There’s something especially daunting about preparing a feature on music books. There’s so much ground to cover in terms of time (a century-plus of recorded music), space (there’s writing on music from all over the world), sound (any genre is conceivably fair game), and format (biography, record guide, critical study, anthology, memoir). So the idea of saying that any 25 or 50 or 100 music books are the “best” seems ridiculous. So this is not that sort of list. Instead, it’s a list of 60 music-related books that explore the depth and breadth of our collective obsessions. There’s no shortage of writing about music—or ways to write about it—and this is not a definitive be-all-end-all list as much as a starting point. All of these works lead to other worthy titles, undiscovered albums, and new ways of thinking about the sounds flowing into our headphones on a daily basis.
There are chronicles of remarkable individual talents like Miles Davis, Neil Young, and Marvin Gaye, as well as histories of scenes and phenomena—the American 1980s indie rock underground, ’90s rave culture—that had musicians and fans banding together toward a common goal or sound. There are also more offbeat and untold stories, like Mountain Goats leader John Darnielle’s Black Sabbath–themed anti-coming-of-age novella Master of Reality or Dave Tompkins’ virtuosic recent history of the vocoder, How to Wreck a Nice Beach. And contextualizing criticism from originators Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, and Ellen Willis. (The great Robert Christgau is not included on this list because we feel his invaluable, 40-plus-year archive of album reviews and essays are best experienced through his highly searchable website.)
Read on and then go to your local bookstore or library and read some more.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
The Disco Files 1973-78: New York’s Underground Week by Week
“Beginning a regular report on the state of the dance floor.” So began Vince Aletti’s weekly series of columns for Record World magazine, on November 16, 1974. Disco threw out the pop music rulebook and, for the first time, brought club DJs to the center of the listening experience, operating as both artists and record industry prophets. Aletti recognized this early on: a 1973 column he wrote for Rolling Stone is widely considered the first published article on New York’s disco phenomenon. The Disco Files: 1973-1978 includes that piece, as well as an early editorial defending disco as a legitimate extension of 1960s black popular music (Aletti was a Motown aficionado), but the bulk of this material is made up of his columns for Record World, where Aletti effortlessly blended rigorous journalism and thoughtful criticism. Each weekly entry contains lists of a few notable DJs’ favorite records (contributors include Jellybean Benitez, Walter Gibbons, and Larry Levan) and aggregated lists of the most popular tracks amongst DJs for that period—a useful resource for hours of YouTube surfing. The columns themselves included reporting on some of the disco era’s most notable events: the founding of the first New York Record Pool (where record labels could connect with DJs), the release of key 12" versions of popular songs, and the sudden arrival of Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” to an “astonishing degree of acceptance.” –David Drake
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground 1981-1991
It’s hard to make it as a musician these days, but it was even harder during the Reagan era. In Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad profiles 13 groups from the first wave of American underground rock—now-legendary acts like Black Flag, the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Fugazi, and Beat Happening—that made uncompromising, often brilliant music outside the margins of popular culture.
In the ’80s, there was no e-mail to streamline tour booking. No iPods to dull the monotony of that 18-hour haul from San Diego to El Paso. Independent record distribution was poor-to-nonexistent. “Even the top [indie] bands lived extremely modestly,” writes Azerrad. “They had the imagination to make it up as they went along, not even knowing where it would all lead.”
Luckily, it did lead to some great records. But Azerrad doesn’t spend much time mulling over the decade’s sounds. Instead, he focuses on the stories—the Minutemen’s ascent from goofball teens to visionary political-minded post-punkers, Black Flag’s harrowing efforts to beat a punk rock cowpath through the nation’s heartland. The usual manna of rock star bios is all there, too: drug addled debauchery (Gibby Haynes of Butthole Surfers getting gonzo and rubbing his genitals on a suitcase that belonged to Jimmy Carter’s daughter) and bratty inter-band squabbling (see: Dinosaur Jr.). In a sense, the book is like On the Road for music geeks, where hipster visionaries drift across the continent in broken-down Econoline vans, blasting rock music, creating a sustainable—if slightly chaotic—subculture along the way. –Aaron Leitko
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’n’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock’n’Roll
Lester Bangs is without a doubt the world’s most famous rock critic. Which doesn’t necessarily make him the best. But he’s left a looming shadow in the public’s mind about who rock critics are—what they look like, how they talk—thanks in part to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal in Almost Famous. And there’s no doubt Bangs’ Beat-inspired, Darvon-fueled fulminating indelibly impacted rock criticism; anyone who has attempted to string together three consecutive thoughts about the music they love or hate has probably contended with his ghost.
While Bangs wrote or co-authored a few books (one on Blondie, another on Rod Stewart), the writing that represented his spirit lived in the column inches of magazines like Creem, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and The Village Voice, where he freelanced with a madman’s zeal. In those pieces, his various passions, irrational hatreds, quirks, biases, and grudges came vividly to life, and they were lovingly gathered into two anthologies: Psychedelic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste.
Both are music-book cornerstones, but that doesn’t mean they’re always smooth reading. Bangs’ prose, at its very best, starts from a single conversation point—say, his complicated relationship to Nico’s The Marble Index, or his love of the Troggs—and takes off through digressions, dirty jokes, confessions, and asides. At its worst, it felt like a clammy, overlong hug from the weepy drunk in the corner. Mainlines, in particular, includes his gimlet-eyed travelogue on Bob Marley and a full-body takedown of Desire-era Bob Dylan, but, ultimately, to pick and choose with Bangs is impossible. Good Lester and Bad Lester are inseparable parts of the same man, and no music nerd is complete until they’ve spent some time at the end of the bar with him. –Jayson Greene
White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s
Whenever anything musically noteworthy occurred in the ’60s, Joe Boyd was probably nearby. In 1964, at age 21, he served as European tour manager for elder statesmen Coleman Hawkins and Muddy Waters. He was stage manager at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric the following year. He managed the UFO Club in London, where Pink Floyd and Soft Machine got their start. And all that was before he became a legendary record producer, recording Floyd’s first single and seminal albums by the likes of Fairport Convention, Nico, and Nick Drake. Miraculously, he made it through with his memory and critical faculties intact, as White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s attests.
Part personal memoir and part social history, White Bicycles bursts with rollicking anecdotes, eyewitness accounts, and canny observations about politics and youth culture that remain accurate and timely today. And, unlike many music biz memoirs, it’s refreshingly free of self-congratulation. Boyd often modestly credits his various successes to good timing or favorable circumstance: “The economy of the ’60s cut us a lot of slack, leaving time to travel, take drugs, write songs, and re-think the universe.” There’s also an undercurrent of sadness, as Boyd mourns departed friends and collaborators like Nick Drake and Sandy Denny, as well as larger cultural losses.
“The destructiveness that comes with innovation is as old as history,” Boyd writes, and it is not without regret that he describes a ’60s rock culture industry that gradually swept aside more regional variants of folk, blues, and jazz. This bittersweet edge helps White Bicycles keep an emotional balance as Boyd guides us through the decade with keen ears and restless intellectual curiosity. –Matthew Murphy
Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King
Lloyd Bradley is tied to reggae as more than a fan or journalist. In the ’70s, he was the operator of the Dark Star Sound System in London, a past that gives him unique insight into the minds of the musicians, DJs, fans, and industry people who made reggae happen. This Is Reggae Music (titled Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King outside the U.S.) is Bradley’s deep history of Jamaican popular music, from its roots in mento, calypso, and the R&B-pumping sound systems of Kingston, through ska, rocksteady, roots, dub and dancehall. He tells it with a fan’s enthusiasm and critical ear, balancing his narrative with interviews with some of the music’s pivotal figures.
The history of reggae is intertwined with the modern history of Jamaica and its expatriate diaspora, and Bradley steps back from the music when he needs to, placing it in the context of Jamaican independence and the country’s steep ups and downs since then. London’s large expatriate community hovers just out of the center of the narrative, and Bradley effectively wields his personal understanding of the back-and-forth between it and the home island. His account of the rise of Rastafarianism from the persecuted margins of Jamaican society to the center of roots music is one of the finest short histories of the movement available. Even Bradley’s attempts to transcribe the patois of his interview subjects work.
It’s also difficult to think of a book that better places Bob Marley in the context of reggae as an evolving musical form. Bradley devotes a whole brilliant chapter to unpacking Marley’s musical, cultural, and societal legacies, explaining clearly how each is different. It’s a sweeping history that captures the feel of the times it documents well, and a bit of the feel of the music, too. –Joe Tangari
Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey
These days, indie rockers no-longer give disco the stink-eye and “serious” dance producers pay it reverent homage. Reissue companies repackage disco classics with the dignity usually reserved for Motown or any of pop’s long-acknowledged pillars. But I was born in 1978, at the high point of disco’s mainstream success, and for most of my life disco was viewed as a joke by the public, chintzy lowest common denominator dance music that briefly swamped the pop charts only to blessedly disappear just as quickly once people got exhausted with that beat.
First published in 2000, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life was one of the first books to take disco seriously, and certainly the most exhaustive to that point, a major and much-needed attempt to rehabilitate the genre. More a study of the rise of the DJ as an artist—tastemaker, musician, cultural icon—the book begins in the prehistory, with radio disc jockeys as architects of modern pop. It brings us right up to house and techno, genres where DJs are just as important (if not more so) than the folks who make the records. (The rave era was still going, just barely, when the book was published.) They’re admirably in-depth across 100 years, on everything from Northern Soul to early hip-hop, with exhaustive interviews that give you not only the facts but also the feel of what it was like to be in those legendary clubs. But it’s hard not to feel like Brewster and Broughton’s major contribution was their excavation of disco’s largely forgotten (or ignored) history, as a scene with deep roots rather than a fad cooked up by industry execs, paving the way for the genre’s current status as one of the key underground movements of the 1970s. –Jess Harvell
Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage
It’s easy to think seminal American experimental composer John Cage valued silence as an ideal. His most notorious composition, 4'33", instructed its performers not to play a single note. He was a student of Zen Buddhism and a devoted amateur mycologist, both disciplines of quietude. He came to prominence at a time when American art was erasing itself across the board, from Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings to Merce Cunningham’s formless choreography. The concept of silence came to define Cage so much that it lent itself to the title of this collection of writings.
