100 books like Can't Stop Won't Stop

I loved this book because Patti Smith paints a true portrait of a young woman burning with passion to become a poet and artist. The book shows the struggles of committing to a life with no assurances in a city teeming with aspiring artists and writers.

What I love the most is showing the years it took, the alliances she made, the risks she took, the hunger she felt, and the desperate circumstances she faced and overcame. When her lucky break came, I was rooting for her! She had paid her dues, and she rose to the occasion when a band put her poetry to music, and she broke out to become a sensation.

The story of how Warner Bros Records, perhaps the best, most profitable yet artist-friendly record label in the 1970s and 1980s became heavily damaged when it was bought out in the 1990s and put under corporate auspices and expectations. Goodman communicates the financial details in a clear and accessible way, as well as the music executives’ singular personalities. Also offers a close-up view of how the corporate execs, especially with their short-term focus on quarterly results, failed to deal with the challenges of Napster and downloads at the turn of the century. An insightful view of the changing components of the music business in our time.

Want to write about music and musicians? You’ll need to understand the world in which they live. And if you’re writing about jazz and rock ‘n’ roll in the middle of the last century, that means a segregated, ugly world where even the most talented were treated as less than human. This was the world of the Chitlin’ Circuit. A dangerous, exciting, lawless network of nightclubs and juke joints from Memphis to New Orleans, Houston to Indianapolis, this topography spawned the popular music we love today. And nobody brings it to life like Lauterbach, whose reporting and language are as intense and musical as the era itself.

A century ago, the record industry sent representatives all over the country to do field recordings of vernacular artists playing folk, blues, and early country for “hillbilly” and “race” records (the sort that Rounder would start putting out in the 1970s).

One of these scouts was Ralph Peer from the Victor Talking Machine Company, for which he oversaw 1927’s legendary “Bristol Sessions.” It was the first time that Hall of Fame titans the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers recorded, generally cited as the beginning of the country music industry.

As explained in Barry Mazor’s excellent biography, Peer went on to become one of the giants of the recording and publishing industry, laying the groundwork that pretty much every record label including Rounder has followed since.

Going back 125 years in recording history, Milner’s book will make you question what “good recorded sound” is, and how that notion, surprisingly, is a political one that has changed over time. A diversity of genres and artists are brought in to prove his points. He demonstrates why technological innovations such as the cylinder, the 78RPM record, magnetic tape, albums, transistors, the cassette, the CD, ProTools and of course MP3s changed the sound and content of music forever. And also how such changes greatly affected the bottom line of the music business, increasing or decreasing revenue as the case may be. Might change how you view your music collection.

My favorite image from my research on New York’s SoHo neighborhood is a photograph of a girl riding her bicycle through her parents’ loft apartment—a former factory transformed into an airy, art-filled home that was spacious enough to serve as an indoor playground.

This book captures what it was like to grow up in one of New York’s most famous artist communities. While few (if any) SoHo children helped to break up an international art forgery ring (like the one depicted in this YA novel), it evocatively captures the sense of adventure that children might have felt living in an industrial area during a time of neighborhood transition.

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.

I love showbiz biographies full of the inside dope on glamorous, brilliant people, because I’ve always wanted to be one of those glamorous, brilliant people. 

Mike Nichols knew everyone important in the arts, ate at the most fabulous restaurants, traveled to the most luxurious locations, and owned several grand homes. And I am pleased to report that he was frequently anxious and depressed. 

I find it very reassuring to learn that someone who has everything I’ve ever dreamed of is no happier than I am. I know that sounds a little mean, but I never claimed to be perfect.

Writer William Goldman, most popular for penning The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and All the President’s Men, embeds himself in the Broadway world, seeing every show in the 1967-1968 season; to quote the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, this book is the autopsy. It’s an enormously accessible book about American theatre, with a murderers’ row of interview subjects at Goldman’s disposal and the author’s ability to translate gossip into hard journalistic data. Even the more economics-based chapters, such as a fascinating one on how most plays live or die on presales to well-connected women’s social groups (a.k.a. “Theatre-Party Ladies”), are as breezy as Goldman’s Oscar-winning screenplays. (Content Warning: The book contains some unfortunate and dated language.)

To quote New York Times critic Sam Anderson, “the sitcom is arguably the defining commercial art form of the American 20th century,” and this book gives that hypothesis weight. Over 24 chapters (starting in 1951 with I Love Lucy, the Rosetta Stone of the genre, and ending in 2014 with Dan Harmon’s cult hit Community), Austerlitz uses the television comedy format to discuss joke structure, technological advancements in the arts, and the evolution of American social and political consciousness over the previous half-century. Sitcoms are by their nature the tension between two opposing forces, centering on characters who strive to change their lot in life only to have everything reset by episode’s end, just in time to do it all again next week. There’s something both beautiful and menacing about that.