100 books like Beneath the Underdog

I’m reluctant to recommend it because these guys don’t need the money. Four raging narcissists/rapists/drug addicts create a band and proceed to destroy themselves and everything around them. I remember reading it and thinking, “This is the stuff they admit to.”

This book is the very definition of “If they were black, they’d be locked up.” By the point I was reading Vince Neil whine about not being able to tour Japan because he was on probation for drunkenly killing his friend, I realized I was witnessing pure evil. However, evil can be fascinating.

This book is so singularly revolting that it completely spoiled my already low interest in stories about entitled people growing more entitled. It was adapted into a very whitewashed Netflix movie.

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. 

Dyer is a gorgeous writer, and this book, which takes its title from a hauntingly beautiful 1947 song, is one of the most musical pieces of prose I’ve ever read. This paragraph captures both his voice and penetrating musical insights: 

“If [Thelonius] Monk had built a bridge he’d have taken away the bits that are considered essential until all that was left were the decorative parts–but somehow he would have made the ornamentation absorb the strength of the supporting spars so it was like everything was built around what wasn’t there. It shouldn’t have held together, but it did, and the excitement came from the way that it looked like it might collapse at any moment, just as Monk’s music always sounded like it might get wrapped up in itself.”

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.

I love this book because it explores the brain science behind how and why we perceive music and the role it often plays in our lives. I enjoy how he not only explains neuroscience in a clear and engaging way but also connects science with our unique human experience of emotions, memory, and individual taste.

As a neuroscientist and a musician, the author draws me in with his deep understanding and enthusiasm about music. His passion and curiosity shine through in a highly accessible and readable way. 

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.