Silence was certainly an important concept for Cage, but as more of a myth than an ideal; after visiting a soundproof isolation chamber at Harvard in 1951, he heard the blood beating in his ears. And the point of 4'33" wasn't to attain silence, but to underscore its illusory nature, as the rustlings of the audience became the music. And the composer’s reputation for reticence is at odds with the many fine words he produced—as a poet, lecturer, and essayist—alongside his music.
When Cage lectured on his aleatory music, he often brought the processes he described to bear on the texts, and it’s great fun to imagine him delivering these crazy things—full of awkward pauses and evasive logical leaps—to the academy. Small, penetrating anecdotes sprout up in Silence, too, giving us an intimate vantage on the composer’s sensibility; they virtually bleed with grace and mischievous humor (remember his playful television appearances). Silence isn’t just about art, it’s art in-process—an invaluable-if-opaque survey of the mid-20th-century American avant-garde by a rare soul whose open-ended ideas still challenge us today. –Brian Howe
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
Most hip-hop histories deal in mythic imagery: the early graffiti heroes who turned dilapidated subway cars into rolling art galleries or block parties with soundsystems that would dim streetlights. In Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, Jeff Chang is less concerned with legend and more invested in the political and social circumstances that allowed the music and the subculture to exist in the first place. In the first chunk of the book, music barely enters the equation; instead, we learn about crippling South Bronx poverty, epidemics of arson, civil rights movements, racial tensions, and gang meetings that Chang depicts as a less-cartoonish version of the opening scenes from The Warriors. So when music eventually does come into the picture, we know a whole lot more about the world of the people making it.
Chang’s history leans heavily toward certain historic eras, and it includes virtually nothing about rap scenes outside of New York and Los Angeles. But Can’t Stop is absolutely essential for the picture Chang creates of some truly epochal moments: the 1973 West Bronx party that launched DJ Kool Herc’s legend, the brief era when uptown rappers and DJs hung out with downtown punks and artists and sniffed coke at the Roxy, the L.A. gang truce that (as Chang tells it) contributed to the sense of euphoria Dr. Dre built on The Chronic, the editorial battles that transformed The Source from a vital voice to a single criminal’s mouthpiece. And what really makes Can’t Stop Won’t Stop pop is Chang’s vivid, humane writer’s instinct. The man knows how to tell a story, and there are great stories here. –Tom Breihan
The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings
When it comes to music reference books, few, if any, have an air of authority that can touch The Penguin Guide. First published in 1992 and updated every other year since, The Penguin Guide is long, deep, wide, detailed, and, more often than not, right on the money. That its entries were all written by two people, UK aficionados Richard Cook (who passed away in 2007) and Brian Morton, makes its achievements that much more impressive. These two not only listened to and catalogued many thousands of jazz records, they somehow had the time and motivation to compile thoughts on each into a well-organized and readable account of the wide-ranging music’s knotty history. Versed in both the avant-garde (the writing on free improviser Derek Bailey’s work is especially astute) and jazz roots (they are experts on Louis Armstrong), Cook and Morton offer both the ultimate roadmap for newbies and a sure-fire argument-starter for old jazz heads. It’s safe to assume that no single jazz guide will ever touch this one. –Mark Richardson
Krautrocksampler: One Head’s Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik - 1968 Onwards
Julian Cope’s mini-history of krautrock was first published in 1995 and has subsequently become as elusive as an original vinyl copy of Harmonia’s Deluxe; the book is long out-of-print, and the singer/author claims to have no plans to rectify that any time soon. But the value of Krautrocksampler in early-internet days—and as a useful reference tool ever since—should not be underestimated. Back when finding an Amon Düül II record seemed like an impossible dream, Cope wasn’t just describing how this music sounded, he was also telling folkloric tales about how these bands formed and blew apart his teenage mind. The writing style is enthusiastic to say the least, with lots of odd capitalization and stream-of-consciousness thoughts slapped straight onto the page. Such flourishes are encapsulated in his catch-all description of krautrock in the introduction: “...a kind of Pagan Freakout LSD Explore-the-god-in-you-by-working-the-animal-in-you Gnostic Odyssey.”
Cope’s unabashed ardor for the genre is infectious, and it mirrors both the humor and the unhinged freak-outs that are often ingrained in the music itself. It’s a slender volume, but Krautrocksampler covers a huge swath of territory. The importance of the Monks and Stockhausen are noted; notorious Ohr Records boss Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser is a recurrent, and sometimes derided, figure; the impact of krautrock on the Sex Pistols and David Bowie is examined; and the major figureheads (Neu!, Can, Faust, etc.) get a chapter each. Some of the stories may feel familiar now, but few other writers have been able to add comparable dashes of wit and vigor to the story of Ash Ra Tempel’s involvement with Timothy Leary or the original Neu! split. –Nick Neyland
Master of Reality 33 ⅓
Black Sabbath didn’t call their ode to soul-crushing sadness “Depression,” they called it (the less whiny, more bad-ass-sounding) “Paranoid.” Following in that tradition of emotionally resonant metal and unpretentious language, John Darnielle’s contribution to Continuum Books’ 33 1/3rd series is an anti-coming-of-age novella that doubles as a celebration of Ozzy and company’s Master of Reality. The Mountain Goats leader realistically inhabits the voice of a bright, passionate (but still very much 15-year-old) kid named Roger, who’s stuck in a psych ward in 1985 and trying to get his Black Sabbath cassette tape back from a kinda-clueless counselor named Gary.
Darnielle—who worked as a nurse in a mental hospital and presumably met quite a few smart, lost kids like Roger—speaks to the soul-damaging aspects of locking up problem teens and offers a piece of music criticism that illuminates the edifying qualities of heavy metal. A curse-filled invective aimed at Gary shifts into a discussion of Sabbath’s actually-kinda-sophisticated theological issues; a hilarious story about putting his sister’s Jesse Johnson tape in the microwave and an appreciation of Tony Iommi’s guitar tone exist on the same emotional plane. Imagine the empathy and kindness of Mountain Goats’ “The Best-Ever Death Metal in Denton” for 100 pages instead of three minutes (and about five times more tragic), and you’re nearly there. –Brandon Soderberg
Miles: The Autobiography
Miles Davis was known for being taciturn as a motherfucker. But in his autobiography, written by poet/journalist Quincy Troupe on the basis of dozens of interviews, he spills his guts like a motherfucker, giving an unflinchingly honest, darkly funny, and casually profane account of his life as one of the most influential musicians ever. Everything and everyone Miles talks about is “a motherfucker”—Miles is a study in the myriad meanings words can acquire based on the speaker’s inflection, and Troupe captures his subject’s voice with such fidelity you might as well be sitting with the man as he expounds on pimping for heroin money in the early 1950s, his harrowing late-’70s retirement, the racism of culturally cloistered American whites, and his Lamborghinis.
Oh, and music. Music was life for Miles, and his devotion to it (and drugs) carved a trail of destruction through his personal life that he doesn’t run from. His oscillating excitement and frustration over it is the book’s throbbing pulse. When Miles talks about his best bands, he sounds like a giddy kid, but some of the most revealing passages detail his own apprenticeships under Eddie Randle, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker.
Published less than two years before Miles died, the book is imperfect. The narrative jumps around like a conversation, embarking on numerous tangents that are hardly profound on the page. But, in that way, it reflects its subject, in all his contradictory brilliance, creative hunger, and personal ugliness. You’re not likely to come away from this autobiography liking Miles Davis the man, but Miles didn’t care. He cared about the music. –Joe Tangari
Chronicles: Volume One
The only thing predictable about Bob Dylan’s memoir is that it’s completely unpredictable. While fans attuned to Dylan’s wavelength weren’t expecting a faithful retelling of his life when the mercurial icon delivered Chronicles: Volume One in 2004, it’s likely few were truly prepared for the book’s crazy quilt of storytelling, metaphysics, myth doctoring, and even some genuine revelation.
Roughly speaking, Chronicles provides snapshots from three distinct stages of Dylan’s career, though it’s anyone’s guess why these specific points were chosen. The biggest chunk follows the fledgling career of a young Minnesotan named Robert Zimmerman as he moves to Manhattan in the early ’60s and gets indoctrinated into the city’s legendary folk scene. It’s the most historically significant portion of the book and also the best; not because Dylan plumbs the depths of his own poet’s soul, but because he renders such a wonderful account of the scene itself and of the musicians who inspired him. Strictly as music writing, Dylan’s grasp of the artistry of performers as disparate as Dave Van Ronk and Ricky Nelson is as good as you’ll find anywhere.
