In addition to engagingly chronicling his own early life and musical development, he clearly lays out his role as the bassist during what was arguably Prince’s most creative and successful period: the Purple Rain era. action in New York City). It has always limped along in pieces, easily cracked by a brief foray into the historical record.” An ecstatic celebration of freedom through sound and movement. The book’s mix of hilarious and heart-rending stories, when compounded with the relief he feels from finally being out of the closet, should appeal to non-headbangers just as much as Judas Priest’s “defenders of the faith.” K.G. Daft Punk’s Homework and Alive 1997 get vinyl reissue. Not only does the musician offer a comprehensive retrospective of her personal and professional life, she also delivers the lyrics to more than 175 songs as well as countless intriguing nuggets certain to please any Dolly fan. Hale experienced it all firsthand, and, Kings of Leon Will Be the First Band to Release an Album as an NFT, Bruno Mars, Anderson .Paak’s Silk Sonic Drop ‘Leave the Door Open’ Video, Bebe Rexha Is a Vampire Who Won’t ‘Sacrifice’ in New Video, Justin Bieber Robs Bank to Save Partner in New ‘Hold On’ Video. It’s an essential contribution to the modern music-book canon, made all the more intimate in Geffen’s hands. In addition to nurturing the careers of the B-52’s, R.E.M., Neutral Milk Hotel, and Vic Chesnutt, Athens was a hipster hotbed for writers, poets, painters, and a host of other creative types. The mirror-image reflections of Nirvana’s subversive ambiguity and Frank Ocean’s boundaryless future? Glitter Up the Dark, the first … She reframes their stories, and the stories of other pioneering Black women, by emphasizing the autonomy they did have, and how they wielded it within a culture that prized white men’s instrumental virtuosity and thrived on Black stereotypes. Much of the book discusses her miserable childhood, her cruel family, and her oppressive marriage to Tommy Mottola, the Sony boss who made her famous. Amid the rehashed hero worship and shoddy sourcing of countless tomes on classic rock, Black Diamond Queens emerges as a rare gem. Most Read This Week. Ewens speaks with Directioners, Little Monsters, Beyhive members, and aging Beatlemaniacs about their camaraderie with fellow fans and devotion to their chosen musicians; the book’s most moving chapter features Arianators who drew empowerment from their peers after surviving the 2017 bombing of Ariana Grande’s Manchester concert. Not only does the musician offer a comprehensive retrospective of her personal and professional life, she also delivers the lyrics to more than 175 songs as well as countless intriguing nuggets certain to please any Dolly fan. That makes BrownMark’s memoir all the more impressive. Barely 21, Kathy Valentine joined a ragtag L.A. punk band on the verge of conquering the world: the Go-Go’s. Mariah Carey’s memoir is her wonderfully dishy story of her life as a star — her trials, her tribulations, her feud with Jennifer Lopez. The Judas Priest frontman spent nearly three decades in the closet before he declared to the world that he was “the stately homo of heavy metal.” His autobiography details the psychological toll that hiding his true self took on him, as he contrasts life onstage as the alpha-male metal god that his fans knew with the depressed, lonely soul he was offstage, sneaking into truck stops for a few moments of pleasure and pursuing relationships via classified ads. Titles by Alicia Keys, Lana Del Rey, Jimmy Page, Michaelangelo Matos, Peter Guralnick and more are among Variety's Best Music Books of 2020. –Quinn Moreland, “Being referred to as an ‘icon,’ blah blah blah. Browse by Content Type. Unfamiliar with the works of Richard Wagner? 1 week ago At each turn, Mark Lanegan comes off looking worse than any of his buddies. By Luis Costa and Christian Len. Next to that, her lunch with Obama and Bono is small potatoes. The book speaks to pop music’s effect on future generations of norm-breaking artists, but also on public perceptions of gender and its engagement with race and class politics. In his second essay collection, the Belgian-born, New York-bred critic writes so rapturously about his generation that every successive one droops in its wake. Nate Patrin has the goods. Luis Costa and Christian Len assemble their tale from scores of interviews with club founders, DJs, and insiders, taking us from the earliest ad-hoc music bars of the 1950s to the present day’s super-clubs and mega-yachts. E.L. God bless BrownMark and every other musician who played for Prince. Her no-bullshit style and professional determination come through clearly, whether she’s discussing her Asian heritage, the countless obstacles she has faced as a woman of color in the music industry, or explaining why and how she became what Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man described as “the group’s muse.”