Showing titles in History & Criticism

Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters is both a gonzo rush - capturing the bristling energy of the Rolling Stones and the times in which they lived - and a wide-eyed reflection on why the Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band in the World needed the world's greatest rock 'n' roll drummer. Across five decades, Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts has had the best seat in the house.

Waylon Jennings. Willie Nelson. Kris Kristofferson. Three renegade musicians. Three unexpected stars. Three men who changed Nashville and country music forever. Streissguth's new book brings to life an incredible chapter in musical history and reveals for the first time a surprising outlaw zeitgeist in Nashville. Based on extensive research and probing interviews with key players, what emerges is a fascinating glimpse into three of the most legendary artists of our times and the definitive story of how they changed music in Nashville and everywhere.

A Look at the History of the Emo and Indie Music Era. Explore the cultural, social, and psychological factors surrounding the genres.

The story of the music that accompanies the cinematic adventures of Ian Fleming's intrepid Agent 007 is one of surprising real-life drama. In The Music of James Bond, author Jon Burlingame throws open studio and courtroom doors alike to reveal the full and extraordinary history of the sounds of James Bond, spicing the story with a wealth of fascinating and previously undisclosed tales.

Songs that sell the most copies become hits, but some of those hits become something more—iconic recordings that not only inspire a generation but also change the direction of music. In Anatomy of 55 More Songs, based on his column for the Wall Street Journal, music journalist and historian Marc Myers tells the story behind fifty-five rock, pop, R&B, country, and soul-gospel hits through intimate interviews with the artists who wrote and recorded them.

Dividing the sum total of human musical achievement, from Beethoven to The Beatles, Busta Rhymes to Bach, into just six fundamental forms, Levitin illuminates, through songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love, how music has been instrumental in the evolution of language, thought and culture. And how, far from being a bit of a song and dance, music is at the core of what it means to be human.

Everybody Had an Ocean chronicles the migration of the rock 'n' roll business to Southern California and how the artists flourished there. The cast of characters is astonishing - Brian and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, eccentric producer Phil Spector, Cass Elliot, Sam Cooke, Ike and Tina Turner, Joni Mitchell, and scores of others - and their stories form a modern epic of the battles between innocence and cynicism, joy and terror. You'll never hear that beautiful music in quite the same way.

David W. Barber has delighted fans around the world with Accidentals on Purpose, When the Fat Lady Sings, and other internationally best-selling books of musical humor. His best-selling Bach, Beethoven and the Boys chronicles the lives of the great (and not-so-great) composers, exploring their sex lives, exposing their foibles, and expanding on our understanding of these all-too-human creatures.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of techno music from its inception in the 1980s to the present day. It discussed the various styles and genres that have emerged within techno, and the key artists and tracks that have helped shape the genre. The book also includes details about some of techno's most prominent producers and DJs, offering listeners insight into their creative process and the inspiration behind their music.

Amid a background of wars and revolution, the 19th century produced many of the world's best-loved composers, including Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky. Discover: Music of the Romantic Era charts the course of music through those turbulent but exhilarating times with 40 music excerpts. Light-hearted but authoritative, it tells the fascinating, often scandalous life stories of the 19th century's greatest composers and describes how they created musical history.

When Dave Hickey was 12, he rode the surfer's dream: the perfect wave. And, like so many things in life we long for, it didn't quite turn out - he shot the pier and dashed himself against the rocks of Sunset Cliffs in Ocean Beach, which just about killed him. Fortunately, for Hickey and for us, he survived, and continues to battle, decades into a career as one of America's foremost critical iconoclasts, a trusted, even cherished no-nonsense voice commenting on the all-too-often nonsensical worlds of art and culture.

Black Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. It is composed of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959-1967. Also includes Amiri Baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.

Sung in moments of personal isolation or on state occasions watched by millions, “Amazing Grace” has become an unparalleled anthem for humankind. How did a simple Christian hymn, written in a remote English vicarage in 1772, come to hold such sway in all corners of the modern world? With this short, engaging cultural history, James Walvin offers an explanation.

Jazz is more than a musical genre. It is a movement, an escape, and a form of rebellion—one whose mystery you can uncover through the fascinating musicians that shaped its history. Jazz doesn’t easily fit into any category owing to its diverse roots, incredible flexibility, and passion for improvisation. It is, therefore, ironic, yet somehow understandable, that this mysterious genre, so different even from other Black-inspired music, should be so well-loved by millions of people across the globe

The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way of understanding his unique, and often controversial, methods of composition.

Map of the Soul: 7 is a capstone of a three-album project intended to reveal the inner landscape of the human soul that is packed with rich symbolism and woven together with BTS’s signature sound and moves. Starting with the lyrics, this book launches into a deep, engaging examination of the album in the light of the psychology of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. The many layers of meaning embedded in the number 7 are brought to light, along with several fundamental concepts of Jungian psychology.

There may be no more joyous iteration in all of music than 1980s hard rock. It was an era where the musical and cultural ideals of rebellion and freedom of the great rock 'n' roll of the '50s, '60s, and '70s were taken to dizzying heights of neon excess. Attention to songcraft, showmanship, and musical virtuosity (especially in the realm of the electric guitar) were at an all-time high, and radio and MTV were delivering the goods en masse to the corn-fed children of America and beyond.

Danny Goldberg's new book is a subjective history of 1967, the year he graduated from high school. It is, he writes, "an attempt at trying to remember the culture that mesmerized me, to visit the places and conversations I was not cool enough to have been a part of." It is also a refreshing and new analysis of the era; by looking at not only the political causes, but also the spiritual, musical, and psychedelic movements, Goldberg provides a unique perspective on how and why the legacy of 1967 lives on today.

Sampling - incorporating found sound and manipulating it into another form entirely - has done more than any musical movement in the 20th century to maintain a continuum of popular music as a living document and, in the process, has become one of the most successful (and commercial) strains of postmodern art. Bring That Beat Back traces the development of this transformative pop-cultural practice from its origins in the turntable-manning, record-spinning hip-hop DJs of 1970s New York through 40 years of musical innovation and reinvention.

The first book of its kind, A Quick Ting on Afrobeats chronicles the social and cultural development of the eponymous music genre, tracing its rich history from the African continent all the way to the musical centre of the Western world.