More surprisingly, Chronicles also visits two comparatively unheralded Dylan eras: his contented early-’70s folk-rock and modest, Daniel Lanois–helmed late-’80s comeback. Here, Dylan proves that for all the fanatical scrutiny he’s received, he remains one step ahead, coyly suggesting that his masterwork Blood on the Tracks was based not on private anguish but on the stories of Chekov, and chalking up his late-career revival to a set of obliquely defined musical principles. Yet when Dylan describes escaping the burdens placed on him by the ’60s counterculture by making widely-loathed artistic choices in order to preserve his sanity and his family, it’s undeniably affecting—even if it may be another feint. –Joshua Love
The Recording Angel: Music, Records, and Culture From Aristotle to Zappa
It’s easy to forget, given all the reactionary bluster from both ends of the digital music debate, but for the vast majority of human history music was a purely ephemeral phenomenon. Unencumbered by plastic form, music was mainly an oral tradition structured by religious and seasonal rituals, and disappearing into history as the last notes drifted through the air. Though various forms of written notation existed for centuries, allowing us to recreate works in standardized ways, music changed forever once paper gave way to plastic—when we learned how to capture and mechanically recreate it.
This is the premise of Evan Eisenberg’s wonderful book The Recording Angel. Beginning in 1877 with Edison’s cylinder, Eisenberg traces music’s myriad new paths over the next 100 years. Musical connoisseurship hit the home, as Victor’s deluxe Red Seal album line signaled highbrow refinement for a nascent demographic of music snobs. The line between composer and producer quickly blurred as the record became the standard unit of popular music, as did the idea of what an “instrument” could be with the rise of phonography. Even the basic ideas of musical time—the patterns of its circulation and the length of individual pieces—were completely upended due to the affordances and limitations of the phonographic medium.
Though he largely confines himself to the realm of philosophy and 20th-century high culture, Eisenberg’s ideas and prose are as compelling and relevant as ever. He introduces us to Clarence the quirky, hermetic vinyl collector; he makes us think about why “desert island discs” are such a fun thought experiment; he pits Aristotle against his prized pupil Plato in a beef about music’s cathartic function. Simply put: there’s no better book that addresses the fundamental musical rituals and belief systems we created once we objectified music. –Eric Harvey
A Year with Swollen Appendices
The core of A Year with Swollen Appendices consists of a diary Brian Eno maintained throughout 1995, adding his own embellishments along the way; its titular appendices allow him to stretch out concepts from the book’s main body with short stories, interviews, and letters. What’s striking is how perpetually busy Eno is, as he flits between his overwhelming personal life and the four music projects he undertook that year (with James, U2, David Bowie, and the War Child Help album). The diary format is ideal for reflecting that ebb and flow—a trip to Egypt is recalled in meticulous detail, while his hectic home life with his two young daughters is laid-out in short, staccato bursts.
As a historical time capsule, it’s an invaluable document of slightly more innocent times. Eno outlines his frustrations with the digital realm, including many misgivings about the uselessness of CD-ROMs, while also praising the Bliss screensaver and Koan music software program. It’s illuminating and deeply amusing in equal measure; Eno has no qualms about exposing his mischievous and sometimes puerile nature, whether it’s through enlarging women’s bottoms in Photoshop or offering detailed instruction on how he peed on Duchamp’s Fountain. –Nick Neyland
Fuck You Heroes: Photographs 1976-1991
It’s a cliché and a truth that successful music photographers need to be in the right place at the right time. Glen E. Friedman was born with that knack. In Fuck You Heroes, he presents an overview of his work shooting skateboard, punk, and rap legends between 1976 and 1991. That last date is key—in his intro, Friedman expresses the dissatisfaction he felt in that pivotal year, whether it was due to the success of Nirvana or the retro culture sweeping the skateboard world. As such, this book partially displays vital documentation of pre-corporate times in the punk scene. The common denominator that binds Friedman and his subjects is the full-blooded engagement they have with their work; his raw live shots of Bad Brains perfectly encapsulate that band’s passion as well as Friedman’s commitment to bone-crunching mosh pits.
Crucially, the lensman isn’t interested in showing his subjects at their best in his live photos. It’s often quite the opposite. One memorable picture shows Black Flag’s Henry Rollins, Gregg Ginn, and Chuck Dukowski with their facial muscles contorted and twisted as they pummel through a song, gloriously lost to the cause. But Fuck You Heroes also offers a more measured side to Friedman’s talent, in his capturing of the burgeoning hip-hop scene. That work demonstrates his understanding of place, with a young Ice-T positioned outside a palatial mansion and Public Enemy shot in a dimly lit studio for the classic Yo! Bum Rush the Show cover. –Nick Neyland
Music Downtown: Writings From the Village Voice
Kyle Gann was hired as a classical music critic at The Village Voice in 1986 and stayed, in one capacity or another, until 2005. If that sounds like a staid job, trust that Gann didn’t approach it like most. The writer eschewed the Midtown highbrow-culture industry of Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center almost completely, instead sniffing out warehouse happenings, loft shows, multimedia events, and scruffy downtown concerts. In the process, he cataloged the hardy, contentious, and explosively creative Downtown NYC scene that has given the world Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, the Bang on a Can collective, and countless others. His critical résumé reads like a downtown-classical version of LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge”: Trimpin’s 1989 concert at the Kitchen? He was there. La Monte Young’s epic seven-Sundays-straight performance of The Well-Tuned Piano? Yep. Diamanda Galás’ Masque of the Red Death? Ditto. If there was something unclassifiable happening somewhere hot and uncomfortable, Gann was there.
If the names and works listed above are utterly alien to you (as they are to most), therein lies much of the joy of reading Music Downtown. To learn of a teeming musical battleground you didn’t even know existed is a delightfully disorienting, even surreal, experience. And when Gann’s alternative canon scrapes up against the mainstream, the results never fail to illuminate: He vociferously defends the music of Yoko Ono, for example, as a pioneering avant-gardist thrust unfairly into the media spotlight: “Would John Cage’s music be better liked if he’d married Madonna?” –Jayson Greene
The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life
Ian McDonald developed the form of this book—a song-by-song chronological run through a band’s entire catalog—to explore the music of the Beatles. And the Smiths turn out to be the ideal band for the same treatment. Like the Beatles, they packed an incredible amount of astonishing music into a short amount of time, and it’s dizzying to take in the sheer volume of classic singles and album tracks they would record in a single month. The Smiths also demonstrated incremental changes in maturity from accomplished but crude early singles to the lush and orchestrated tracks found on Strangeways, Here We Come, and seeing those changes laid end-to-end highlights how even a band with an established and distinctive sound is never fixed in any one place. But laying aside the striking career arc of the Smiths, Simon Goddard’s book is a winner because it strikes such a perfect balance between immersive fandom and sharp criticism. Goddard, who also wrote the great (if for committed fans only) Mozipedia: The Encyclopaedia of Morrissey and the Smiths from last year, was granted access to the band’s archives and access to everyone in the band save Morrissey (Johnny Marr agreed to contribute only after the book was first published, so the updated later edition of this book is definitive), and he clearly knows and understands the band’s music on a very intimate scale. But his discussions of the tracks are packed with insight not only into how they were assembled, but for how they resonate with listeners. Songs That Saved Your Life is so successful, it makes you wish that every band you cared about would get such a loving and incisive treatment. –Mark Richardson
Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson
Alan Greenberg’s Robert Johnson screenplay has never been made into a film, though people have certainly tried. In the late ’70s, Mick Jagger backed the project. Throughout the ’90s, Martin Scorsese was gonna direct, and in the early 2000s, Diddy was to star in a version. But Love in Vain the film still hasn’t happened, leaving only a stand-alone biopic script that reads like a great American novel.
Instead of conveniently conflating history like most dramatized musical biographies, the book focuses on milieu and mood. Greenberg, who went to the Mississippi Delta and chased down friends and enemies of Johnson for research, is very sensitive to the contingencies of vagabond living as he conveys the feeling of what it was like to drunkenly shuffle from one dirty and dangerous jook joint to the next each night. There’s a tragic inevitability to the script that’s hard to shake.
For cold hard facts about Johnson, there are 50 pages of end notes, wherein Greenberg cites sources, explicates screenwriting decisions (taking note of where he’s played with the truth or created composite characters), obsessively breaks down blues traditions, and provides prospective directors some cinematic advice (apparently, Ethiopian tribal music should score Johnson’s death). This well-researched, brashly impressionistic screenplay is haunting, but it also happens to be the definitive book of any kind on the gifted, eccentric blues legend. –Brandon Soderberg
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom
With his two short-story collections in the ’60s, Almost Grown and Mister Downchild, Peter Guralnick was a fiction writer first and a music historian second. Those origins are obvious in 1986’s Sweet Soul Music, with its epic trajectory, complex and relatable characters, telling details, and sharp prose that emphasizes empathy and clarity over showy idiosyncrasies.
Tracing soul’s roots in the black church and its entry into the mainstream, Sweet Soul Music begins with the innovations of Sam Cooke and Ray Charles, who transformed gospel music by applying its emotionalism to secular matters. Cooke in particular—followed by the worldlier James Brown—was a savvy, striving businessman who broke new ground for blacks simply by succeeding in the industry.
“Soul music is Southern by definition if not by actual geography,” Guralnick writes, and the South becomes a richly complex, often hostile setting for this story, defined by segregation as well as by the desire to thwart it in search of great music. Both Stax in Memphis and Fame in Muscle Shoals were essentially integrated, with white and black musicians and businesspeople working alongside one another. Soul music, in addition to offering some of the hottest, rawest, and most inventive sounds of the ’50s and ’60s, provided a model of how an integrated society could interact to everyone’s benefit. “Soul music,” he writes, “derives, I believe, from the Southern dream of freedom.” And the book is as much about tragedy as triumph: the murder of Sam Cooke, the death of Otis Redding, the shuttering of Stax Records, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Ultimately, this is a book about what was and—just as crucially—what might have been. –Stephen M. Deusner
Decoded
One of JAY-Z’s aspirations for Decoded is to “show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.” It’s a pretty lofty goal, even for JAY-Z. But part of Jay’s brilliance is his stubborn inability to back down from a challenge, whether it be dealing drugs and avoiding cops in Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects, starting his own record label, Roc-a-Fella, becoming CEO of Def Jam, launching a clothing line, or breaking genre boundaries as the first hip-hop headliner for some of the Earth’s biggest music festivals. At this point, it’s foolish to bet against the man born Shawn Corey Carter, and with Decoded, he offers an essential first-hand hip-hop textbook that, for the most part, wisely touts the genre without oversimplifying it.
