Here are 100 books that 1989 fans have personally recommended if you like
1989.
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I am a lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. I write regularly on popular music and culture in scholarly form and as a critic in various publications. I am convinced that popular music can gesture at utopia despite its emergence from within a capitalist market society.
This book was actually written before Baraka’s turn to Marxism, but as a social history of African American music, it is more than exemplary of a style of writing that takes the relationship of cultural form to its conditions seriously.
How Baraka moves between the music and the social conditions of Black musicians changed what I thought engaged musical analysis could be.
"A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music." — Langston Hughes
"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."
So says Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) in the Introduction to Blues…
I am a lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. I write regularly on popular music and culture in scholarly form and as a critic in various publications. I am convinced that popular music can gesture at utopia despite its emergence from within a capitalist market society.
Whilst not strictly a book about popular music, but rather two separate but related essays on the modern composers Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, Adorno’s study has been utterly formative for how I understand music and its relationship to its social conditions.
I can’t even fathom how I could think about music without Adorno, and this book is by far his most concerted and concise statement on the subject.
An indispensable key to Adorno's influential oeuvre-now in paperback
In 1949, Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of New Music was published, coinciding with the prominent philosopher's return to a devastated Europe after his exile in the United States. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Arnold Schoenberg reviled it.
Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal…
I am a lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. I write regularly on popular music and culture in scholarly form and as a critic in various publications. I am convinced that popular music can gesture at utopia despite its emergence from within a capitalist market society.
Sometimes, the analytical frame of a book completely changes one’s understanding of a phenomenon, and that was the case with this history of work song.
By showing that singing and music-making at work were silenced in the latter half of the 19th century by the noise of machines and the discipline of factory bosses, Korczynski et. al. provided me with a wholly new way to understand the function of music in an industrialized capitalist society: in terms of the segregation of labor and leisure.
Whether for weavers at the handloom, labourers at the plough or factory workers on the assembly line, music has often been a key texture in people's working lives. This book is the first to explore the rich history of music at work in Britain and charts the journey from the singing cultures of pre-industrial occupations, to the impact and uses of the factory radio, via the silencing effect of industrialisation. The first part of the book discusses how widespread cultures of singing at work were in pre-industrial manual occupations. The second and third parts of the book show how musical…
I am a lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. I write regularly on popular music and culture in scholarly form and as a critic in various publications. I am convinced that popular music can gesture at utopia despite its emergence from within a capitalist market society.
Iton’s book isn’t restricted to popular music but ranges more widely across Black popular cultures.
However, in the ways he understands the historical intersection of popular music and institutional politics (especially in a magisterial chapter on soul music), Iton gave me a way of conceptualizing music as a form of political expression and organization in itself.
*Named one of CHOICE 's "Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009"*
Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, black popular culture was commonly seen as a means of forging community and effecting political change.
But as Richard Iton shows in this provocative and insightful volume, despite the changes brought about by the civil rights movement, and contrary to the wishes of those committed to narrower conceptions of politics, black artists have continued to play a significant role in the making and maintenance of critical social spaces.…
I wrote Leaving the Beach because I was once bulimic and music-obsessed. After seeking help and recovering, I realized I wanted to write a realistic book about a bulimic woman; it was critical that I didn’t unintentionally romanticize any aspects of this insidious, potentially fatal disease.
When I first read Girl, I thought Blake Nelson was a woman. That’s how convincingly this male author writes—diary-style—in the voice of female protagonist Andrea. Andrea’s a typical high school student in the Pacific Northwest who lives and breathes music and thrift-store clothing. But through her friendship with another like-minded woman, she becomes way more involved in the Portland, Oregon grunge scene than she ever imagined she would. One thing I love about Girlis the way we experience the world exclusively through Andrea’s eyes. She sees the world as it happens, without editorializing or offering any sweeping commentaries. I found this book impossible to put down.
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Meet Andrea Marr, straight-A high school student, thrift-store addict, and princess of the downtown music scene. Andrea is about to experience her first love, first time, and first step outside the comfort zone of high school, with the help of indie rock band The Color Green.
"After I saw Todd Sparrow something deep inside me began to change. It was not a big change and I didn't shave my head and I didn't really think any differently about my life or Hillside or anything like that. But one glimpse of Todd and you immediately realized how limited you were and…
Where does that dark passage really lead?
Could that crazy drainage area really be a secret base for small aliens?
Just walking down the streets as a child these were the kinds of thoughts that would swirl through my mind. I would see passages to parallel worlds, or the signs of a hidden world everywhere I looked. They really were all around us, kept out of our perception by some spell or grand camouflage device.
Part of being a writer I really enjoy is creating secret, hidden worlds, alternate realities, exploring the possibilities, and looking at all the dark passageways to see if there is a portal there.
An absent-minded, modern-day scientist is pulled out of time, finding himself in a medieval England of a parallel universe. He is mistaken for a sorcerer and starts using his knowledge to make a name for himself.
I know all of that may sound cliche, the story is anything but.
I was especially drawn to the big bad of the story, who is so powerful that he can hear that narrator and start to argue with him in some great fourth-wall-breaking moments that turn out to be more than just humorous exchanges.
I found this to be a fun series that really plays around with some common fantasy concepts and has fun with it all, not taking itself too seriously.