. He glimpses at the backstage motives and controversies of artists from R.E.M. Not an opera fan? It sounded like commercial self-destruction, but, became a Number One smash; it reached Number 20 on, matters — it’s the fascinating saga of how the music turned into the symbol of a new cultural era. Ever since she landed a job as the head of marketing for Atlantic Records only two years out of college, the author has embodied the claim in her memoir’s title. Not that it’s all pot smoke and peace signs: The authors also dig into broken relationships (the pair have racked up seven marriages total), racism, sexism, depression, and death. The Best Middle-Grade Chapter Books of 2020. Between his drug abuse and his sex addiction, it’s easy to wonder how he lived to tell his tale — and how he remembers any of it. And all my girlfriends were jealous. A.G. So while Beethoven or Bach may claim more influence over music, Wagner’s impact on neighboring arts—like novel-writing, architecture, and painting—remains unparalleled. If all that survived of 20th-century hardcore were this slim volume, future historians would have a pretty good idea of the era’s spirit, its motivating ideas, its triumphs and failures. The voice is everything Amos fans have come to admire about her: candid, creative, political, controversial, unabashedly complex. A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! Not to worry. E.L. The Best Books We Read in 2020. Bonus: We learn more about her husband in this book than we have over the course of their 50-year marriage. Within her personal and professional story — from child virtuoso through career ups and downs and the death of her beloved mother — the author embeds insightful commentary on a host of relevant issues, including government oppression, sexual abuse, LGBTQ rights, and human-rights activism. Sasha Geffen’s central thesis is that popular music has always been powered by transgressive ideas about identity: “The gender binary cannot really be broken because the gender binary has never been whole. From Jeff Tweedy’s practical advice and Mariah Carey’s decadent memoirs to scene-defining oral histories and deep-dives into the cultural archives, these were the books that stuck with us this year. (Constable, 2020) An 800-page doorstop devoted to the Sex Pistols manager, variously dubbed here a “genius” and “conman”. Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary. Dolly Parton, with Robert K. Oermann, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics (Chronicle) — In this book, the … Ever since she landed a job as the head of marketing for Atlantic Records only two years out of college, the author has embodied the claim in her memoir’s title. For 2020, we’ve teamed up with Kirkus Reviews, the pre-eminent book-review publication, to create a list of the year’s best music books. The 21 titles we came up with include biographies of musicians from Wagner to Kendrick Lamar, memoirs by greats like Rob Halford and Mariah Carey, and deep-dive explorations into topics like the history of sampling, gender and pop music, and the indie-rock scene of Athens, Georgia. history of artistic culture in the West during Wagner’s life. 0 0 0 0. Veteran journalist Marcus J. Moore didn’t interview Lamar for this biography, but that isn’t a problem since the author keeps the focus on the rapper’s musical development while still drawing important observations from his personal life, such as how a trip to South Africa ended up inspiring the Lamar’s instant-classic 2015 album, To Pimp A Butterfly, which is ranked Number 19 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. This is a spirited history of music — and art in general — amid a particularly fertile historical period. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. More importantly, they would understand why so many people dedicated themselves to a niche subculture that could be pretty absurd. © Copyright 2021 Rolling Stone, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC. Our 15 Favorite Music Books of 2020. This is your one-stop Dolly shop. In between, he recalls how each Judas Priest album was made and fascinating tales of his encounters with everyone from Andy Warhol to the Queen of England. Cleverly organized around four pioneering figures in the world of sampling — Grandmaster Flash, Prince Paul, Dr. Dre, and Madlib — this musicological study is never dry, always enthusiastic and appreciative, and groundbreaking in its analysis of the art of sampling as just that: art. The singer-songwriter offers free-flowing recollections of her career, from performing show tunes in gay bars as a teenager to crafting her groundbreaking 1992 debut Little Earthquakes and beyond. (Read the rest of our Pitchfork Book Club entry on Glitter Up the Dark.) Michaelangelo Matos’ genre-by-genre survey of a momentous year — the 1967 of the Gen X crowd — recalls a year in which pop stars, aided by record sales, MTV, and films, became as central to the culture as movie stars. Our favourite music books of 2020 By VF Team in Features December 21, 2020. So many worthy parties are given their roses, from the many backup singers that helped English rockers access gospel authenticity to the misunderstood genre challengers like LaBelle and Betty Davis to the influential but overlooked girl group the Shirelles. In this brilliant book, Steven Hyden goes deep into why Kid A matters — it’s the fascinating saga of