And while the tome might be lacking in juicy details from the rapper’s personal life, he more than makes up for it with incisive ruminations on hip-hop greats; turns out JAY-Z is a better critic than most rap critics, too. On Rakim: “He chose the words because they rhymed, but it was his genius to combine them in a way that made it feel like those words were always meant to be connected.” On Public Enemy: “Chuck D famously called hip-hop the CNN of the ghetto, and he was right, but hip-hop would be boring as the news if all MCs did was report. Rap is entertainment—and art.” The book’s snatches of annotated lyrics can be a bit pedantic to those in the know, but remember, Jay is aiming for “everyone in the world” here. And, impressively, Decoded delivers for both obsessives and neophytes alike. –Ryan Dombal
Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists
Ego Trip magazine lasted four glorious years and, when the bell tolled in 1998, the five sharp, funny, insanely knowledgeable rap nerds behind the rag proceeded to pour all their obsessive, irreverent love of the genre into this tome, a compulsively re-readable collection of factoids, jokes, and opinions, both defensible and otherwise.
There’s a perversely interesting bon mot on almost every page. Ja Rule’s name is an acronym for “Jeff Atkins Represents Unconditional Love’s Existence”! Naughty by Nature’s Treach once attacked De La Soul’s Posdnous mid-performance! Heavy D and Pete Rock are cousins! But the book is also a whole lot of fun when the crew of writers stops digging up trivia blips and brings the funny, clowning on Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s punk-inspired skintight vinyl outfits or Jam Master Jay’s historically awful verse on Run-D.M.C.’s “Pause.” And though there’s no reason why a list of rap’s greatest sweater references should be entertaining reading, there’s one here, and I’ve read it at least three times.
This isn’t a self-serious myth-indulging history; it’s a celebration of rap’s goofy-ass marginalia that feels like the work of actual fans, engaging in the work of day-to-day fandom. But the greatest reason to buy the book may be the final section, where the jokes and trivia stop and the writers offer lists of the greatest rap albums and singles, broken down by year, since the genre’s inception. It’s not a definitive list, tilted as it is toward the New York side of things, but it’s a hell of a downloading guide nonetheless. –Tom Breihan
The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972-1982
The Voice of New Music (out of print, but available for free as a PDF here) compiles Tom Johnson’s Village Voice coverage of the wave of minimalist music in ’70s New York, a post-Cage movement stretching from the extended flights of La Monte Young and Terry Riley to the populist minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. This music was performed live more often than it was recorded or released, and Johnson’s first-person impressions put you right there in the downtown galleries and lofts. And he didn’t just follow the big names—there is seemingly no NYC minimalist that Johnson didn’t witness and report on.
But the best thing about the book is how Johnson’s perspective is always more philosophical than technical. He never gets bogged down in wonky musical matters (despite being a composer himself), opting instead to contemplate bigger issues. In one particularly revelatory piece, “Shredding the Climax Carrot,” he sums up minimalism’s personal appeal. “I am not sure that... performance must hold us in rapt attention from beginning to end in order to be beautiful,” he writes. “Some of the performances I enjoyed most this past season are ones in which my mind wandered a great deal. They did not try to manipulate me... they simply said what they had to say, leaving me free to listen or not listen, and respond in my own way.” –Marc Masters
The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way
Being pop stars was never quite as easy as UK dance duo the KLF sometimes made it look—the depths of their discography include many a flop single or go-nowhere side project. But they had a gift for always acting as if everything they did was deliberate. So after getting a No. 1 UK single with “Doctorin’ the TARDIS,” a track mashing up the “Doctor Who” theme with Gary Glitter, they wrote a book explaining how they did it, and how you could do it, too.
At least one group did—novelty-pop act Edelweiss followed The Manual to the letter, they claimed, and had a Swiss smash. But this handbook is mostly a masterpiece of post-facto rationalization, a tour guide of the late-’80s music biz in all its venal, cheap, and shoddy pomp. It admits these things from the outset, of course, and is all the livelier for them. It’s also generously full of wild and funny theories on the nature of pop and success—like how the glam-rock beat is so potent you can only revive it once in a generation, for instance. The cost breakdowns are the only things in The Manual to have dated—the rest of it is as exhilarating and inspiring as ever, a mix of hard-won practicality and prankster wisdom. –Tom Ewing
Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta
Fargo Rock City is essentially Chuck Klosterman’s long-form love letter to hair metal. And while he didn’t invent the idea of personal narrative-as-music criticism, it’s hard to imagine a lot of our finest think-piece depositories existing without the admirable standards its tangent-prone prose set before the dawn of Tumblr. It’s as anti-authoritarian as any book on this list without wallowing in self-satisfied contrarianism or academic pomp; independently voiced but accessible and nostalgic while still maintaining a salty, unromantic edge.
It doesn’t hurt to have a working knowledge of the BulletBoys’ discography or an adolescence drinking cheap beer in a rural outpost going in, but it’s hardly necessary. The import of Fargo Rock City isn’t so much what’s said about “November Rain” or North Dakota so much as flipping the script on the common gripe about music criticism that “it tells you more about the reviewer than the album”: being an authority on one’s own experiences gives anybody a right to be a part of the conversation. Klosterman’s writing here has the passion, humor, and empathy to not only excuse the solipsism but justify it. –Ian Cohen
Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age
Writing a book about the state of the constantly shifting music industry can be a fool’s errand since it could very well be dated before it even hits the shelves. Rolling Stone reporter Steve Knopper’s music-biz exposé Appetite for Self-Destruction is not entirely immune to this pitfall—its narrative ends in 2008, when DRM-free mp3s, Starbucks’ Hear Music label, and Radiohead’s PWYC model for In Rainbows were the biggest headline-makers—but it remains a valuable text by taking the long view, presenting the record industry’s current crisis not as some recent phenomenon, but as the inevitable culmination of a myopic pattern dating back to the ’70s.
And rather than getting mired in statistical analysis and doomsday prognostication, Knopper frames the question of “Who killed the music industry?” as if he were directing a comedic whodunit, interrogating a colorful cast of over 200 moguls and insiders. Together, their amusing anecdotes connect the dots, marking the sea-change moments—from the death of disco to the advent of CDs and MTV to the late-’90s teen-pop boom to the post-Napster online free-for-all—and forming a deeply unflattering portrait of an industry that has habitually resisted technological change to protect its short-term bottom line. –Stuart Berman
Hip: The History
“Hipster” may be one of the most overused epithets of the 21st century. As this 2004 book argues persuasively, the concept of hip also happens to be one of the uniquely defining characteristics of American culture: a complex and contradictory social nexus that shapes how we view the world to this day. If anyone is suited to take on the fool’s errand of answering Tower of Power’s immortal question, “What Is Hip?”, it’s John Leland, former editor-in-chief of Details and an original columnist at SPIN. Rather than provide a how-to manual for trendies, Hip: The History exhaustively explores how this strange force works, how it has come to dominate over the past several centuries, and what all that might mean, with incredibly provocative results.
The history of hip, Leland discovers, is about the unequal exchange between outsiders and insiders, with African-Americans foremost among them. Drawing a direct line from the coded language of slaves to minstrel shows to the exaggerated “post-hip” whiteness of Ashton Kutcher in a trucker hat, Leland defines hipness in terms of not only Charlie Parker and the Velvet Underground, but also Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. Hip, he sees, can be a progressive force, as in the civil rights movement, but it can also allow privileged whites to substitute enjoying the most stereotyped elements of African-American culture for actually ending racism. And, nodding to Thomas Frank, he acknowledges that the pursuit of hipness is inextricable from 21st-century corporate capitalism, too. Unfortunately, the fact that there’s just a single chapter set aside for women further reflects hip’s ongoing problem with gender equality.
At the time, some critics complained that Leland hadn’t written in some would-be hip argot—his prose is painstakingly intellectual, overflowing with knowledge and ideas—but that only underscores how far ahead of them he really was. –Marc Hogan
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Not too many careers progress from engineering records for the Grateful Dead and Blue Öyster Cult to conducting MRI scans of Sting’s brain. In fact, only one man can claim this improbable arc: McGill University neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin. Having a foot in both worlds makes Levitin an ideal guide through the current body of knowledge of how the brain processes and appreciates music.
Applying the tools of neuroscience to music is actually a relatively recent field, stimulated by the development of live-brain imaging technology and computational methods. Levitin’s own research blends these futuristic practices with some simple tricks—one experiment simply has him asking non-musician subjects to sing their favorite song, and it found that people have the remarkable ability to nail the correct pitch and tempo from memory. Levitin doesn’t poke and prod music like a lifeless corpse, but tackles questions that listeners love to debate. What makes a good song? (Spoiler alert: it has to do with expectation, anticipation, and novelty.) How does musical taste form, and can it be changed? Do musicians perceive music on a neural level differently than non-musicians, and are non-musician critics full of it? Levitin even dips into the role of music in human evolution (expanded upon in his 2008 follow-up The World in Six Songs), observing that rock stars have hundreds of times the sexual partners of normal males. Forgive the occasional classic-rock corniness of Levitin’s taste—there’s currently no better tour of the neuroscience of pop. –Rob Mitchum
The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958
When I first got into experimental jazz, expert friends pointed me to three books: Ekkehard Jost’s Free Jazz, Val Wilmer’s As Serious as Your Life: The Story of New Jazz, and John Litweiler’s The Freedom Principle. Jost offers a thorough technical analysis, complete with graphs and notation; Wilmer focuses more on stories about the movement’s pioneers; Litweiler falls somewhere in between, folding the careers of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler into a historical arc that traces how free jazz both broke from tradition and formed its own.
