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."

    While Horses pays homage to the record's origins in the nascent New York punk scene, the book's core lies in a detailed analysis of Patti Smith's lyrics and includes discussions of lyrical preoccupations: love, sex, gender, death, dreams, god, metamorphosis, intoxication, apocalypse and transcendence. Philip shaw demonstrates how Horses transformed the possibilities of both poetry and rock music; and how it achieved nothing less than a complete and systematic derangement of the senses.

    Peter Burkholder has meticulously revised and restructured the text to make it more accessible for today's students. This revision places a stronger emphasis on social and historical context and adds substantially expanded pedagogy and striking four-color design.

    The various paths are made clear by a concentration on the major works and turningpoints in the music of our time: the new rhythmic force that came in with The Rite of Spring, the unbounded universe of Schoenberg's atonality, the undreamed-of possibilities opened up by electronics, the role of chance in the music of John Cage and the astonishing diversity of minimalism.

    Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

    And if UB 40 get a mention, I missed it. Isn`t that recommendation enough for you?' Mojo'Switches between informed analysis and intoxicating aural history...With epic contributions from major players such as PrinceBuster, Horace Andy, Bunny Lee and Dennis Bovell' GQ'Fascinating...written with passion, style and gusto. This is a book many musicians would benefit from reading' Jah Wobble, Independent on Sunday'A compelling social and musical history running from Fifties soundsystem roots to contemporary dancehall...filled to the brim with anecdotes to keep the most hardened music-head happy' Face'A classic...Hilarious in places, peppered with social and historical comment in others, this is a fascinating account detailing how reggae evolved in Jamaica and became a global phenomenon' New Nation

    Here a personal friend of the band looks at the rise of Nirvana and their effect on American youth culture.

    They had a violin player. They came from Portugal, Spain, and England. Their anarchy was poetic. Working with the iconic Rough Trade Records at its radical beginnings, they were the first group of punk women to actively call themselves feminists.In this short book—the first on The Raincoats—author Jenn Pelly tells the story of the group's audacious debut album, which Kurt Cobain once called “wonderfully classic scripture.” Pelly builds on rare archival materials and extensive interviews with members of The Raincoats, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Hole, Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, and more. She draws formal inspiration from the collage-like The Raincoats itself to explore this album's magic, vulnerability, and strength.

    It's Big Brother singing. Call it what you will -- elevator music, Moodsong ® easy listening, or Muzak ®. For a musical genre that was supposed to offend no one, it has a lot of enemies.Musical cognoscenti decry its insipid content; regular folk -- if they notice -- bemoan its pervasiveness; while hipsters and campsters celebrate its retro chic. Mindful of the many voices, Joseph Lanza's Elevator Music sings seriously, with tongue in cheek, the praises of this venerable American institution.Lanza addresses the criticisms of elites who say that Muzak and its ilk are dehumanized, vapid, or cheesy. These reactions, he argues, are based more on cultural prejudices than honest musical appraisal.Says Lanza, today's so-called mood music is the inheritor of a long tradition of mood-altering music stretching back to the ancients; Nero's fiddle and the sirens of Odysseus being two famous examples. Contemporary atmospheric music, Lanza argues, not only serves the same purpose, it is also the inevitable background for our media-dominated age.One of Lanza's premises, to quote Mark Twain, is that this music is "better than it sounds." "This book will have succeeded in its purpose," he writes, "if I can help efface...the distinction between one person's elevator music and another's prized recording."Joseph Lanza is an author, producer, and music historian. His most recent book is Russ Columbo and the Crooner Mystique.

    In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it.Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men.But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."

    It was also the first age of cultural globalization—an epoch when mass communications and high-speed rail travel brought Europe together, overcoming the barriers of nationalism and facilitating the development of a truly European canon of artistic, musical, and literary works. By 1900, the same books were being read across the continent, the same paintings reproduced, the same music played in homes and heard in concert halls, the same operas performed in all the major theatres.Drawing from a wealth of documents, letters, and other archival materials, acclaimed historian Orlando Figes examines the interplay of money and art that made this unification possible. At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange—they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures.As Figes observes, nearly all of civilization’s great advances have come during periods of heightened cosmopolitanism—when people, ideas, and artistic creations circulate freely between nations. Vivid and insightful, The Europeans shows how such cosmopolitan ferment shaped artistic traditions that came to dominate world culture.

