Having run out of options, former YouTube star Dax Flame must get a job at an ice cream shop in order to make ends meet.

    In both subject and sound, it was like nothing else on the radio. It defied the cynicism and apathy of Generation X; it challenged the aesthetic expectations for a "pop song" (or even a "protest song"), fusing blues, opera, rock and gospel; and it demanded accountability in an era of corporate greed, globalization and environmental indifference. A massive hit globally (reaching #1 in over fifteen countries), it wasn't even offered as a single in the United States. Yet nearly two decades later, it stands as one of Jackson's greatest artistic achievements. In this groundbreaking monograph, author Joseph Vogel details the song's context and evolution from its inception in Vienna in 1988, to its release and reception in 1995, to Jackson's final live performance in Munich in 1999. Based on original research, including interviews with the song's key participants, Earth Song: Inside Michael Jackson's Magnum Opus offers a fascinating reassessment of this prophetic musical statement.

    Music. Through manifestos, scores, interviews, notes and critical papers, contributors to this in-depth anthology address composing, playing, improvising, teaching, and thinking in and through music. Rather than attempting to distill or define musician's work, ARCANA illuminates it with personal vision and experience.

    The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical re-forming of compositional technique and in John Cage's move into zen music, in Milton Babbitt's settling of the serial system, and in Dmitry Shostakovich's unsettling symphonies, in Karlheinz Stockhausen's development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono's pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis's view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio's consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that have continued to unfold. This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no single history of music. We live' as Griffiths says, among many simultaneous histories'. His study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how they converge and diverge.

    With 116 million albums sold worldwide and 25 years on the pop charts to their credit, Pink Floyd is one of the most successful rock groups in history, yet their storyuntil nowis one of the least known. The only continuous member of the band through its entire 40-year history, Nick Mason has witnessed every twist, turn, and sommersault from behind his drum kit. The journey begins with the band's origins as the darlings of London's late 1960s underground and the creation of the classic Pink Floyd sound, all the way through to The Wall and those legendary stadium shows. Here are the players who shaped the band's history and the story behind the storythe inside perspective on, for example, the deterioration and departure of Syd Barrett; the overwhelming success of The Dark Side of the Moon and the resulting pressures and conflicts within the band, including the rift with Roger Waters; and Nick and David Gilmour's decision to put their reputations on the line and continue as Pink Floyd. Packed with rare photographs and vintage Floyd graphics from Nick Mason's extensive private archive, Inside Out is an eye-opener for both veteran fans and those just discovering the group. And, in keeping with the classic Floyd style, the book's cover was designed by Storm Thorgerson, creator of such iconic images as the Dark Side pyramid. Always candid, by turns poignant and funny, Nick's own memories are augmented with extensive research and interviews, making Inside Out a comprehensive history of one of the most brilliant and imaginative bands the world has knownand a masterly memoir of rock and roll.

    They had awards, credibility, commercial success and creative freedom. They deleted their records, erased themselves from musical history and burnt their last million pounds in a boathouse on the Isle of Jura.And they couldn’t say why.This is the story of The KLF, told through the ideas that drove them. It is a story about Carl Jung, Alan Moore, Robert Anton Wilson, Ken Campbell, Dada, Situationism, Discordianism, magic, chaos, punk, rave and the alchemical symbolism of Doctor Who. Wildly unauthorised and totally unlike any other music biography, ‘KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money’ is a trawl through chaos on the trail of a beautiful accidental mythology.

    It is also an unprecedentedly revealing and instructive guide to how songs and records are made.Developed from a series of interviews conducted over many months, the book explores in detail some thirty XTC songs--including well-know singles such as 'Senses Working Overtime' and the controversial 'Dear God'--from throughout the group's thirty-year career. It casts new light on the writing of lyrics, the construction of melodies and arrangements, the process of recording, and the workings of the music industry. But it is also filled with anecdotes about Partridge, his XTC bandmates, and their adventures around the world, all told with the songwriter's legendary humor.

    In Wicked Messenger, acclaimed cultural-political commentator Mike Marqusee advances the new thesis that Dylan did not drop politics from his songs but changed the manner of his critique to address the changing political and cultural climate and, more importantly, his own evolving aesthetic. Wicked Messenger is also a riveting political history of the United States in the 1960s. Tracing the development of the decade’s political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee shows how their twists and turns were anticipated in the poetic aesthetic—anarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk— of Dylan's mid-sixties albums, as well as in his recent artistic ventures in Chronicles, Vol. I and Masked and Anonymous.Dylan’s anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, was a deeply creative response to a deeply disturbing situation. "He can no longer tell the story straight," Marqusee concludes, "because any story told straight is a false one."