That mix makes The Freedom Principle the perfect book for novices. Litweiler’s fluid survey—from Coltrane’s melding into the mainstream, to Sun Ra’s underground travels, to the rich Chicago scene, to the European adoption of free jazz—remains relevant 30 years after it was originally published. In particular, the opening to his chapter on Ayler remains the most concise, poetic description of that man’s particular talents. “Every one of the noisy horrors the first Free wave was accused of, he gladly embraced,” Litweiler writes. “He bypassed the entire history of jazz to go back to attitudes about music that predated the art’s conception.” If that gets your heart beating at all, this book just might fascinate you. –Marc Masters
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’Roll Music
As an originator of rock criticism, Greil Marcus expanded the notion of what music writing could be while finding a place for important artists in the grand scheme. He used sounds and personalities as a jumping-off point, delving into what they said about our past, present, and sense of self as an audience. His first major work, 1975’s Mystery Train, filters the American dream—what it means, where it’s going, where it’s been—through six disparate artists: white blues anomaly Harmonica Frank Floyd, the mythic Robert Johnson, Canadians the Band, political soul rebel Sly Stone, arch piano man Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley. He was aiming “to deal with rock’n’roll not as youth culture, or counterculture, but simply as American culture,” and Mystery Train still reads fresh and wise and, yes, mysterious. Because there’s no easy answer to what makes the American psyche tick; Marcus knows that and he gravitates toward artists who do, too, picking their brains and art for clues. And the writer has a gift for connecting unlikely details and references—whether it be the legend of African-American badass Staggerlee, or Little Richard yelling into the camera on “The Dick Cavett Show,” or quotes from Herman Melville, a great American artist from a century before—into a heady and satisfying whole. –Ryan Dombal
The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes
Originally dubbed Invisible Republic, The Old, Weird America is Greil Marcus’ legendary meditation on The Basement Tapes, the 1967 collaboration between a (supposedly) convalescent Bob Dylan and the Band. Part historical account, part extended critical riff, it reads like a prose poem: Marcus is dizzyingly specific about the music in question, but mind-bendingly broad about its consequences.
The book was re-packaged for its paperback release, and now its title functions almost independently of its story: With a single evocative phrase, Marcus inadvertently articulated a collective nostalgia (part real, part imagined) for the strange, creaky old folk songs that animated the first half of the 20th century in America, as showcased by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. For Marcus, the Anthology and The Basement Tapes are emotional analogues: “Smith’s Anthology is a backdrop to The Basement Tapes,” he writes. “More deeply, it is a version of them.”
One of the pioneers of contemporary rock criticism, Marcus is, in all probability, the only working author who could write a 300-page book about Bob Dylan and then enlist Dylan to blurb it: “This book is terminal,” Dylan writes on the cover. “Goes deeply into the subconscious and plows through that period of time like a rake.” Lest Dylan be too earnest about his own mythologizing, he ends his endorsement with an oddball platitude: “Greil Marcus has done it again.” Indeed. –Amanda Petrusich
Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties
Writing something new about the Beatles is a critic’s nightmare: The most famous band in history is also the most discussed. A Beatles assignment was a tricky prospect even before 1994, when Ian MacDonald made the job far harder in the most glorious fashion. Revolution in the Head not only pioneered a form—the song-by-song story of an artist—it found something fresh to say about every Beatles track. And the band’s career as a whole. And the decade they emerged in.
I’ve read Revolution in the Head as someone wary of the Beatles, then later as a fan, and it works superbly from either angle. It is a loving book but never a reverential one—the story it tells is one of rise, triumph, and decline, not of a group of saints who only lost their way with a split. Individual insights glitter: the account of “Revolution 9” as an entryist avant-garde project, for example, or MacDonald’s sharp contextualization of exactly what was so shocking and exciting about their first singles.
MacDonald was that rarest of critics—someone who could tackle musicological detail without boring or baffling the reader. And this, more than anything, is how Revolution in the Head achieves what the best music books do: pushing its readers away from the page and back to the records, however often they’ve been played. Like the music it so tenderly dissects, this book has sparked a forest of imitations, which often get the form right and fall at the content. It’s become, like its subject, a wonderful monolith. –Tom Ewing
Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap
Feminism and rock’n’roll are not enemies. They’re natural bedfellows, as exhaustively displayed by this essential anthology. Collecting 62 pieces covering four decades, Rock She Wrote documents the once-secret history of female rock writers starting in the late ’60s. There’s Ellen Willis on the sociology of rock in The New Yorker in 1968, Lisa Robinson on the birth of NYC punk in Creem in 1975, Ariel Swartley on Prince in 1980, Deborah Frost on Mötley Crüe in 1985, Joan Morgan on Ice Cube in 1990, and Pamela Des Barres interviewing Courtney Love in 1994. First-person recollections from Kim Gordon, Patti Smith, Cherie Currie, and Marianne Faithfull and riot grrrl manifestos and scholarly examinations are here, too. The book gives proof that girls can be obsessive, mouth-breathing music nerds, too, just like the boys—as well as lusty animals funneling their desires into prose. And that the f-word can be worn with pride, even when struggling with one’s love for Axl Rose (see: Mary Gaitskill’s “An Ordinariness of Monstrous Proportions”). The book is now 16 years old; perhaps it’s time for a sequel. –Amy Phillips
Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography
Even after 40 years in the limelight, Neil Young is an inscrutable character whose popularity endures despite—or rather because of—his tendency to consistently undermine the expectations of his fans, record companies, and fellow musicians. But while we like to valorize the truly independent artist who answers only to his own whims, Jimmy McDonough’s bio Shakey surveys the collateral damage caused by one man’s pursuit of autonomy: the failed marriages, bruised egos, strained friendships, and band mates literally left on the side of the road.
McDonough is obviously a die-hard Young fan—the sort who writes rapturously about the lost mid-’70s masterwork Homegrown while dismissing the best-selling Harvest as middling—and he was granted an unprecedented amount of one-on-one interviews with the notoriously media-shy Young and his inner circle for Shakey. This close proximity to a hero doesn’t compromise McDonough’s journalistic instincts, as he engages Young in disarmingly candid discussions of his darkest hours (namely, the heroin-related deaths of guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry) and calls him out for the seemingly selfish decisions that grant his backing bands less job security than that of the average factory worker. (Young admits: “I can be an asshole as much as anybody else—and have been. But y’know—I’m on my trip. I make no qualms about it.”) Tellingly, the interview transcripts with Young are presented as interjections in McDonough’s overall narrative—a choice that’s emblematic of how Shakey expertly balances an insider’s unfettered access with an outsider’s unflinching objectivity. –Stuart Berman
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
Probably the most entertaining depiction of musical debauchery and desperation other than Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt, don’t go expecting your typically button-downed, chronological, rigorously fact-checked musical history from Please Kill Me. Like most oral histories, driven by the clashing reminiscences of the interviewees, McNeil (one of the co-founders of o.g. punk zine Punk) and McCain’s book is as contentious and contradictory as it is illuminating, with everyone having their own stake on what punk was, who was responsible, and what it meant. People argue in these pages as much as they set the record straight about the rise and (supposed) fall of punk rock in the U.S.
Beginning with the Velvets, taking us into the freaks-are-let-off-their-leashes flowering of the CBGB scene, and not sparing us the lows of its drug-fueled ignoble flameout, Please Kill Me is also a book that barely acknowledges the hardcore and indie scenes that spun off from punk and kept its D.I.Y. spirit alive. So if your definition of punk stretches beyond leather jeans and Johnny Thunders, you might take issue with Please Kill Me as a “final word” on the subject, but what arguments they have, the dozens of interviewed musicians and scene fixtures, and what stories they tell, even if they’re often unbelievable or grossly hilarious. All oral histories are likewise driven by their compilers’ personal obsessions; Please Kill Me just drops the pretense of objectivity. McNeil has stated in interviews that he’s more interested in chronicling the lives of “desperate people” than a subculture or an art form, and Please Kill Me does seem more interested in the foibles of its once-alienated fringe-dwelling stars than in the records they made. But while it may not satisfy as a who-what-when-where history of punk, as a bitchy, scabrous, multiphonic account of one of the most over-mythologized movements of the last 40 years and the book delivers beyond expectations. –Jess Harvell
A Whore Just Like the Rest: The Music Writings of Richard Meltzer
As the back cover of this book rightly claims, Richard Meltzer is “one of the inventors of rock criticism” alongside Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches. But his idiosyncratic gonzo/beat/lunatic style has kept him relatively obscure—and polarizing; most readers are either baffled as to what his appeal could possibly be, or willing to swear by his every word. And while I admit not everything by him is completely brilliant, all of it contains something unique, surprising, and worthwhile. A Whore Just Like the Rest seems to literally contain all of it—575 pages of reviews, essays, blurbs, and random thoughts, stretching from the late ’60s into the end of the ’90s, when Meltzer tossed off surreal concert previews for the San Diego Reader. (Example: A Cigar Store Indians blurb is mostly a list of imaginary flavors at the “National Soup Museum.”)