    From early pioneers like Suicide and Richard Hell, to forgotten treasures like Red Transistor and Bush Tetras, and descendants like ESG and Sonic Youth, No Wave charts all the cracks and crevices of a surprisingly diverse movement.Flashing through the New York underground in the late 1970s, No Wave was the ultimate anti-movement. Its bands consisted of artists and poets untrained in music, looking to explode rock and disappear before the smoke cleared. No Wave tells the fascinating story of this radical, anarchic and hugely influential musical movement.Best known for short songs and even shorter life-spans, No Wave bands fused disparate styles to fashion abrasive, rhythmic songs that were completely original and utterly compelling. The primary perpetrators – Lydia Lunch’s howling Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance’s skeletal Contortions, the dark-noise groups Mars and DNA – all drew on primitivism, performance art, and the avant-garde.The book also delves into No Wave cinema, where pioneers like Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, and Beth and Scott B. translated the aggression and innovation of No Wave music to the screen. Musicians often starred in these films, and figures like Jim Jarmsuch and Steve Buscemi first cut their teeth in this vibrant scene.Illustrated with rare and previously unseen concert photos, record covers, and other ephemera of the times, and featuring exclusive interviews with key protagonists from the scene, No Wave is the definitive guide to a genre whose sounds and ideas still vibrate through alternative culture today.

    At that point, we will be at the same distance in time from 1970 as 1970 was from 1920, the year Al Jolson's ‘Swanee’ was the bestselling record and Gustav Holst composed The Planets.The Beatles continue to occupy a position unique in popular culture. They have entered people's minds in a way that did not occur before, and has not occurred since. Their influence extended way beyond the realm of music to fashion, politics, class, religion and ethics. Countless books have doggedly catalogued the minutiae of The Beatles. If you want to know the make of George Harrison's first car you will always be able to find the answer (a second hand, two-door, blue Ford Anglia 105E Deluxe, purchased from Brian Epstein's friend Terry Doran, who worked at a dealership in Warrington). Before she met John Lennon, who was the only Beatle Yoko Ono could name, and why? Ringo. Because ‘ringo’ means ‘apple’ in Japanese. All very interesting, but there is, as yet, no book about The Beatles that combines the intriguing minutiae of their day-to-day lives with broader questions about their effect – complicated and fascinating – on the world around them, their contemporaries, and generations to come.Until now. Craig Brown's 1-2-3-4: The Beatles in Time is a unique, kaleidoscopic examination of The Beatles phenomenon – part biography, part anthropology, part memoir, by turns humorous and serious, elegiac and speculative. It follows the unique “exploded biography” form of his internationally bestselling, Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret.

    Major fanatics of the new punk happenings in the late ’70s, TV and DS set out to chronicle, lambaste, ridicule, and heap praise on all they arbitrarily loved or hated in the music communities in the US and abroad.In laughably minuscule press runs by today’s standards, T & G was made by guys within the Midwest scene strictly for the edification of scenesters and pals in other cities like DC, Philly, Boston, LA, SF, Chicago, et al. Inspired by magazines such as Slash and Search and Destroy and writers like Claude Bessy and Chris Desjardines, TV and DS pumped out seventeen naughty, irreverent issues together, and TV did another five solo.Magazines like Forced Exposure and Your Flesh, among others, soon fired up Xerox machines themselves, and the rest is history. So is the legendary independent record label launched from this zine, and so are the bands covered inside: Black Flag, Minor Threat, the Misfits, Negative Approach, the Fix, the Avengers, the Necros, Discharge, Iron Cross, Youth Brigade, Faith, Die Kreuzen, Crucifix, Poison Idea—and all the other punks worth their weight in glorious black and white.

    It chronicles the back-story of Greenwich Village in the early days of the folk music explosion, when Dylan was honing his skills and she was in the ring with him.A shy girl from Queens, Suze Rotolo was the daughter of Italian working-class Communists. Growing up at the start of the Cold War and during McCarthyism, she inevitably became an outsider in her neighborhood and at school. Her childhood was turbulent, but Suze found solace in poetry, art, and music. In Washington Square Park, in Greenwich Village, she encountered like-minded friends who were also politically active. Then one hot day in July 1961, Suze met Bob Dylan, a rising young musician, at a folk concert at Riverside Church. She was seventeen, he was twenty; they were young, curious, and inseparable. During the years they were together, Dylan was transformed from an obscure folk singer into an uneasy spokesperson for a generation.Suze Rotolo’s story is rich in character and setting, filled with vivid memories of those tumultuous years of dramatic change and poignantly rising expectations when art, culture, and politics all seemed to be conspiring to bring our country a better, freer, richer, and more equitable life. She writes of her involvement with the civil rights movement and describes the sometimes frustrating experience of being a woman in a male-dominated culture, before women’s liberation changed the rules for the better. And she tells the wonderfully romantic story of her sweet but sometimes wrenching love affair and its eventual collapse under the pressures of growing fame.A Freewheelin’ Time is a vibrant, moving memoir of a hopeful time and place and of a vital subculture at its most creative. It communicates the excitement of youth, the heartbreak of young love, and the struggles for a brighter future.