Magic Is Alive, Science Is Afoot….Trying to discover time travel, absent-minded genius Dr. Marvin Brewster accidentally transports himself to a parallel universe where magic really works … a land that resembles medieval England, but is populated by leprechauns, virgin-hating unicorns, coffee drinking beatnik vampire elves, rapping Rastafarian grunge dwarves, philosophically musing dragons, ambulatory vegetation, bumbling outlaws, gorgeous brigand queens, cursed were-princes and evil wizards. In a world where science is unknown, Brewster’s knowledge results in his being mistaken for a sorcerer … but the real sorcerers have a powerful, exclusive guild, and Brewster’s not a member. As he searches for…
I grew up in a small town full of ghosts. They broke plates in a doctor’s office-turned-restaurant, feuded in a house built by twins, emerged from cornfields to stand in our headlights, and turned headstones blue in a cemetery where tombstones protruded from the ground like jagged teeth. The stories that surrounded me while I was a teen still bleed into my writing. And as reader, I gravitate toward books that are atmospheric, rich in moments of magic or the unreal, and riddled with stories of the past and long-forgotten.
As one of four sisters, I appreciate a good sister story because there’s always something going on under the surface. House of Hollow is no different. There’s the complicated dynamic of the three sisters—the model and fashion designer, the grunge musician, and the loner high school student—revealed when the eldest goes missing and the two younger sisters search for her. And then there’s the twist of something otherworldly—the fact that the girls disappeared for a month as children, reappearing with black eyes, white hair, mysterious scars, and the ability to entrance others with their scent and touch. I couldn’t stop turning the pages.
'A gorgeous, grisly modern fairy tale.' - THE GUARDIAN
'Dark and delicious. House of Hollow hums with malice and mystery. I devoured it whole.' - KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE
** SHORTLISTED FOR THE YA BOOK PRIZE 2022 **
The Hollow sisters - Vivi, Grey and Iris - are as seductively glamorous as they are mysterious. They have black eyes and hair as white as milk. The Hollow sisters don't have friends - they don't need them. They move through the corridors like sharks, the other little fish parting around them, whispering behind their backs.
I’ve always adored romance books—there’s nothing like the thrill of meeting characters that you know you’re going to fall in love with just as much as they’re going to fall in love with each other. I didn’t start out intending to write about rock stars. But when I was sitting down in front of that first blank screen looking for inspiration, it was a rock star that took shape in my mind. There is something so inherently appealing about the artistic, tortured souls of musicians. Relationships in the spotlight come with very special challenges, and I love exploring how characters navigate these while still developing passionate, soul-deep emotional bonds.
Paula Dombrowiak writes non-traditional rock star romances that will absolutely touch your heart. This is the first book in her Blood & Bone series and tells the story of middle-aged rock star Jack, who is being interviewed by Erin about the rise and fall of his nineties grunge band, including his tumultuous relationship with his former bandmate and collaborator, Mia. Paula paints a vividly realistic picture of the nineties grunge scene, skillfully mixing past and present to tell Jack’s heartbreaking story. This book is a beautifully written and emotional look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of the rock star life.
A steamy, exciting, and emotional rock star romance with a bit of a slow burn, a love triangle and a '90s grunge aesthetic.
Two Days, One Interview, Twenty-Five Years of Rock 'N Roll. Telling his story might just repair past relationships and ignite new ones.
Jack O’Donnell is a middle-aged rock star with a long history of bad decisions. When unimaginable circumstances bring Jack and journalist Erin Langford, together, the two embark on a journey through Jack’s past where he recounts the rise and fall of his band and the profound bond he shared with his former bandmate and collaborator.…
As an author of historical fiction, I have a number of time periods that I go back to again and again. Both the 1960s (specifically, the late 1960s) and the 1990s are two of those eras that I just can’t get enough of. The parallels between these two time periods are very compelling: both were times of political upheaval and amazing music, with young people leading the charge, hoping to create a better world than the one they were disenchanted with.
This non-fiction work is the definitive grunge memoir, told in stark – sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking – detail.
Lanegan is candid and honest about his own struggles as well as those of his music colleagues and friends like Layne Staley, Kurt Cobain, and others, always keeping their humanity at the forefront.
A must-read for anyone interested in the grunge scene of the Seattle ‘90s.
"Mark Lanegan-primitive, brutal, and apocalyptic. What's not to love?" Nick Cave
"A stoned cold classic" Ian Rankin
"Powerfully written and brutally, frighteningly honest" Lucinda Williams
From the back of the van to the front of the bar, from the hotel room to the emergency room, onstage, backstage, and everywhere in between, Sing Backwards and Weep reveals the abrasive reality beneath one of the most romanticized decades in rock history-from a survivor who lived to tell the tale.
When Mark Lanegan first arrived in Seattle in the mid-1980s, he was just "an arrogant, self-loathing redneck waster seeking…
I’m a writer/artist inspired by a lifetime of reading graphic novels. A visual artist at heart with a BFA in Industrial Design I have worked over a decade in conceptual thinking for research and development in the manufacturing sector. I love the experimentation that breaks the boring norms of industry standards. I wanted to use my talent, experience, and passion to create a sci-fi graphic novel, Bear Serum, and break the medium norms. I wrote and drew it to satiate my own wild ideas in the sci-fi category to push the medium further.
Scud is a ’90s indie comic at its best and is now in one giant collection. Vending machine robots with various whacky, funny, and violent scenarios. Artist/writer Rob Shrab created a ton of awesome indie work. His passion and talent are undeniable as he creates one crazy scenario to the next. I recommend going to a local coffee shop and spending some time with the printed copy sipping a latte while listening to 90’s grunge rock.
I suggest that you read this one on a Saturday afternoon.
In the world of Scud, bullets are cheaper than human life. Corner
vending machines provide any weapon you might need. The most popular weapons are
Scud disposable assassins: Robot hitmen that self-destruct when they kill their
target. This volume follows Scud 1373, assigned to take out a hideous female
man-eater named Jeff. While fighting the indestructible Jeff, Scud discovers his
infamous warning panel in a bathroom mirror. Realizing that to kill Jeff is to
kill himself, Scud blows off her arms and legs and hospitalizes her. Her life
support bills will have to be paid, and Scud will have to…