Fucking with forms is a Meltzer specialty, but he can also be a moving, intimate writer. That comes through best in the little section intros that trace the ups and downs of his career—he’s great at writing about himself. But even in his most conventional pieces, he offers the kind of unfiltered stream-of-consciousness that even Bangs couldn’t muster, risking clumsy jokes or absurd invectives with no compulsion to wrap them all up in a neat conclusion. When he’s rolling, Meltzer is like an experimental musician, improvising phrases, roaming around for ideas, returning randomly to invented words or nonsensical jive. Don’t read A Whore Just Like the Rest for information or insight about the music he’s discussing—instead, look for the kind of unexpected revelations that can only come from free-form art. Give him patience, and he’ll reward with moments you can’t find anywhere else. –Marc Masters
Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever surveys the history of recorded sound, highlighting the ways that the constant evolution of how we record and listen to music directly influences how music is created and experienced. The book unfolds chronologically for the most part, drawing a line from Thomas Edison’s public “tone tests” and Alan Lomax’s field recordings to Phil Spector developing his “wall of sound” to cater to the limitations of transistor radio and Def Leppard building their album Hysteria note by note with producer Mutt Lange.
The chapters on the early days of recorded music are fascinating, but the book really kicks in once it shifts into the digital era. Milner doesn’t do much to hide the fact that he’s an analog partisan, but he presents a lively debate both for and against digital recording and playback and, at the end, puts his own biases to the test in a specially designed listening room at the Communications Research Center in Canada.
Milner is a natural storyteller capable of taking potentially dry, technical subject matter and crafting a compelling narrative that places an emphasis on lively characters such as record producers Tony Bongiovi and Steve Albini, dub pioneer King Tubby, and Auto-Tune inventor Andy Hildebrand. In the book’s best sequence, Milner tells the story of the “Loudness War”—a race within the record industry to produce louder tracks by sacrificing the dynamic range of recordings in the mastering stage—by tracing its roots back to the peculiarities of radio compression and the rivalry between two major pop stations in New York City in the ’80s. It’s a tale rooted in audio science and industry standards, but it’s nevertheless a total page-turner and essential reading for anyone invested in creating, listening to, or writing about contemporary music. –Matthew Perpetua
Ask: The Chatter of Pop
When an unimpressed Paul Morley interviewed Jerry Garcia for the NME in 1981, his editor ruefully estimated it cost the magazine 30,000 readers. It’s a mark of Morley’s then star power—and the gung-ho, confrontational attitude of the post-punk UK music press—that this was cause for pride.
The Garcia piece and many others are in Ask, a 1986 compilation of Morley’s ’80s interviews. The format cuts out some of the flights of post-structuralist fancy that earned Morley much of his rep and instead zeroes in on his two best qualities: a devil-may-care feel for what the right questions to ask are, and a fierce sense that the best music of the early ’80s was in fact the most vital and important music ever made. Since many of his interviewees—Sting, Garcia, Iggy Pop—were more ambivalent about the current scene, it made for some spiky confrontations. It wasn’t just a case of generational sniping, though—if the new breed proved to be blockheads, as in a hilariously savage Duran Duran interview, Morley would call them on it.
The special conditions that spawned Ask—this sense of schism between music writers and rock stars—no longer apply, and interviews are far more cozy now. In today’s more congenial environment, Morley would seem a prima donna. But at the time he and writers like him were needed, and Ask captures why. –Tom Ewing
Great Pop Things: The Real History of Rock and Roll from Elvis to Oasis
One of the best ways to take the piss out of pop orthodoxy is to screw with its history, and no revisionists did it funnier or more incisively than the duo behind Great Pop Things. A strip that ran in Record Mirror and NME throughout the ’80s and ’90s, it skewered the overinflated self-importance of rock’n’roll mythology with a sensibility that fell somewhere between Harvey Kurtzman and Monty Python.
Artist Chuck Death—the Mekons’ Jon Langford under a pseudonym—had a knack for making rock stars look as grotesque as possible while still making them recognizable; his Mick Jagger might be the most comically cruel depiction of a rock celebrity ever drawn. Meanwhile, Morton’s jokes were both archly smart-assed and spectacularly absurd—the three-part “Space-Morrisseys” (“we relish the chance to be more pathetic than earthlings”) is among the most priceless—hiding in-jokes inside puns inside callbacks, and fitting as many intertwining laughs as possible in every panel. The end result is a body of work so anarchic and baffling in its comedy that it’s hard to tell just how much of it actually reflects any real-world opinion of the creators, much less anyone else. With practically every artist the strip covers being credited with trying to change the world (The Police: “...by dressing up as punks a bit but not really”; Henry Rollins: “...with sensitive shouting”), they turn critical boilerplate into goofy running gags. –Nate Patrin
The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band
For years, a film version of The Dirt, the Neil Strauss–compiled oral history detailing the rise and continual fall of ’80s glam-metal sadists Mötley Crüe, has languished in Hollywood development hell. It’s easy to understand why. How do you put all of this shit into a movie without having it look like one big needle-festooned orgy of a snuff film?
Drugs are used, abused, sworn off, and re-embraced with unholy vigor. Women (and burritos) are sexually violated, friends are accidentally murdered, and at one point bassist Nikki Sixx fucking dies, only to inexplicably return from the great unknown. You know that urban legend about Jimmy Page and the mud shark? Yeah, well, these guys actually did that—except it was with a telephone receiver. There are famous cameos galore—all of them overshadowed by Ozzy Osbourne’s infamous ant-snorting, urine-drinking, Hitler-blow-up-doll-touting mania. Whether you chalk this malevolent behavior up to the dark side of the music industry’s indulgences or some sort of grand societal failure, this is not just a manual for “the good old days” of rock’n’roll excess; the free-falling back half is marked by consequences, regret, and (non-reversible) death. –Larry Fitzmaurice
Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture
Generation Ecstasy is the abridged American version of Energy Flash, British critic Simon Reynolds’ definitive postmortem of ’90s rave culture. But it’s still 390 pages of close analysis, lively interviews, and epic descriptions of the reflexive textures of music and drugs. Documentary evidence in the form of names, places, and dates accumulates with dizzying force. With robust back matter including deep bibliographies and listening recommendations, it’s a comprehensive trial-by-fire for techno novices.
Splicing social history and critical theory with a personal conversion narrative, Reynolds tracks the mercurial development of house and techno back and forth across the Atlantic—through countless archipelagos of subgenres—with firm precision. He shows how rave music, though fundamentally “for dancing,” was also a collective autobiography, reflecting its drug-fueled community’s initial rush of optimistic bliss, slide into gloominess and paranoia, and eventual “debauched extremity.” Throughout it all, Reynolds remains devoted to the transcendent ideal of the audience as the star, symbiotically one with each other and the music.
The book begins by describing his awakening from “rockism,” and from the zealously ideological vantage of the convert, he makes some passionate and provocative arguments about the more cerebral strains of electronic music. (IDM is... racist?) This openly biased humanity is part of what makes the book great. Reynolds combines the scholar’s informed perspective with the fan’s lived experience in a work of history that feels truly alive. You can feel the beat in it. –Brian Howe
Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984
For all its filth and fury, punk music—at least the back-to-basics rock’n’roll the Sex Pistols dished out on Never Mind the Bollocks—wasn’t terribly far removed from AC/DC. The weird stuff happened later. With Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds provides the definitive history of what came after punk’s initial explosion—when kids in far-flung cities and suburbs took the movement’s troublemaking ideals and ran with them.
“This book is for, and about, the people who weren’t there at the right time and place (in punk’s case, London and New York circa 1976), but who nonetheless refused to believe it was all over and done with before they joined in,” writes Reynolds in the book’s intro. And a lot of people wanted to join in. Rip It Up runs over with heady analysis and record-nerd esoterica as Reynolds finds a narrative thread in the exploits of characters who reinvented themselves throughout the period like former Sex Pistol John Lydon and Scritti Politti frontman Green Gartside. He revels in the funny, awkward moments that often act as precursors to innovation—Phil Oakey passing his Human League audition by singing lyrics about slaughtering silkworms, Genesis P-Orridge’s stomach-churning gigs with the performance art collective COUM Transmissions. Punk’s initial scope was narrow, but, ultimately, open to interpretation. Rip It Up and Start Again shows just how limitless the possibilities were. –Aaron Leitko
Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye
Originally published in 1985, a year after Marvin Gaye’s death, David Ritz’s Divided Soul is an intimate and unflinching look at one of America’s most conflicted—and affecting—popular artists. The author—who’s also written books on Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, B.B. King, and Etta James—raises Gaye’s life into something out of Greek tragedy. Ritz convincingly compares the Motown great to Apollo, Dionysus, Shelley, and Keats, all while also exposing his myriad, deep faults. There was Gaye’s constant internal war between the carnal songs that made millions love him and his own spirituality, a battle that resulted in layers-upon-layers of corroding self-hatred. So when Gaye is shot in the heart by his own father while his mother looks on, his grisly end is brutal but also somehow fated. Gaye’s life is so rich and complicated that it seems like almost anyone could’ve made a phenomenal book about it, but Ritz had the advantage of many months of interviews with the star toward the end of his life. The two were so close that Ritz won a songwriting credit for Gaye’s 1982 smash “Sexual Healing.” Though, like everything else in the singer’s life, the collaboration wasn’t simple—Ritz was only awarded the credit after much debate, and after Gaye’s passing. –Ryan Dombal
Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album
A handful of books have told the Factory Records story, but none do it as beautifully as Matthew Robertson’s The Complete Graphic Album, a collection of design projects undertaken by the label during its lifespan. Record covers predominate, but completists can sigh over other ephemera, including posters, stationery, postcards, and a New Order ruler.
