Showing titles in History & Criticism

From a legendary journalist with four decades of unprecedented access and untold stories, an insider’s behind-the-scenes look at the major personalities of rock and roll. Lisa Robinson has interviewed everyone from John Lennon to Bono to Patti Smith, Eminem to Lady Gaga to Jay-Z and Kanye West...

In 100 brief chapters, John M. Borack discusses and ranks the greatest moments in Beatles history. An avid Fab Four fan since childhood and a music journalist for more than 35 years, Borack has created a book to agree with and disagree with, and one that is sure to spark conversations. A love letter to the greatest rock band of all time, The Beatles 100 is a book for Beatles buffs and casual fans alike. 

You know his work—Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, The King and I. But you don't really know Oscar Hammerstein II, the man who, more than anyone else, invented the American musical. Among the most commercially successful artists of his time, he was a fighter for social justice who constantly prodded his audiences to be better than they were.

A fascinating history that examines how real estate, gentrification, community and the highs and lows of New York City itself shaped the city’s music scenes from folk to house music. Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and you’ll likely pass some of the most significant...

La biografía integral de Roger Waters, cerebro de una de las bandas más importantes de los últimos sesenta años, en un recorrido que va de su infancia—marcada por la desaparición de su padre en la guerra—a la ebullición cultural de la Inglaterra de los Beatles y los Stones y después. Syd Barrett, las giras, los discos, El lado oscuro de la luna, The Wall, David Gilmour, la militancia política y las peleas y polémicas de una carrera única que lo encuentra vital como siempre y tocando por todo el mundo a los 80.

Bob Dylan is the prince of self-reinvention and deflection. Whether it's the folkies of Greenwich Village, the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s, born-again Christians, the Chabad Lubavitch community, or English department postmodernists, specific intellectual and sociopolitical groups have repeatedly claimed Bob Dylan as their spokesperson. But in the words of filmmaker Todd Haynes, "The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he's no longer where he was."

Pet Sounds is, rightly, one of the most celebrated pop albums ever released. It has also been written about, pored over, and analyzed more than most other albums put together. In this disarming book, Jim Fusilli focuses primarily on the emotional core of the album, on Brian Wilson’s pitch-perfect cry of despair. In doing so, he brings to life the search for equilibrium and acceptance that still gives Pet Sounds its heart almost four decades after its release.

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, this passionate and provocative book tells the complete story of Black music in the last 50 years, and in doing so, outlines the perilous position of Black culture within white American society. In a fast-paced narrative, Nelson George’s book chronicles the rise and fall of “race music” and its transformation into the R&B that eventually dominated the airwaves, only to find itself diluted and submerged as crossover music.

Thirty years ago, Chuck Berry starred in the seminal music documentary Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll, which profiled the legend during a star-studded concert celebrating his 60th birthday. Now comes the complete story behind one of America's most enduring and embattled icons. Compiled as an oral history by the film's producer, Stephanie Bennett, Johnny B. Bad combines interviews from the film's participants, including its music director - Keith Richards. These unique interviews and accounts paint a vivid and multifaceted picture of the artist.

One of Oprah Daily's 20 Favorite Books of 2021 Selected as one of Pitchfork's Best Music Books of the Year “One of the best books of its kind in decades.” —The Wall Street Journal An epic achievement and a huge delight, the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years...

As a young man, Richard Neer dreamed of landing a job at WNEW in New York - one of the revolutionary FM stations across the country that were changing the face of radio by rejecting strict formatting and letting disc jockeys play whatever they wanted. He felt that when he got there, he’d have made the big time. Little did he know he’d have shaped rock history as well. FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio chronicles the birth, growth, and death of free-form rock-and-roll radio through the stories of the movement’s flagship stations.

 Along Comes the Association is the story of how Russ Giguere and his fellow band members in the legendary and influential pop group The Association came together to create unparalleled music, unique to the time and place, and never again to be repeated. 

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.

Music journalists Dean Budnick and Josh Baron chronicle the behind-the-scenes history of the modern concert industry. Filled with entertaining rock-and-roll anecdotes about The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, and more - and charting the emergence of players like Ticketmaster, StubHub, Live Nation, and Outbox - Ticket Masters will transfix every concertgoer who wonders just where the price of admission really goes. This edition has an updated epilogue that covers recent industry developments.

House is the first descendant of disco. While Black and Hispanic communities were jamming and party DJs spinning records, a new birth of rhythm gave way to music lovers from Chicago and New York in the form known as house music. Developed in Chicago's underground dance club culture in the early 1980s, today house music is worldwide and continues to dominate most club scenes and has expanded beyond its subculture beginning.

This audiobook takes the reader on a grand musical tour from its origins in prehistory to the twenty-first century. It describes its roles in culture and religion in ancient China and the Middle East and how it developed in the Mediterranean world of classical Greece and Rome. Andrew Gant...

In Music and Mayhem, acclaimed saxophonist Keith Donald traces his extraordinary journey from post-war Belfast to the forefront of a musical movement that reshaped modern Ireland - and resonated far beyond it. Born into Unionist east Belfast during the early years of the Troubles, Donald was performing on the BBC at just ten years old. By the 1960s, he was studying classics at Trinity College Dublin while immersing himself in the restless energy of the European jazz scene. Music became both refuge and rebellion - and, at times, self-destruction.

A first-time-ever exploration of the 290 songs from the entirety of Twin Peaks, sure to entice fans of the David Lynch-Mark Frost's cult classic that revolutionized TV, with brand-new interviews with Frost and several of the key composers and musicians involved.

This oral history documents the story of Oasis as told by the fans who were there. Discover never-before-seen perspectives charting the rise, fall, and rise again of Liam and Noel Gallagher and the British rock band whose music defined a generation. A few years after Definitely Maybe topped the...

The central experience of the Ramones and their music is of being an outsider, an outcast, a person who’s somehow defective, and the revolt against shame and self-loathing. The fans, argues Donna Gaines, got it right away, from their own experience of alienation at home, at school, on the streets, and from themselves. This sense of estrangement and marginality permeates everything the Ramones still offer us as artists, and as people. Why the Ramones Matter compellingly makes the case that the Ramones gave us everything.