceral slacker classic from 1987, an album that influenced enormously the nascent alternative scene.
The son of '60s star Tim Buckley blew the rock world away when he released this instant classic of astonishing range and depth. Its status has become all the more legendary as it was to be his last record - Buckley died tragically young.
"It's Time To Party," the first track off of I Get Wet, opens with a rapid-fire guitar line - nothing fancy, just a couple crunchy power chords to acclimate the ears - repeated twice before a booming bass drum joins in to provide a quarter-note countdown. A faint, swirling effect intensifies with each bass kick and, by the eighth one, the ears have prepped themselves for the metal mayhem they are about to receive. When it all drops, and the joyous onslaught of a hundred guitars is finally realized, you'll have to forgive your ears for being duped into a false sense of security, because it's that second intensified drop a few seconds later - the one where yet more guitars manifest and Andrew W.K. slam-plants his vocal flag by screaming the song's titular line - that really floods the brain with endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and whatever else formulates invincibility.Polished to a bright overdubbed-to-oblivion sheen, the party-preaching I Get Wet didn't capture the zeitgeist of rock at the turn of the century; it captured the timelessness of youth, as energized, awesome, and unapologetically stupid as ever. With insights from friends and unprecedented help from the mythological maniac himself - whose sermon and pop sensibilities continue to polarize - this book chronicles the sound's evolution, uncovers the relevance of Steev Mike, and examines how Andrew W.K.'s inviting, inclusive lyrics create the ultimate shared experience between artist and audience.
July, 1967: It seems the entire country stopped to listen to a husky voice steeped in the simmering secrets of the South tell a tragic tale of teenage suicide. So much for the Summer of Love. "Ode to Billie Joe" knocked the Beatles' "All You Need is Love" off the top of the charts, and Bobbie Gentry became an international star. Almost 50 years later, Gentry is as enigmatic and captivating as her signature song. Of course, fans still want to know why Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. They also wonder: Why did Bobbie Gentry, who has not performed or made a public appearance since the early 1980s, leave it all behind? Through extensive interviews and unprecedented access to career memorabilia, Murtha explores the real-life mysteries ensnarled within the much-disputed origin of Ode to Billie Joe. The result is an investigative pop history that reveals, for the first time, the full breadth of Bobbie Gentry's groundbreaking career-and just may help explain her long silence. Foreword by musician Jill Sobule.
Offers an exploration of a best-selling gospel album. Through interviews, musical and theological analyses as well as archival discoveries, this book sets the scene, traces the recording's traditional origins and pop infusions and describes the album's enduring impact.
Presents an illustrated oral history of the Magnetic Fields' 1999 triple album, "69 Love Songs" - an album that was afforded "classic" status - as told by participants, fans and others. It also includes studio anecdotes, performance notes from the album shows in New York and London, rare and unpublished images, personal memorabilia, and others.
The question of control for Black women is a costly one. From 1986 onwards, the trajectory of Janet Jackson's career can be summed up in her desire for control. Control for Janet was never simply just about her desire for economic and creative control over her career but was, rather, an existential question about the desire to control and be in control over her bodily integrity as a Black woman. This book examines Janet's continuation of her quest for control as heard in her sixth album, The Velvet Rope. Engaging with the album, the promotion, the tour, and its accompanying music videos, this study unpacks how Janet uses Black cultural production as an emancipatory act of self-creation that allows her to reconcile with and, potentially, heal from trauma, pain, and feelings of alienation. The Velvet Rope's arc moves audiences to imagine the possibility of what emancipation from oppression--from sexual, to internal, to societal--could look like for the singer and for others. The sexually charged content and themes of abuse, including self-harm and domestic violence, were dismissed as "selling points" for Janet at the time of its release. The album stands out as a revelatory expression of emotional vulnerability by the singer, one that many other artists have followed in the 20-plus years since its release.
When I'm Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen hit stores in 1991, Leonard Cohen's career had plummeted from its revered 1960s high. Cohen's record label had refused to release his 1984 album Various Positions--including the song "Hallelujah"--in the United States. Luckily, Velvet Underground founder John Cale was one of the few who did hear "Hallelujah," and he covered it for I'm Your Fan, a collection of Cohen's songs produced by a French fanzine. Jeff Buckley adored the tribute album and covered Cale's cover in 1994, never having heard Cohen's still-obscure original version.In 2016, Stereogum labeled the tribute album "possibly the most universally derided format in pop music." However, without a tribute album, you wouldn't know the song "Hallelujah." Through Buckley through Cale, "Hallelujah" is now one of the most often-performed songs in the world--and it wouldn't be without this tribute album. I'm Your Fan thus offers a particularly notable example of a much broader truth: Despite all the eye-rolling they inspire, tribute albums matter. They can resuscitate legends' fading careers, or expose obscure artists who never had much of a career to begin with.
Oasis's incendiary 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe managed to summarize almost the entire history of post-fifties guitar music from Chuck Berry to My Bloody Valentine in a way that seemed effortless. But this remarkable album was also a social document that came closer to narrating the collective hopes and dreams of a people than any other record of the last quarter century. In a Britain that had just undergone the most damaging period of social upheaval in a century under the Thatcher government, Noel Gallagher ventriloquized slogans of burning communitarian optimism through the mouth of his brother Liam and the playing of the other Oasis 'everymen': Paul McGuigan, Paul Arthurs and Tony McCarroll. On Definitely Maybe, Oasis communicated a timeworn message of idealism and hope against the odds, but one that had special resonance in a society where the widening gap between high and low demanded a newly superhuman kind of leaping. Alex Niven charts the astonishing rise of Oasis in the mid 1990s and celebrates the life-affirming, communal force of songs such as "Live Forever," "Supersonic," and "Cigarettes & Alcohol." In doing so, he seeks to reposition Oasis in relation to their Britpop peers and explore one of the most controversial pop-cultural narratives of the last thirty years.
Presents a thorough history of Slint, and the Louisville scene that surrounded the band, leading up to and focusing on the creation of their masterpiece, "Spiderland". This book attempts to break through some of the mystery surrounding "Spiderland" and the band that made it.
The Stone Roses shows a band sizzling with skill, consumed with drive and aspiration and possessing an almost preternatural mastery of the pop paradigm. This book explores the political and cultural zeitgeist of England in 1989, and attempts to apprehend the magic ingredients that made "The Stone Roses" such a special album.
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