Robertson intermittently includes blocks of text to explain certain inspirations, which were occasionally drawn from Situationist ideas (the Durutti Column’s sandpaper sleeve for The Return of...) and Futurist principals (New Order’s Movement), but this tale is dominated by Peter Saville, whose work shaped the Factory aesthetic. (In particular, the iconic typefaces and austere imagery he produced for Joy Division.) Like label co-founder Tony Wilson, Saville was an inveterate risk-taker; his covers regularly featured scant information about the artists and sometimes barely any text at all. It’s astonishing to think how many of his uncompromising and austere works, such as those for New Order circa Brotherhood, entered countless homes in the UK when the artists made the Top 40. –Nick Neyland
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
How does a dense tome of 20th-century classical music history become a runaway international best seller? It’s possible that not even author Alex Ross knows for certain. But when the New Yorker classical critic published The Rest Is Noise in 2007, it hit some mysterious nerve cluster, racking up awards, spawning foreign-language translations, and even earning the author a coveted spot on “The Colbert Report.” Ross’ narrative canvas is broad enough to include cameos from David Bowie, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, and the Beatles; in the introduction, Ross writes about how he explicitly angled the book not just toward cognoscenti, “but also—especially—for those who feel passing curiosity about this obscure pandemonium at the outskirts of culture.”
Organized roughly in 10- and 20-year chunks, The Rest Is Noise tells an impressionistic story that leaps about freely. This means that the earnest soul hoping for a straightforward education might find themselves occasionally holding on by their fingertips. But Ross’ connections, across time and genre, are continually startling—Paul McCartney lending an ear to Stockhausen; Bob Dylan being floored by Kurt Weill’s “Pirate Jenny” in Greenwich Village. And Ross transforms music theory into poetry so gracefully—explaining how the natural harmonic series “shimmers like a rainbow out of any vibrating string,” for example—that the music’s DNA strands uncoil gorgeously on the page. Few music books send you scrambling to hear the music discussed with such desperation, and on this quality alone, The Rest Is Noise has earned its curious spot as the only classical book many Americans keep on their shelf. –Jayson Greene
The Wu-Tang Manual
To stumble across the Wu-Tang Clan’s stew of Abrahamic religions, black nationalism, kung-fu flicks, numerology, organized crime, Eastern philosophy, and chess strategy on “Rap City” in the ’90s was to discover a whole new cosmology hidden within pop music. The crew grafted a detailed fantasy world onto their New York stomping grounds, turning jaded teens into amateur scholars. It was easy enough to discern that “Shaolin” was Staten Island and “yellow Wallabees” were moccasins your dad wore in the ’70s, but much of the slang was enticingly impenetrable. If any music needed an instruction manual, this was it.
Happily, that manual arrived in 2005, after we’d deciphered everything we could on our own. Written in a clear and engaging voice by the RZA and writer Chris Norris, The Wu-Tang Manual opens like a fantasy novel with a hand-drawn map of Shaolin, and goes on to survey all of this mythic terrain. Appreciative bios, origin stories, annotated lyrics, and an illuminating breakdown of the production technology and business plan that RZA used to mastermind a worldwide brand are all found within. But the nerdiest section must be the “Wu-Slang Lexicon”—at last, we could tell our friends to meet us at the “God hour” and trust that everyone would arrive at 7 o’clock. –Brian Howe
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Neurologist and New Yorker staple Oliver Sacks tackles the science of music in his usual style: guiding the reader through a hall of neurological curiosities as a means of cracking a difficult puzzle. Behold! The composer who loses the ability to perceive emotion in music after a stroke! Marvel at the doctor who becomes addicted to playing piano after being struck by lightning, or the savant-like musical abilities of otherwise disabled children with the rare genetic condition Williams Syndrome! Chill to the horrifying fragility of the mind, and ponder the uncanny ability of music—what psychologist Steven Pinker dismissed as “auditory cheesecake”—to offer respite to the most severe sufferers of dementia, amnesia, and Parkinson’s disease!
Sacks’ work can seem anecdotal, haphazard, and—when he focuses on his own musical/neurological experiences—self-indulgent. But his approach is classic neurology, attempting to clear the mist surrounding the brain’s mysteries by analyzing the bizarre results that occur when the organ is damaged. If you’re worried about the romance of music being reduced to mere anatomy, relax—the primary lesson to take from these case studies is that there is no such thing as a “music center” in our heads. In fact, listening to music is probably one of the most distributed functions in the human brain, recruiting auditory, motor, emotion, prediction, and language regions—wondrous and reassuring news to anyone who firmly believes that music is more than mere sound. –Rob Mitchum
England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond
UK punk’s story has been told so often, in so many formats, from books to PBS documentaries to biopics to “exhaustive” magazine cover stories, that it’s become both overly familiar and full of holes. The same origin stories get repeated. The facts get obscured. Easy-to-regurgitate legends and recycled apocrypha get confused with the (often more interesting) real who-what-where-when of the movement’s brief flare and long aftermath.
Jon Savage was actually around for the boom-and-bust-and-rebirth that took place between 1975 and 1978, which makes him better suited than most to tell the tale. But in England’s Dreaming, he also tracks down and interviews the major participants, and along with his deeply felt personal stake in the movement, which makes the book polemic as much as history lesson, his deep research serves as much to debunk the myths behind punk as provide the most comprehensive account of its brief and wildly influential two or three year attempt to raze British pop.
Good thing, too, because few movements have produced shameless self-mythologizers on the level of Malcolm McLaren and John Lydon, whose after-the-fact pronouncements have made it seem like the whole of punk was the result of a personality clash between two mad geniuses. Savage never discounts the importance of McLaren and the Sex Pistols to punk as a whole, but he also charts punk’s long gestation through the socio-economically shitty Britain of the ’70s, the various individuals and movements that lit the long fuse leading to punk’s explosion. The book gives us a wide-canvas view of punk as the much-needed but never inevitable coming together of a whole generation desperate for something to call their own. –Jess Harvell
Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
Music is made to be shared. In a time of torrents and Google-friendly file-transfer sites, the mixtape has maintained an improbably prominent place in popular culture, from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and its movie adaptation to Thurston Moore’s Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, Jason Bitner’s Cassette From My Ex, and the many online-only “mixtapes” spanning Dirty South rap and Berlin techno.
In concept, Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mix Tape could have been unbearably affected: The longtime Rolling Stone writer organizes his book around 15 mixtapes made by him and wife Renée Crist, herself a fellow music critic. In execution, though, Sheffield’s memoir is wonderfully poignant—funny but also deeply moving, and less about mixtapes than about the joy and pain of being human. “Renée died on May 11, 1997, very suddenly and unexpectedly, at home with me, of a pulmonary embolism,” we learn in the opening pages. “She was 31.”
Sheffield is self-deprecating and unsentimental in setting out the facts of his story, but the man’s love for his late wife radiates from the page, and by the time the book is over, many readers will feel it, too. Love Is a Mix Tape reveals how music—especially the music of the ’90s, and especially the music of indie-rock icons Pavement—brought together a “shy, skinny, Irish Catholic geek from Boston” and a “hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl,” deepened their bond, and finally accompanied Sheffield through his lonely, miserable months as a widower. The first night Sheffield met Crist, he offered to make her a tape. “Except this time, with this girl,” he writes, “it worked.” –Marc Hogan
Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco
Though this century’s disco revival has certainly warmed audiences to the genre’s aesthetic legitimacy, Shapiro is interested in tracing the roots of the movement and understanding its function in the wider scope of American cultural history with Turn the Beat Around. The book is full of muscular, knotty prose that makes for surprisingly quick reading; in setting the historical stage, he refers to the disco’s birth as a “glittering beast that eventually rose on sateen wings from the burrows of the Big Apple’s worm-eaten core.” In making the connections between history and music explicit, Shapiro firmly asserts the music’s socio-political subtext and connects it to the era and the people who experienced it, from the origins of the discotheque in occupied France to the socioeconomic upheaval of white flight, recession-era economics, conservative politics, and increased immigration in the ’70s that led to this cultural explosion. He balances this with a recognition of disco’s internal contradictions—the tug between aspirational living and its origins in disenfranchised communities, its utopian idealism and its exclusivity. –David Drake
Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra
It’s impossible to separate the myth from the music when it comes to Sun Ra, thanks in no small part by the man himself: “At the heart of everything that Sun Ra did or said was the claim that he was not born, that he was not from earth, that he was not a man, that he had no family, that his name was not what others said it was,” writes biographer John F. Szwed.
Space Is the Place creates a bold narrative from one of music history’s most amorphous personalities; even Ra’s discography has a haphazard, unknowable irrationality. The artist’s earthly arrival—he claimed to have come from Saturn—on May 22, 1914 marked the beginning of a life that became impossible to pigeonhole. His music touched upon swing, doo-wop, R&B, the avant-garde, bebop, free jazz, fusion, disco, and new age; his shows incorporated costumes, art, dance, and poetry. Everything was imbued with a mythical sensibility that incorporated ideas of black nationalism and Egyptology, pulp sci-fi, oblique humor (his bands recorded interpretations of “Pink Elephants on Parade” from Dumbo, as well as the theme to the “Batman” TV show), high art and low. Chronicling the work of such a challenging figure is no easy task, and Szwed’s book is an admirable attempt to give shape to Ra’s life without reducing him to caricature, or drawing him as merely the sum of his influences. In addition to sketching a history of Sun Ra’s life, Szwed wrestles admirably with the totality of the man and his art, illuminating the philosophical and historical context for his work, and the full complexities of his story. –David Drake
How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop
During World War II, the Allies used the vocoder as a sonic telephone communication filter to bypass eavesdropping Germans; three decades later a group of German electronic-pop icons used it to cross over onto the American Top 40. Dave Tompkins notes this odd historical twist and many others with enthusiastic, tangential-information-overload prose with How to Wreck a Nice Beach, a narrative of a device seemingly unmoored from the workaday world.
Between the evocative side-tours into parallel pop-culture lines and a tendency to take unexpected turns into astounding field-reporter digressions (“The last time I saw Donnie Wahlberg, he was missing his eyebrows, shivering in his underwear in Bruce Willis’ bathroom after escaping from a mental institution...”), the book provides a background of the electronic voice in pop music that fractures technological, political, and musical lore into strange, rambling shards of moments in time. The musical lineage from A Clockwork Orange to Kraftwerk and beyond is given due attention—as is the vocoder’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nixon’s White House—but what could have been the simple, dry R&D-to-R&B story of a scientific advancement turns out to be a giddy, irreverent, and somewhat arcane look into a technology that didn’t so much evolve as mutate. –Nate Patrin
Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds
David Toop’s first music book, Rap Attack, applied his wide-ranging knowledge and peerless musical ear to the music of a very specific time and place: New York City in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when hip-hop was first getting rolling. What his second book lacked in specificity it made up tenfold in breadth and imagination. Ocean of Sound is partly a mediation on immersive sound and the development of modern music, but there’s no single term that is adequate to describe what Toop has accomplished here.
An exploration of Debussy’s experience with Gamelan music at the 1889 Paris Exposition leads Toop to probe the nature of 20th century musical experience, but his path through it all is meandering and non-linear. So Toop talks to David Lynch about “Twin Peaks” and the Julee Cruise album Floating Into the Night, shares thoughts on the sonic alchemy of Joe Meek and follows them into an interview with Lee Perry about his Black Ark studio, and figures out the meaning of Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros. The book’s dream-like structure shouldn’t obscure Toop’s scholarship; there’s plenty to learn here, and it’s far more than extended reverie. Mixing interviews, criticism, history, and memory, Toop moves seamlessly between sounds, styles, genres, and eras, using listening as a tool in a search for a deeper understanding. –Mark Richardson
Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory
Nine years after he published the epochal Ocean of Sound, David Toop returned to further explore ideas about “immersive music”—ambient, minimalism, improvisation, and electronica—in Haunted Weather. But if Ocean of Sound was Toop’s “pop” book, crafting a history of sound-as-an-environment that could include the Beach Boys along with La Monte Young, Haunted Weather leaves the familiar world of songs and stars far, far behind.
Prompted by the author’s work as both musician and critic, the book is the result of both his participation in and observation of the further reaches of experimental music around the turn of the millennium. And if that sounds forbidding, just know that it’s the most readable journey possible through the tangled history of some of the most difficult modern sounds. Toop traces a radical shift toward music that’s barely there (compositions that make use of mostly silence, the density of free jazz giving way to extremely delicate improvisation), and music that seems to construct itself as much as it’s guided by musicians (artists who use software to let sounds seemingly mutate on their own). As music, it’s the definition of not-for-everyone, some of it quite beautiful and intriguing, some of it more interesting to read about than listen to, but Toop has a unique ability to write evocative descriptions about this sort of music without lapsing into either purple poetry or musician’s jargon. I can still recall lines from his daydream revolving around a Patrick Pulsinger piece, or his sensitive and nuanced description of how Morton Feldman’s ultra-minimal music works, without pulling the book off the shelf. And as a working musician, his insider’s knowledge gives you a realistic sense of how this seemingly formless music actually gets made. –Jess Harvell
Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock’n’Roll
In the preface to the revised edition of 1977’s Country: The Biggest Music in America, Nick Tosches provides some context for his musings and ramblings on early 20th-century country and blues. Shortly after he signed a deal with his publisher, country music began crossing over into the pop market. “My book was now seen as a timely one, and I was behooved to finish it as soon as possible,” he writes, adding that his editor “wasn’t aware that neither old Willie nor Waylon, neither Dolly’s left nor right breast was to weigh heavily in my scheme of things.”
Ignoring establishment superstars (except Tompall Glaser… he loves Tompall Glaser), Tosches digs much further back in time to the pre-war years. It was a wild scene: Black and white musicians, whether separately or together in an uneasily integrated industry, were recording lyrically and musically raw country and blues singles mostly for independent—or “mongrel”—labels. They addressed subjects that were taboo in the mainstream: drugs, race, sex. Even models of Nashville propriety, such as the legendary Roy Acuff, regularly “recorded smut"” like “Doin’ It the Old-Fashioned Way” and “When Lulu’s Gone,” which were explicit enough to make listeners then as now blush or grumble.
A prodigious researcher who indulges long lists of recordings like Biblical begats, Tosches proves an exacting and eccentric historian. He peppers his accounts of the development of the phonograph or the impact of Hawaiian guitar on popular music with surly insights and baiting opinions, such as his mislabeling of Buddy Holly as “the first soft rocker.” Country was and remains wonderfully contentious—a much-needed corrective to the wholesome image that the industry has perpetuated for several decades now. In this bloody bar brawl of a book, the genre is rowdy, raunchy, incorrigible, and much more intriguing and honest than its modern-day counterparts. –Stephen M. Deusner
How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music
People I know who love this book lament the title: It was doubtless chosen because it read like a provocation, daring you to pick up this book and see what this guy has against the most popular band of the modern era. But the Beatles aren’t even mentioned until the last chapter, and most of the book is an exploration of how popular music developed from the 1920s through the ’50s, with particular focus on jazz, country & western, vocal pop, and rhythm & blues.
The subtitle says it all: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. Not the alternative history, because Wald is too sharp a scholar to think that any two people would agree about what should be included in such a book. Wald sets out to examine and challenge received wisdom, and his tool is the primary source, examining how music was experienced and discussed at the time it was being made. One of his primary theses is that popular music history is written in a way that favors the cerebral over the visceral; so dance music is often considered frivolous while popular music that nakedly aspires to “art” is held up for pushing boundaries. Inside this thesis are thoughts on race, gender, and class, and Wald moves through it with a good sense of humor and solid understanding of his own biases. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll is one of those books that helps you to think about popular music differently and gives you new tools for thinking about music from several angles simultaneously. –Mark Richardson
The SPIN Alternative Record Guide
Based entirely on anecdotal evidence, it would seem that the SPIN Alternative Record Guide from 1995 is the Velvet Underground of music books—not a huge seller, but it inspired a disproportionate number of young readers to pursue music criticism. Personally, the book introduced me to a wide range of artists, gave me historical perspective, and got me hooked on a style of criticism that is extremely knowledgeable but also conversational and funny.
The guide, which was edited by Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks, features the best and brightest writers of the ’80s and ’90s, many of whom started off in zines but have since become major figures in music criticism. To name a few, there’s Ann Powers, Michael Azerrad, Byron Coley, Simon Reynolds, Alex Ross, Charles Aaron, and MVP Rob Sheffield, who turned in the lion’s share of the book’s full discography reviews. SPIN’s book is fascinating mainly because it never attempts to be comprehensive. Instead, its writers define the “alternative” sensibility by building a canon that connects ’70s punk, ’80s college rock, ’90s indie, grunge, krautrock, synthpop, hip-hop, disco, electronic music, reggae, metal, alt-country, avant-garde jazz, noise, and mainstream pop outliers like ABBA and Madonna. It’s an inclusive, open-minded survey, but it’s defined as much by what's left out—pretty much all Boomer-oriented rock—as what it includes. –Matthew Perpetua
Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
Reading the late Ellen Willis’ music criticism for the first time is like discovering that you’ve somehow never heard, say, Creedence Clearwater Revival before. Part of the generation that basically invented critical writing about rock music, Willis was the pop writer for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1975, hired on the strength of a single spectacular essay she’d written about Bob Dylan (included here, along with most of her New Yorker work and a handful of later pieces).
Willis’ specialty was thinking deeply about the way the music she cared about acted in the world, and the way it spoke for the culture of its time. (A surprising number of these pieces revolve around a few canonical figures—Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, and above all Dylan.) She weighted her work more toward observations and smart, carefully phrased arguments than undiluted accolades or indictments; she was a proud child of the ’60s who believed fervently in the power of rock’n’roll as a force of liberation, and nonetheless could note with dead-on precision (in a merciless, clear-eyed assessment of the Woodstock festival) that rock’s “rebelliousness does not imply specific political content; it can be—and has been—criminal, fascistic, and coolly individualistic as well as revolutionary.” –Douglas Wolk
Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste 33 ⅓
There may be no accounting for taste, but there’s always a story behind it. For all the different approaches and musical genres on display in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of books about albums, almost all of their subjects have one thing in common: critics adore them. Former Pitchfork contributor Carl Wilson’s entry on Céline Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love is different. When this book came out in 2007, Dion had just become the best-selling female recording artist of all time, but she was—and remains—anything but a critics’ darling. “From the start,” Wilson acknowledges, “her music struck me as bland monotony raised to a pitch of obnoxious bombast—R&B with the sex and slyness surgically removed, French chanson severed from its wit and soul... a neverending crescendo of personal affirmation deaf to social conflict and context.”
A music writer for the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail, Wilson is too conscientious to feel comfortable rejecting someone so globally beloved. So this erudite and eye-opening book attempts to explore not only Dion’s polarizing appeal but also the very concept of “taste.” Along the way, Wilson traces his loathing for Dion back to her Oscars performance alongside Elliott Smith, examines the meaning of “schmaltz” and Dion’s French-Canadian roots, meets her adoring fans, sees her Vegas show, reviews the album (it’s the one with that Titanic song), and analyzes theories on taste from David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Pierre Bourdieu (turns out social distinction plays a big part). By the end, Wilson has set the blueprint for a kind of music criticism that “might put less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment, with all its messiness and private soul tremors—to show what it is like for me to like it, and invite you to compare.” In other words, let’s talk about love. –Marc Hogan
