But the Album was more than just a ten-track collection of songs written by five musicians from Oxfordshire, more than the weird follow-up to the critics' fashionable go-to record of choice OK Computer, more than what the Village Voice described as the biggest, warmest recorded go-fuck-yourself in recent memory. Kid A was an event. By pulling Kid A from its canonical status and grounding the album in various contexts, Marvin Lin explains not only why Radiohead suddenly adopted a new songwriting methodology, but also how properties like genre and authenticity distracted us from understanding our reactions to it. From bovine growth hormones and neurological impulses to Dada poetry and bandwidth throttling, the book articulated the politics behind both Radiohead's music and our listening experiences. But in a period of socio-political unrest, is listening to Kid A a waste of time? In and through the album, Lin seeks to answer this question by examining what Kid A does to us over time, what Kid A tells us about the future, and whether it's possible (or even desirable) to use Kid A to transcend time altogether.

    This is a smart and unusual book about a pioneering band.

    Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing - even occasionally stomping on vinyl that sounded too clean. Using production techniques that have never been duplicated, the Bomb Squad plundered and reconfigured their own compositions to make frenetic splatter collages; they played samples by hand together in a room like a rock band to create a "not quite right" tension; they hand-picked their samples from only the ugliest squawks and sirens.Weingarten treats the samples used on Nation Of Millions as molecules of a greater whole, slivers of music that retain their own secret histories and folk traditions. Can the essence of a hip-hop record be found in the motives, emotions and energies of the artists it samples? Is it likely that something an artist intended 20 years ago would re-emerge anew? This is a compelling and thoroughly researched investigation that tells the story of one of hip-hop's landmark albums.

    Over 50,000 copies have been sold.Tracing the creation of Exile on Main St. from the original songwriting done while touring America through the final editing in Los Angeles, Bill Janovitz explains how an album recorded by a British band in a villa on the French Riviera is pure American rock and roll. Looking at each song individually, Janovitz unveils the innovative recording techniques, personal struggles, and rock and roll myth-making that culminated in this pivotal album. "Exile" is exactly what rock and roll should sound like: a bunch of musicians playing a bunch of great songs in a room together, playing off of each other, musical communion, sounds bleeding into each other, snare drum rattling away even while not being hit, amps humming, bottles falling, feet shuffling, ghostly voices mumbling on and off-mike, whoops of excitement, shouts of encouragement, performances without a net, masks off, urgency. It is the kind of record that goes beyond the songs themselves to create a monolithic sense of atmosphere. It conveys a sense of time and place and spirit, yet it is timeless. Its influence is still heard today. Keith Richards has said, tongue in cheek, the record was the first grunge record.

    In his book, Mike McGonigal talks to all the members of My Bloody Valentine, in an almost certainly futile attempt to get at the essence of this extraordinary record.

    Here, Andy Miller traces the perilous circumstances surrounding its creation, and celebrates the timeless, perfectly crafted songs pieced together by a band who were on the verge of disintegration and who refused to follow fashion.EXCERPT'Big Sky' contains some of the most beautiful, thunderous music The Kinks ever recorded, aligned to a vulnerability and warmth no other group - and I mean no other group - could ever hope to equal. It is a perfectly balanced production. On the one hand, the mesh of clattering drums and electric guitar never threatens to overwhelm the melody; on the other, the gossamer-light harmonies, Ray and Dave's vocal line traced by Rasa Davies' wordless falsetto, are bursting with emotion. When most of the instruments drop away at 1.20, the effect is effortlessly vivid - two lines where Davies' performance is both nonchalant and impassioned. The result is wonderfully, enchantingly sad, made more so perhaps by the knowledge that The Kinks will never again sound so refined or so right.

    By turns obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the Thirty Three and a Third series explores critically acclaimed and much- loved albums by famous recording artists.

    And yet, it doesn't neatly fit into any of these descriptors. Buried underneath the radio-friendly exterior lie coded confessions of the subversive, wounded intelligence that gives this album its staying power as a work of art. Here Lou Reed managed to make a fun, accessible rock'n'roll record that is also a troubled meditation on the ambiguities-sexual, musical and otherwise-that defined his public persona and helped make him one of the most fascinating and influential figures in rock history. Through close listening and personal reflections, songwriter Ezra Furman explores Reed's and Transformer's unstable identities, and the secrets the songs challenge us to uncover.33 1/3 is a series of short books about popular music, focusing on individual albums by artists ranging from James Brown to Celine Dion and from J Dilla to Neutral Milk Hotel. Each album covered in the series occupies such a specific place in music history, so each book-length treatment is different. Jonathan Lethem, Colin Meloy, Daphne Brooks, Gina Arnold and Alan Warner are just some of the authors who have contributed to the series so far. Widely acclaimed by fans, musicians and scholars alike. More

    It is, like each of their first four albums, a masterpiece. Edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky, and fun - with Brian Eno's production, it's a record that bursts out of the downtown scene that birthed the band, and hints at the directions (positive and negative) they'd take in the near future. Here, Jonathan Lethem takes us back to the late 1970s in New York City and situates Talking Heads as one of the most remarkable and enigmatic American bands. Incorporating theory, fiction, and memoir, and placing Fear of Music alongside Fritz Lang, Edgar Allen Poe, Patti Smith, and David Foster Wallace. Lethem's book is a virtuoso performance by a writer at the peak of his powers, tackling one of his great obsessions.