how the music turned into the symbol of a new cultural era. Fame, fortune, and everything that goes with it? 2020 Holiday Buying Guide; Top Music Books Of 2020. Featuring plenty of entertaining cultural history, this is a significant contribution to hip-hop studies. –Cat Zhang, Mariah Carey, pop’s reigning diva, is elusive no more. When Robert Johnson went down to that Mississippi crossroads, he created a mystique that few blues musicians have been able to match. In a year largely bereft of live music or even social lives, there was plenty of time to curl up with a good book and the music described therein. She also shares the heartwarming tale of her romance with baseball star Derek Jeter: “Just like his position on the team, our relationship was a short stop in my life.”, Can you see the iridescent thread that connects Big Mama Thornton’s revolutionary roar to. Twenty years ago, Radiohead dropped their masterwork Kid A — an album people have loved arguing about ever since. By The New Yorke r. December 1, 2020 Save this story for later. Just 50 years ago, many Ibizan homes lacked telephones, ... Balearic: Historia oral de la cultura de club en Ibiza. Though compact, this book does much to pull the blues master out of the fog of myth. She fondly recounts stories of Johnson’s technical ability, showmanship, and musical versatility. “I wish someone had told me of their artistic struggles. News & Features . By Keely Weiss. Named after the rotation speed of a vinyl LP, each instalment of … E.L. For someone who’s always seemed serenely confident, Alicia Keys divulges a fair amount of behind-the-curtain chaos: her bumpy relationship with ex-boyfriend Krucial, the time she fired her mother as her assistant, and humiliating encounters with photographers and record execs who wanted to sex up her image. Fame, fortune, and everything that goes with it? (Read the rest of our Pitchfork Book Club entry on Wagnerism.) The timeline is peppered with queer, trans, and gender-subverting artists who ruptured the rules of the binary, ranging from the mega-mainstream (Prince, pop culture’s patron saint of gender mindfuckery) to the underground (proto-punk pioneer Jayne County). The tale of the man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for a mastery of the blues is one of the great legends of American popular music. Full review >. BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR. After more than a dozen albums and as many tours, the vocals-and-piano powerhouse proves equally adept on the page. Yes, the Purple One was an important 20th-century artist, but he was also a taskmaster who was notoriously difficult to work with, whether in the studio or on tour. In an NYRB essay that’s folded into a longer work of experimental fiction, he describes “Arleen,” by the reggae DJ General Echo, as “suggestive, seductive, hypnotic, light-footed, veiling questionable designs under a scrim of innocence, or else addled, talking shit in a daze as a result of injury.” In another, he recalls his thrilling first encounter with the “skinny, quick-witted, disarmingly unprofessional” Patti Smith. McPheeters has a novelist’s eye for characters that represent sweeping historical forces, and he has a critic’s knack for reading the significance in cultural minutiae like fashion, band logos, even the different facial expressions adopted by successive generations of singers. Because biographical info is so skeletal, fans should rejoice in this memoir from Johnson’s nonagenarian sister, Annye C. Anderson, who was 12 when he died. She gives detailed accounts of early family traumas, maps the trajectory of her 30-year career, and shares her side of the tabloid scandals she’s endured. The collective telling of their stories and achievements, within an intersectional feminist framework, is the kind of illuminating scholarship that rock really needs. Though compact, this book does much to pull the blues master out of the fog of myth. Balearic: Historia oral de la cultura de club en Ibiza. Her husband, Swizz Beatz, hires the cast of House Party 2 for a Keys birthday party, and she rents out a Louis Vuitton store for Swizz’s own birthday (complete with leased “Porches and Lamborghinis” for some real-life Fast & Furious action in New York City). The New Yorker’s Alex Ross is one of the best music writers in the business, and his latest is a sweeping (operatic?) This impressive, illustrated work (that’s laid out like issues of Tiger Beat and J–14) gives proper lessons on boy bands from the Beatles and the Jackson 5 to ‘NSync and BTS. Curious about the genesis of all of the earworm hooks you hear across every subgenre of hip-hop? and hip hop (Run-DMC’s debut), the year normally associated with George Orwell had its share of firsts. Even though 2020 was the worst of the worst (I'm seriously ready to wipe it from my memory foreverrrr), it did give us ample time to do one thing: Read a sh*t-ton of books. –Rawiya Kameir, Part memoir, part love letter to an idea, and part mea culpa, former Born Against singer Sam McPheeters’ Mutations takes the form of largely unconnected essays, with the occasional interview and record review in the mix. 4. The former Screaming Trees frontman holds absolutely nothing back in this gritty accounting of his life before he got sober. K.G. R.S. All this and more sparkle through the pages of this pocket history of pop music through the lens of gender, written by one of today’s deftest cultural critics. For all the setbacks, she’s rewarded with a one-percenter lifestyle that she manages to convey in graphic but humbling ways. But his willingness to confront his demons and more than a few funny stories (such as when he put Oasis’ Liam Gallagher in his place) make the book one of the most compelling and revealing rock memoirs ever. That makes BrownMark’s memoir all the more impressive. Rather than dwelling on the mechanics of music theory, How to Write One Song offers strategies and good-natured encouragement for passing creative roadblocks like self-doubt, difficulty finding inspiration, and unwillingness to indulge ideas. He is one of those rare critics who never sounds clinical, or on a deadline; under his eye, culture ambles and winks, instead of suffocating under a Plexiglass screen. Kirkus & Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020. Luc Sante makes me feel ashamed: for using Spotify and air conditioning, for paying $20 to attend a warehouse party where a creep whispered to me about Xi Jinping. She reveals she made a secret grunge album in 1995, out of frustration at how tame her official pop records were. The Judas Priest frontman spent nearly three decades in the closet before he declared to the world that he was “the stately homo of heavy metal.” His autobiography details the psychological toll that hiding his true self took on him, as he contrasts life onstage as the alpha-male metal god that his fans knew with the depressed, lonely soul he was offstage, sneaking into truck stops for a few moments of pleasure and pursuing relationships via classified ads. She reveals she made a secret grunge album in 1995, out of frustration at how tame her official pop records were. E.L. Not an opera fan? –Cat Zhang, In Fangirls, British music journalist and VICE UK editor Hannah Ewens rejects the narrative that her titular subjects are obsessive, hysterical, or unhinged—terms that critics have thrown at female music fans since pop’s advent, and that have been used to deride all sorts of passionate women for centuries before that. J.D. Best music books of the year 2020. Featuring plenty of entertaining cultural history, this is a significant contribution to hip-hop studies. Other essay subjects in Maybe the People Would Be the Times include crime novelists, tabloid history, and accumulating strangers’ photographs. As a proud fangirl herself, the author approaches her subjects with empathy, validating the importance of these self-made communities. –Eric Torres, In 1994, at age 23, a rap- and rave-loving high school graduate from suburban London found himself the boss of a fledgling UK indie label, XL Recordings. The former Screaming Trees frontman holds absolutely nothing back in this gritty accounting of his life before he got sober. Facebook Mariah Carey’s memoir is her wonderfully dishy story of her life as a star — her trials, her tribulations, her feud with Jennifer Lopez. On Christmas Day 1980, at an X concert, she meets a Go-Go in the ladies room and talks her way into the band. It’s hard to believe Tori Amos has been in the music business for 40 years. When Robert Johnson went down to that Mississippi crossroads, he created a mystique that few blues musicians have been able to match. Witness the bassist-vocalist-guitarist wielding a shotgun and mean-mugging in a still from Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley ’69” video in 1985; beaming beside Sofia Coppola at a fashion show in 1998; performing beneath towering Renaissance paintings in the Louvre in 2019. (Read the rest of our Pitchfork Book Club entry on Mutations.) All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. Over the past 50 years, music historian Peter Guralnick has written definitive books about Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, and Sam Phillips. Sante is now in his 60s, and yet the New York Review of Books contributor, photography professor, and one-time neighbor to Allen Ginsberg seems more voracious and alive than cosmopolitan writers half his age. “I want to be in a band.” –Jenn Pelly, In Glitter Up the Dark, Colorado-based critic and Pitchfork contributor Sasha Geffen dismantles the myth of gender experimentation as an anomaly throughout music history by tracing a lineage from blues icons Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, who sang thinly-veiled lesbian lyrics nearly a century ago, to the present wave of internet-based iconoclasts like Arca and SOPHIE. Share. At each turn, Mark Lanegan comes off looking worse than any of his buddies. What began as a multi-sensory wonderland where you might hear Manuel Göttsching’s kosmische masterpiece E2-E4 in full while tripping on LSD in a nightclub swimming pool has turned into a shrink-wrapped, third-rate facsimile of licentiousness—a capitalist hellscape of VIP lists, ketamine, and all-night, undifferentiated oonce-oonce.
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