I love music books and annoy my wife with how many I consume per month. (She wants me to read fiction. Pish-posh.) The ones that play with format and provide multiple viewpoints are my favorites. I became a music journalist after spending my teenage years in a ska band; that alone taught me that music is complex, ever-evolving, and the technical is intrinsically tied to the personal. I approached my book with the same acknowledgment of diverse opinions and fierce emotional connection. I have devoted my life to loving and playing ska, and it seemed to be the only genre lacking a defender. The defender turned out to be me.
I wrote...
In Defense of Ska: The Ska Now More Than Ever Edition
I think music is magic. Sometimes, it feels like reading about music deflates its inherent mystery. When I finished Dilla Time, it was like I had taken mushrooms and could see beat patterns with my mind’s eye. Although a good portion of Dilla Time is biographical, the parts I love are the chapters explaining how rhythm works, and Charnas dives deep into this topic.
The biography portion strengthens those sections because Dilla fundamentally changed the rhythm of pop music. I read this book, and my understanding of rhythm completely changed—and I am a drummer! Plus, the mixed-media, multi-formatted content is such a delight. He even includes graphs. Who doesn’t enjoy a nice graph?
It's Dilla Time. Finally. Dilla Time is the story of the invention of a new kind of time, a new kind of sound, by the most influential music producer of the last twenty-five years, someone you may never have heard of: J. Dilla. He's revered by rappers and producers from Kanye West to Kendrick Lamar, and he worked with the likes of Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson-but Dilla himself never rose to mainstream fame, despite revolutionizing the way music sounds before his untimely death at the age of thirty-two.
In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of J. Dilla,…
I could easily recommend five Hanif Abdurraqib books. Still, I chose this one because his writing in this book is profoundly personal and emotional, revealing how his connection to their music helped him understand his identity and place in the world.
I found myself relating to his thought processes and relationship with music, especially because music helps me express all my hard-to-put-to-word feelings. Abdurraqib relays his love for Tribe with such poetic grace. I was already a fan of Tribe before reading the book. Now, I get choked up when I listen to some of their songs. Music is transformative.
A New York Times Best Seller 2019 National Book Award Longlist, Nonfiction 2019 Kirkus Book Prize Finalist, Nonfiction A February IndieNext Pick Named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by Buzzfeed, Nylon, The A. V. Club, CBC Books, and The Rumpus, and a Winter's Most Anticipated Book by Vanity Fair and The Week Starred Reviews: Kirkus and Booklist "Warm, immediate and intensely personal."-New York Times
How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
I could tell you entire life stories based on what albums I was listening to when they happened, and that’s just what Marc Wasserman is doing with this book—and he’s chosen a damn fine album, the English Beat’s Special Beat Service. Sure, he discusses the band’s cultural impact, but it’s also about how Marc fell in love with the album and the band during a difficult time.
I love how the book weaves Marc’s story with well-researched details. Maybe one day I’ll write a book about Quasi’s Featuring Birds album, covering the period in my 20s when I was broke, destitute, and searching for meaning while delivering pizzas in Las Vegas.
Part Gen X memoir, and part English Beat oral history, the book takes a detailed look at the making of, response to, and influence their third album “Special Beat Service” had on young American fans like marc as well as musicians like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Adam Duritz of Counting Crows, Elvis Costello, and Pete Townshend of the Who. “Soul Salvation” includes a foreword by Jay Boberg, the president of I.R.S. Records who worked to break the band in America during 1982-83 and features extensively researched interviews, insights and anecdotes from band members, record company executives, music critics and…
I can’t see myself writing a detailed chronicle of a specific location and period without pulling my hair out. But Will Hermes did precisely that (well, not the hair-pulling-out part) by relating five crucial years in New York. It initially reads weird, maybe even slow, because he writes short intersecting snippets of music history.
Once I got deeper into it, I fell in love. I already knew much of the history he touched on regarding stuff like punk, Bruce Springsteen, and salsa, but those fun factoids aren’t the point of Hermes’s book. Instead, it’s about how multiple scenes coexisted and informed one another. I’m well versed in the NY music scene now and—bonus!—New York itself.
Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented—all at once, from one block to the next, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the city’s infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless.
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era’s music scenes…
Adventures in the Radio Trade documents a life in radio, largely at Canada's public broadcaster. It's for people who love CBC Radio, those interested in the history of Canadian Broadcasting, and those who want to hear about close encounters with numerous luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, J. Michael Straczynski, Stuart…
I grew up at the best moment to fall in love with Britpop—Pulp is the best of them, by the way. But I digress. As an American, I knew little about the culture that birthed Britpop; I just consumed it without context. Daniel Rachel’s oral history on Cool Brittania explains this entire culture where a bunch of ’90s British rock bands were influenced by ’60s British rock bands.
This cultural blip was also tied to soccer, Trainspotting, the work of Nick Hornby, and “lad culture.” Oh, and I even learned what lad culture was! It was a straightforward read but packed with a ton of info that helped me appreciate British pop culture even more than I already (superficially) did.
The nineties was the decade when British culture reclaimed its position at the artistic centre of the world. Not since the 'Swinging Sixties' had art, comedy, fashion, film, football, literature and music interwoven into a blooming of national self-confidence. It was the decade of Lad Culture and Girl Power; of Blur vs Oasis. When fashion runways shone with British talent, Young British Artists became household names, football was 'coming home' and British film went worldwide. From Old Labour's defeat in 1992 through to New Labour's historic landslide in 1997, Don't Look Back In Anger chronicles the Cool Britannia age when…
This book isn’t just a book about ska music; it’s a defense. It asks why ska has been unfairly maligned in culture and encourages readers to reconsider their opinions on the genre—no matter how well they think they understand it.
It is a fun journey that reads unlike any other music book. It’s told through scattered, nonlinear essays. Some are opinion pieces, some are journalistic snippets on important (and sometimes, not-so-important) ska history, and some are little slices of memoir cut from the author’s life as a ska fan and former (unsuccessful) ska musician. Interwoven throughout are a myriad of viewpoints, all making the case for ska’s value as an essential musical genre.
Country music diva Hayley Swift has fallen off the charts and into a funk. Desperate to regain her place in the limelight, she agrees to a low-budget tour of Southern venues, starting with her 35th high school reunion.
There, in an unexpected but fortuitous reconnection, The Girls Next Door —who…
In the bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the first —and to date only— Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000…
