100 books like K-punk

This book will change your idea of the place and importance of synthesizers in music history. I had the privilege to be taught by Trevor Pinch as an undergraduate and have followed his work closely since. His passing in late 2021 left a massive hole in the field of Science and Technology Studies and he is sorely missed.

The book is based on primary research on the genesis and development of the Moog synthesizer, perhaps the most important instrument in electronic music history. Unlike most texts on the instruments of electronic music, which dig into the technical details of synthesis, I love the fact that this book gives you the human stories and socio-technical processes behind how an iconic synthesizer was designed, circulated, and adopted by rock musicians from Rick Wakeman to The Beatles.

There is delight in the details, such as how salesmen packed the unwieldy Moog synth into… show more.

I wasn’t expecting this! One of the most gifted and quirky songsmiths of the age, the lead singer of art pop band The Talking Heads no less, turns his attention to the technological evolution of music.

I found profound insight and erudition on every page, but it’s not preachy or overly auto-biographical. Instead, Byrne limns out the changing shapes of music and how it comes into being in composition, performance, and education. He is as much at ease with Hume and Adorno as he is with scales, harmonies, and DJ culture, and the payoff is enormous.

Whenever I pick this book up, which is regularly, it takes me on unexpected journeys and provokes new ideas. My favorite quote on the creative process: “The idea is to allow the chthonic material the freedom it needs to gurgle up.” 

This is the book that changed my view of music and made me realise that I could write about popular music from a sociological perspective and not bore people to death!

Simon combines the punchy directness of a music critic with a thorough understanding of music as a social force that shapes our lives, loves, and identities. The book demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century popular music.

I often start any research project by using the index to look up related terms and ask: “What does Simon say?” I particularly like the sections on how star persona works, and the chapter on technology is a must, too.

Is music as universally positive and life-affirming as we think?

This book made me think twice about that idea. Yes, music lubricates our identities and can generate fellow feeling and a sense of well-being, but it can just as easily drive us apart. Think about pop’s repertoire of overtly sexist and racist songs, the booing of national anthems at sports events, and music reserved for the status acquisition practices of the elite, like opera.

What I like about David Hesmondhalgh’s exploration of why music matters is that it takes a balanced view of these questions. I use it a lot in teaching as an antidote to the somewhat lazy idea that music is *always* a force for social good. I also admire David’s ability to move from the somewhat abstract realms of moral philosophy to dancing bodies without losing sight of basic but important questions like social inequality.

Thomas Sowell is underrated. How is a world-renowned thinker and commentator still underestimated? Many people think of Sowell as little more than a cultural commentator or an ideologue.

This book shatters those misconceptions by introducing you to the depth and clarity of Sowell’s thoughts. Reading and re-reading this book will impress you with the power of the economic point of view. Read it after Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.

If you want to learn about the history of the concept of authenticity and how it is understood in the western world, this is probably the best book to read (after my book, of course!). Charles Taylor is one of the most prominent living philosophers of selfhood, and this book (topping out at only a little over 100 pages) is an easy-to-read digestion of the ideas that he elaborated in his much-longer book Sources of the Self. Taylor is ambivalent about whether personal authenticity is a good or a bad thing in our era. He recognizes the harms imposed by some of the debased forms that it takes in modern society, but Taylor also tries to articulate an ethics that could rehabilitate authenticity in a way that affirms the dignity of and respect for each individual. I don’t like the fence-sitting, but this remains required reading.

I met Svetlana in the last two years of her life and was deeply impressed by her brilliance in literature and the history of ideas and cultures. She died, tragically, in her mid 50s cutting short her extraordinary career, from childhood and youth in Soviet Russia to her stellar career as a Harvard professor of comparative literature. Of her seven books, this highly original study of nostalgia has been particularly important.

A ground breaking study about longing in its positive and negative forms, focusing on post-communist cities such as St. Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin, and writers Nabokov, Brodsky, and Kabakov. Erudite, brilliant, and witty, this is a great cross-genre study of our modern condition.

I remember first reading Future Shock after buying a battered, orange-coloured paperback edition at a bargain price from one of the second-hand bookshops that once saturated London’s Charing Cross Road.

It hadn’t really occurred to me before how much the increasingly rapid technological changes around us might create a sense of shock—‘future shock’— for some people. It changed my thinking about the influence of technology on our world and the impact it has on people, society, economics, and politics.

Even after all these years, many of Alvin Toffler’s insights and ideas remain just as topical today.

I have always doubted the claim that people are predominantly violent and egotistical and can never change. Jeremy Rifkin, in this well-researched book, shows that despite humanity’s history of conflicts and misery, human beings have the potential, and have already begun, to create an empathic, global society.

A book such as this is needed to help us understand history as a process of humanity’s gradual maturing.

When I first read this book as a graduate student, Kathleen Davis’s ability to draw unexpected connections—between political power and temporality, feudalism and imperialism, medieval and postcolonial studies—melted my brain (in a good way). It’s not easy to do justice to her complex argument in a few sentences, but basically she shows how early modern jurists deliberately relegated certain ideas (servility, absolutism, religiosity) both to Europe’s medieval past and the present of the nonwestern world in order to justify imperial expansion, colonial domination, and even chattel slavery. A dense critique of both medieval historiography and postcolonial theory, Periodization and Sovereignty isn’t a breezy read but it’s well worth the effort.