Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, Audio Culture traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical production and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture. Via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers, Audio Culture explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, Ambient music, HipHop, and Techno. Instead of focusing on the putative "crossover" between "high art" and "popular culture," Audio Culture takes all of these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another. While cultural studies has tended to look at music (primarily popular music) from a sociological perspective, the concern here is philosophical, musical, and historical. Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Ornette Coleman, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, Paul D. Miller, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. The book is divided into nine thematically-organized sections, each with its own introduction. Section headings include topics such as "Modes of Listening," "Minimalisms," and "DJ Culture." In addition, each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts. The book concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.

    Best known in recent years for producing U2's sensational albums, Eno began his career as a synthesizer player for Roxy Music. He has since released many solo albums, both rock and ambient, written music for film and television soundtracks, and collaborated with David Bowie, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, and classical and experimental composers. His pioneering ambient sound has been enormously influential, and without him today's rock would have a decidedly different sound. Drawing on Eno's own words to examine his influences and ideas, this book—featuring a new afterword and an updated discography and bibliography—will long remain provocative and definitive.

    Pioneers of electronic minimalism in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Kraftwerk redefined pop music. When they split up in the early 1980s, founding member Wolfgang Flur discovered his name dropped from album credits and the drum machine of his own invention being patented by his bandmates. Kraftwerk: I Was a Robot documents the group's alternately inspiring and bitter story from its unsteady beginnings through worldwide fame to the legal battle in a Hamburg court that vindicated the author but left lasting scars on all. Color photographs are included.

    Along the way, Zappa offers his inimitable views on many things such as art, politics and beer.

    In its pages, Dr. John, the alchemist of New Orleans psychedelic funk, tells his story, and what a story it is: of four decades on the road, on the charts, in and out of trouble, but always steeped in the piano-based soulful grind of New Orleans rhythmn & blues of which he is the acknolwedged high guru. From childhood as a prodigal prodigy among 1950s legends from Little Richard and Fats Domino to sesssions with the Rolling Stones and the Band; from recording studio to juke joint to penitentiary to world tours; from Mac Rebennack to Dr. John the Night Tripper, this is the testament of our funkiest rock storyteller. Full of wit and wordplay, tales of hoodoo saints and high-living sinners, Under a Hoodoo Moon casts a spell as hard to resist as Mardi Gras itself.

    The Song Machine goes behind the scenes to offer an insider’s look at the global hit factories manufacturing the songs that have everyone hooked. Full of vivid, unexpected characters—alongside industry heavy-hitters like Katy Perry, Rihanna, Max Martin, and Ester Dean—this fascinating journey into the strange world of pop music reveals how a new approach to crafting smash hits is transforming marketing, technology, and even listeners’ brains. You’ll never think about music the same way again.A Wall Street Journal Best Business Book

    This book examines different aspects of music production, from sound design, compression and effect to mixing and mastering to publishing and promoting, to help you become a better producer.

    In the insightful How Music Works, Byrne offers his unique perspective on music - including how music is shaped by time, how recording technologies transform the listening experience, the evolution of the industry, and much more.

    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."

    If you don't know what you want, I'll do it for you."Few record producers possess the musical facility to back up such a bold promise, but in over forty-plus years behind the glass, Todd Rundgren has willed himself into becoming a not only a rock guitar virtuoso, an accomplished lead vocalist and vocal arranger and visionary keyboard player, not to mention a serviceable drummer. But arguably, Rundgren's greatest instrument of all is the recording studio itself. After learning his craft with Nazz, Rundgren engineered The Band's Stage Fright album and soon became the producer of a string of noteworthy albums for Sparks, Grand Funk, The New York Dolls, Badfinger, Hall & Oates, Meat Loaf, Patti Smith Group, Cheap Trick, The Psychedelic Furs and XTC. Meanwhile, Rundgren played almost every instrument on his solo albums such as Something/Anything?, A Wizard A True Star and Hermit Of Mink Hollow while collaborating on a series of albums by his band, Utopia. A Wizard A True Star: Todd Rundgren In The Studio by Paul Myers is a fascinating and authoritative trip through the land of flickering red lights inhabited by a studio wizard - and true star - who has rarely enjoyed a proper victory lap along the many trails that he has blazed. Researched and written with the participation and cooperation of Rundgren himself.

    Lives were mangled. Fortunes were made. All for your pleasure. Follow writer and narrator Jon Ronson as he uncovers our web of desire.

    But behind the music lay a ghost city of malice and corruption.Pressed under the thumb of the Bjelke-Petersen government and its toughest enforcers - the police - Brisbane's musicians, radio announcers and political activists braved ignorance, harassment and often violence to be heard."Pig City" maps the shifts in musical, political and cultural consciousness that have shaped the city's history and identity. This is Brisbane's story - the story of how a city finally grew up.

    His music had been a spark firing 60s political idealism. His death signaled the end of an era. There But for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs is both an in-depth biography & a significant musical history, focusing on the importance of Ochs' topical songs addressing the civil rights, anti-war & labor movements. With the full cooperation of his family, & with unprecedented access to his diaries & notebooks, biographer Michael Schumacher tells the story of this gifted artist--from his early years as a musical prodigy & aspiring journalist in Ohio, where he earned his 1st guitar after betting on a Presidential election, to his initial performances in Greenwich Village's cafes & folk clubs; from his headline-making appearances at Carnegie Hall to his ambitious consciousness-raising political rallies. Rich in anecdotal detail, this biography recounts his travels round the globe, including his involuntary prison tour of S. America, as well as his associations with some of the most notable figures of his generation, including Bob Dylan, Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Joan Baez & John Lennon. The story of Phil Ochs is ultimately the chronicle not only of a man but of the singular times in which he lived.

    Music for Silenced Voices looks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a "diary, the story of his soul." The silences and the voices were of many kinds, including the political silencing of adventurous writers, artists, and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich's operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and the death-silenced voices of his close friends, to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works.Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets, considered one at a time in chronological order, lead the reader through the personal, political, and professional events that shaped Shostakovich's singular, emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets, Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience, Music for Silenced Voices is a pleasure to read; at the same time, it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. It will fill readers with the desire to hear the quartets, which are among the most compelling and emotionally powerful monuments of the past century's music.

     Once one of Silicon Valley’s greatest success stories, Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users’ data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech. The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, the crises. Time after time, Facebook’s engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world’s most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits, and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts. Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth. Their explosive, exclusive reporting led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly but an inevitability—this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21st century executives—he the tech “boy genius” turned billionaire, she the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches. But sealed off in tight circles of advisers and hobbled by their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is coopted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences. In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable.