Showing titles in History & Criticism

In this volume, you will learn all the secrets and details regarding the conception, recording, and release of the legendary "Creatures of the Night" album by Kiss. The author tells all about the origins of the work, how it was conceived by the band, and also explains its historical context. He makes a meticulous analysis of each track on the album, mentioning its sources of inspiration, revealing details about the recording sessions, and much more. He explains the legacy left by the album and its influence over other artists and also in the world of music. In the end, there a bibliography ...

In this volume, you will learn all the secrets and details regarding the conception, recording, and release of the legendary "Paranoid" album by Black Sabbath. The author tells all about the origins of the work, how it was conceived by the band, and also explains its historical context. He makes a meticulous analysis of each track on the album, mentioning its sources of inspiration, revealing details about the recording sessions, and much more. He explains the legacy left by the album and its influence over other artists and also in the world of music. In the end, there a bibliography about...

To many of us, Bowie was so much more than a pop idol. But why? In Why Bowie Matters, Professor Will Brooker answers that question persuasively, as both a fan and an academic. A Bowie obsessive since childhood, he hit the headlines over the course of a year-long immersive research project that took him from London to Berlin and New York, following in Bowie’s footsteps, only listening to music and reading books he loved, and even at times adopting his fashion.

La nueva música clásica es una exploración personal y profunda sobre el rock: la revolución musical que comenzó en los años cincuenta con el rock ’n’ roll, le dio la vuelta al mundo en los sesenta montada en los hombros de los Beatles y transformó para siempre la música popular con las experimentaciones del movimiento hippie, más los que le siguieron.

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

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

In the 1920s and 1930s, as radio took over the pop music business, record companies were forced to leave their studios in major cities in search of new styles and markets. Ranging the mountains, prairies, rural villages, and urban ghettos of America, they discovered a wealth of unexpected talent - farmers, laborers, and ethnic minorities playing styles that blended the intertwining strands of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

In this volume, you will learn all the secrets and details regarding the conception, recording, and release of the legendary "1984" album by Van Halen. The author tells all about the origins of the work, how it was conceived by the band, and also explains its historical context. He makes a meticulous analysis of each track on the album, mentioning its sources of inspiration, revealing details about the recording sessions, and much more. He explains the legacy left by the album and its influence over other artists and also in the world of music. In the end, there a bibliography about the ...

With China’s history unfolding around her, this is the true story of how Frances channeled her unique talents and connections to unite people in our shared humanity.

One of the most celebrated artists of her generation, Joni Mitchell has inspired countless musicians and authors, while never stopping still herself. In Traveling, Ann Powers seeks to understand the paradox of Mitchell – at once both elusive and inviting – through her myriad journeys. Drawing on extensive interviews with Mitchell’s peers and deep archival research, Powers takes readers to rural Canada, charts the course of Mitchell's musical evolution, follows the winding road of Mitchell's collaborations with other greats and explores her loves along the way.

This book celebrates Madvillainy as a representation of two genius musical minds melding to form one revered supervillain. A product of circumstance, the album came together soon after MF DOOM's resurgence and Madlib's reluctant return from avant-garde jazz to hip-hop.

Zeth Lundy's book, in keeping with the album's themes, is structured as a life cycle. It's divided into the following sections: Birth; Innocence/Adolescence; Experience/Adulthood; Death; Rebirth. Within this framework, Zeth Lundy covers Stevie Wonder's excessive work habits and recording methodology, his reliance on synthesizers, the album's place in the gospel-inspired progression of 1970s R'n'B, and many other subjects.

In Listen to This, Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, looks both backward and forward in time, capturing essential figures and ideas in classical-music history as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music that emphasizes the power of the individual musical voice in whatever genre.

Guthrie kept moving throughout his life, making friends, soaking up influences, and writing about his experiences. Along the way, he produced more than 3,000 songs, as well as fiction, journalism, poetry, and visual art, that gave voice to the distressed and dispossessed. In this insightful audiobook, Will Kaufman examines the artist’s career through a unique perspective: the role of time and place in Guthrie’s artistic evolution.

Miles to Go is a frank and intimate exploration of Miles Davis' eccentric working life, drug habits, paranoia, depression, and subsequent recovery. Murphy explores Davis' troubled relationship with his children and the controversial role Cicely Tyson played in his life. The book also delves into the dynamics that made Davis' band work so well together, placing Davis' work in a historic, literary, and musical framework.

Jewell uncovers how battles to control college radio were about more than music—they were an influential, if unexpected, front in the nation's culture wars. These battles created unintended consequences and overlooked contributions to popular culture that students, DJs, and listeners never anticipated. More than an ode to beloved stations, this book will resonate with both music fans and observers of the politics of culture.

In early 1960’s Palo Alto, Jerry Garcia randomly opened a dictionary to a fable in which an appreciative soul repays the generosity of a traveler by delivering him a fortune, a “gift of the grateful dead.” After a traumatic car accident that injured him and killed a close friend, Garcia had recently resolved to build the life he wanted, which meant making music. He had practiced relentlessly and caromed across the northern California folk and bluegrass scene, gathered up some fellow musicians and formed a band. Now they had their name.

In this unique collection, Literary Witches co-creator Katy Horan unearths the true and fictional stories behind twenty traditional murder ballads, exploring the beauty and horror of the art form through stories, lyrics, and original interpretations. The audiobook includes covers of various folk songs by Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, Marissa Nadler, and Lizzie No.

Fun, bright, and playful, Power Pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, Power Pop has meant many things to many people. In Go Further, editors Paul Myers and S. W. Lauden have a whole new crop of writers going deep on what certain Power Pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go Further is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

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