    In Dream Brother, music critic David Browne offers an incisive portrait of the ill-fated father and son, examining their deaths and their short, though accomplished, careers. Browne's keen reporting and strong sense of the complex relationship between Jeff and Tim Buckley create a gripping account of a young artist hurtling toward his own destruction and a lyrical story of two lives adrift on the same churning river. Too discerning to simply attribute Jeff's death to some otherworldly, shared destiny with his father -- who died in 1975 at 28 -- the author instead paints a compelling picture of two valuable artists who never should have left the world so early. Dream Brother avoids dwelling on the similarities between father and son, but its focus on their individual paths makes the coincidences all the more haunting.Despite looking and sounding uncannily like a man who came a generation earlier, Jeff Buckley did not embrace his father's legacy. As Browne points out, the son was already without his father long before Tim's fatal heroin dose. For the rest of his life, Jeff resented his father for his absence and rejected the drug habit and self-destructive lifestyle that had ensnared Tim. And yet, both father and son possessed a daring that led them to premature, accidental deaths.Painting vivid images of the art and business of music in two very different eras, Dream Brother makes it clear that the common thread linking the deaths of Tim and Jeff Buckley is a sense of profound loss -- youth cut short, talent unexplored, music extinguished.Indeed, pervasive throughout Dream Brother is the feeling of something seductively ethereal. Maybe it's the presence of the Wolf River, which lured Jeff to his death. Maybe it's the foreknowledge of how the story will end. But probably, long after the Buckleys are gone, it's the music they left behind. (Karen Burns)

    And that's where I come in." --Greg Dulli, introducing "When We Two Parted" onstage in San FranciscoLike no record before or since, Gentlemen is fraught with the psychological warfare, bedroom drama, Catholic guilt, reprehensible deception and uncleansable shame that coincide with relationships gone seriously wrong. This story explores what happens when intellectual sophistication is star-crossed with outspoken braggadocio, a charismatic mixture that managed to alienate the mainstream horde and arms-folded indie scenesters while, for good measure, incited outsider jealousy and condescending rumors advanced by the Fat Greg Dulli 'zine. In addition to dissecting the record's organization, arrangements and lyrics, as well as examining old articles, reviews and interviews, this book delves into the memories, experiences and influences of the Afghan Whigs, most notably those that drive Dulli, a polarizing frontman whose fierce pretentiousness, GQ appearance and gloves-off boisterousness concealed deep-rooted mental depression and chemical dependency.

    Including many new details and eyewitness accounts never before published, as well as keen insight into the Nashville cats who helped Dylan reach rare artistic heights, it explores the lasting impact of rock’s first double album. Based on exhaustive research and in-depth interviews with the producer, the session musicians, studio personnel, management personnel, and others, Daryl Sanders chronicles the road that took Dylan from New York to Nashville in search of “that thin, wild mercury sound.” As Dylan told Playboy in 1978, the closest he ever came to capturing that sound was during the Blonde on Blonde sessions, where the voice of a generation was backed by musicians of the highest order.

    He delves deep into his volatile, profound, and enduring relationship with singer Steve Tyler and reveals the real people behind the larger-than-life rock-gods on stage. The nearly five-decade saga of Aerosmith is epic, at once a study in brotherhood and solitude that plays out on the killing fields of rock and roll.With record-making hits and colossal album sales, Aerosmith has earned their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But theirs is ultimately a story of endurance, and it starts almost half a century ago with young Perry, the rebel whose loving parents wanted him to assimilate, but who quits school because he doesn’t want to cut his hair. He meets Tyler in a restaurant in New Hampshire, sways him from pop music to rock-and-roll, and it doesn’t take long for the “Toxic Twins” to skyrocket into a world of fame and utter excess. From the mega-successful song and music video with Run DMC, “Walk This Way,” to the realization that he can’t pay his room service bill, Perry takes a personal look into the human stories behind Aerosmith, the people who enabled them, the ones who controlled them, and the ones who changed them. In his own words, Rocks is the whole story: “the loner’s story, the band’s story, the recovery story, the cult story, the love story, the success story, the failure story, the rebirth story, the re-destruction story, the post-destructive rebirth story.”Foreward by Johnny Depp.

    David Bowie is holed up in his Bel-Air mansion, drifting into drug-induced paranoia and confusion. Obsessed with black magic and the Holy Grail, he's built an altar in the living room and keeps his fingernail clippings in the fridge. There are occasional trips out to visit his friend Iggy Pop in a mental institution. His latest album is the cocaine-fuelled Station To Station (Bowie: "I know it was recorded in LA because I read it was"), which welds R&B rhythms to lyrics that mix the occult with a yearning for Europe, after three mad years in the New World. Bowie has long been haunted by the angst-ridden, emotional work of the Die Brucke movement and the Expressionists. Berlin is their spiritual home, and after a chaotic world tour, Bowie adopts this city as his new sanctuary. Immediately he sets to work on Low, his own expressionist mood-piece.

    And that’s just since the Halifax musician started making records of his own in 1999. For a decade before that, he was one-quarter of Thrush Hermit, a band of scrappy Superchunk disciples who became hard-rock revivalists and one of the last survivors of the ’90s pop “explosion” of major-label interest in Halifax.Canada’s east coast has never been much of a pop-culture mecca. Most musicians from the region who’ve ever made it big moved away. But armed with a stubborn streak and a knack for great songwriting, Plaskett has kept Halifax as his home, building both a career and a music community there. Along the way, he’s earned great respect: when he plays shows in Alberta, east-coast expats literally thank him for staying home.Nowhere with You is the study of how he pulled this off, from the origins of Canada’s east-coast exodus to Plaskett’s anointment as “Halifax’s Rick Rubin.” It’s a story about what happens when you call a city “the new Seattle,” about the lessons you learn playing to empty rooms in Oklahoma, and about defying radio-single expectations with rock operas and triple records. It’s about doing what you want, where you want, no matter how much work it takes.