    Having lived mostly in the remote deserts of Arizona and New Mexico with no access to formal training, Partch naturally created theatrical ritualistic works incorporating Indian chants, Japanese kabuki and Noh, Polynesian microtones, Balinese gamelan, Greek tragedy, dance, mime, and sardonic commentary on Hollywood and commercial pop music of modern civilization. First published in 1949, Genesis of a Music is the manifesto of Partch's radical compositional practice and instruments (which owe nothing to the 300-year-old European tradition of Western music.) He contrasts Abstract and Corporeal music, proclaiming the latter as the vital, emotionally tactile form derived from the spoken word (like Greek, Chinese, Arabic, and Indian musics) and surveys the history of world music at length from this perspective. Parts II, III, and IV explain Partch's theories of scales, intonation, and instrument construction with copious acoustical and mathematical documentation. Anyone with a musically creative attitude, whether or not familiar with traditional music theory, will find this book revelatory.

    A celebration of rave's quest for the perfect beat definitive chronicle of rave culture and electronic dance music

    His guitarist is trying to get them all killed. Fans are stealing his things. Mechanics are rebuking his lifestyle. Even his own fragile, uptight psyche is antagonizing him. But despite having every odd stacked against him, Project 86's frontman is living the dream and loving it. In It's All Downhill From Here, Andrew Schwab chronicles the highs and lows, the struggles and triumphs of this underground, independent rock band's rocky road to stardom. From a hostage situation on their first day on the road, to a drummer's crushed hand, a haunting female fan and an '80s rocker's halitosis problem, Schwab tells it like it is, with biting wit and rock star charm. This insider's look at the real life of a rock band not only reaffirms that everyone's human, but makes you hungry for a dream of your own to chase after.

    His journals reveal an artist who loved music, who knew the history of rock, and who was determined to define his place in that history. Here is a mesmerizing, incomparable portrait of the most influential musician of his time.

    This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together, and that's what I'm going to talk about.--Rhythm ScienceThe conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, delivers a manifesto for rhythm science--the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, the changing same. Taking the Dj's mix as template, he describes how the artist, navigating the innumerable ways to arrange the mix of cultural ideas and objects that bombard us, uses technology and art to create something new and expressive and endlessly variable. Technology provides the method and model; information on the web, like the elements of a mix, doesn't stay in one place. And technology is the medium, bridging the artist's consciousness and the outside world.Miller constructed his Dj Spooky persona (spooky from the eerie sounds of hip-hop, techno, ambient, and the other music that he plays) as a conceptual art project, but then came to see it as the opportunity for coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity. For example: Start with the inspiration of George Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strip. Make a track invoking his absurd landscapes...What do tons and tons of air pressure moving in the atmosphere sound like? Make music that acts a metaphor for that kind of immersion or density. Or, for an online remix of two works by Marcel Duchamp: I took a lot of his material written on music and flipped it into a DJ mix of his visual material--with him rhyming! Tracing the genealogy of rhythm science, Miller cites sources and influences as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson (all minds quote), Grandmaster Flash, W. E. B Dubois, James Joyce, and Eminem. The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce, he writes.Miller's textual provocations are designed for maximum visual and tactile seduction by the international studio COMA (Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans). They sustain the book's motifs of recontextualizing and relayering, texts and images bleed through from page to page, creating what amount to 2.5 dimensional vectors. From its remarkable velvet flesh cover, to the die cut hole through the center of the book, which reveals the colored nub holding in place the included audio CD, Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives, this pamphlet truly lives up to Editorial Director Peter Lunenfeld's claim that the Mediawork Pamphlets are theoretical fetish objects...'zines for grown-ups.

    There's nothing cool about Céline Dion, and nothing clever. That's part of her appeal as an object of love or hatred — with most critics and committed music fans taking pleasure (or at least geeky solace) in their lofty contempt. This book documents Carl Wilson's brave and unprecedented year-long quest to find his inner Céline Dion fan, and explores how we define ourselves in the light of what we call good and bad, what we love and what we hate.