100 books like Beneath the Underdog

I feel it’s important to note that I never liked this stupid band. But Mötley Crüe's book was all guilty pleasure for me: pleasure because I knew Seattle grunge had already killed their L.A. hair-band era, and guilty because (a) there turned out to be genuinely poignant moments, which revealed that (b) I’m a snob.

This book is a fast read of a slow-motion car crash, documenting the squalid, drug-sick lives of four self-consumed dingbats who stepped in success and somehow couldn’t scrape it off their shoe. I find this book revolting and recommend it highly.   

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy really, really wants everyone to write a song, and I find it terribly endearing.

I picked up his handbook amid a COVID-era creative block, and with Jeff as my songwriting sherpa, I was eventually able to drop some baggage and make my way up. I had already known that music would pay me back for the effort, but Jeff (I think he’d want me to call him Jeff) patiently walks through directly applicable strategies such as word-laddering, stealing, and the Dadaist cut-up technique for lyric writing.

His encouraging nudge made it easier to leave self-judgment and even good sense behind.

Another work that is wonderfully and winningly hard to pin down, Coming Through Slaughter is an imaginative and fragmentary collage of monologue, memoir, interviews, lyrics, photographs, archival material, hospital files—and white space—that builds a novelistic portrait of the mythical dark life and hard times of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the originators of jazz in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. From the little that is known about Bolden and his music, Ondaatje shapes an audacious story that is short, cinematic, dream-like, and devastating, a book that incontrovertibly proved once again to me that there are many, many ways to tell the story of a life. 

Geoff Dyer is one of the modern masters of post-genre literature. He has written numerous pioneering works of creative non-fiction, four novels, two collections of essays, and a study of English critic and fellow polymath John Berger. But Beautiful is his “book about jazz”, an impressionistic and semi-fictional evocation of the lives and music of seven legendary jazz figures—including Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Chet Baker, and Bud Powell—interspersed with scenes from life on the road with Duke Ellington, and ending with an essay on jazz’s vital forces of “tradition, influence, and innovation”. A kind of extended improvisation on themes of inspiration, creativity, struggle, and self-destruction, and with many poetic turns of phrase, the book is the literary equivalent of much of the music I most like and admire: rooted in jazz, yet not defined by it. But Beautiful is brilliantly beyond category. 

Don’t let the (original) lengthy subtitle, with its nearly forty-year-old date reference, put you off; this is a deeply original and highly engaging account of the music and philosophy of one of America’s most prolific and consistently creative musicians: composer, improviser, educator and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton. With a double narrative that deftly alternates between lofty discussions of subjects such as metaphysics, mysticism, language, and astrology, and the daily grind of a challenging twelve-date tour of England by a Braxton quartet in the winter of 1985, Forces in Motion cleverly captures much of the complexity, intelligence, ambition and humour of its uncompromising subject. At one point Lock describes Braxton as “an alchemist, a man who opens doors you didn’t know existed”; the same can be said of the book itself. A perfect marriage of musician and writer. 

A book about the creation and meaning of the one jazz album that every music fan seems to own, Miles Davis’s meditative and miraculous 1959 masterpiece Kind of Blue—and how it connects to a whole lot more. Loudly trumpeted on its back cover as the record that “influenced the whole course of late twentieth-century music,” The Blue Moment takes the album as a starting point and expands ever outwards to trace its wider roots, contexts, echoes, correspondences, undercurrents, and legacies. It’s quite a ride: from Bauhaus to Brian Eno; from the existential modernism of Antonioni to the minimalism of La Monte Young; from Picasso’s Blue Period to the aesthetics of esteemed German record label ECM. For me, not all of the links and associations, some of which are tenuous at best, stand up. Yet Williams is one of music writing’s most elegant chroniclers and insightful thinkers, and The… show more.

As a professional record producer turned neuroscientist, Daniel Levitan drew me in with his yin-yang mind. Was the intersection of creativity and science really navigable? Could he dispel the notion, at last, that inspiration is beamed down from a cloud? And how did a guy who worked with Stevie Wonder and Rosanne Cash get to be such a nerd?

I lapped up his explanations about musical ideas traveling along neurons and brain chemicals and how it’s possible that physical sound waves elicit an emotional response. I also realized that science and art are not so opposite.

I think people who make music recognize it as an experiment with variables and environmental factors and failures along the way, and that we’ll celebrate when we solve it, and that then the questions will change.  

That’s right; it’s an entire book of musical notation. Like I said, this list is for players, not civilians.

I love that every note on every original Beatles record is transcribed here, right down to Ringo’s drum fills on “You Won’t See Me” and the guy saying “number nine” a hundred times on “Revolution 9.”

I love sitting down with my kid, who plays guitar, and discovering exactly how to recreate the parts we can’t work out by ear. I love seeing how the Beatles fit the gears together to make the wheels turn on these songs and how they used chords and notes that I have on the piano at my house, too.

I was writing my novel in 2013, but 20 years earlier I’d picked up a book by the jazz drummer Arthur Taylor. I didn’t realize how much it influenced me until I went back to it again and again as I worked to get dialog and cadence and the ‘feel’ of jazz on paper. I prefer memoirs because I want to hear the shorthand, slang, and shortcuts artists take. This book has that and more. Taylor interviews the best of the best — Ornette, Roach, Dizzy, Nina. I like to think had my protagonist been real, he’d have been included in this list. I owe a lot to this book and if you’re looking to learn not just about jazz music, but jazz culture and life, this is a great start.

When I began my book I’d been out of graduate school for 25 years. I read deeply to see what I’d missed and discovered what is now called cultural history. It seems to me that a great deal of it is written to a template rather than directly from the facts as discovered. Even though DeVeaux comes out of the academic world, I get no such sense from Bop. It’s brilliant. Immaculately researched and nicely written, it addresses the extraordinary transition of Black music from entertainment-driven (however artful) to art (however entertaining). It’s an important story, and DeVeaux tells it beautifully.