10 books like Lexicon of Musical Invective

Geek Love is one of the strangest, most fascinating, and thoroughly unsettling novels I’ve ever read. It tells the story of a carny family whose mother and father breed their own exhibit of human oddities with the help of a variety of illicit drugs, insecticides, and radioisotopes. I’ve certainly felt freakish at times, but compared to the Binewski spawn—a boy with flippers, a hunchbacked albino dwarf, resplendent piano-playing Siamese twins, and Fortunato, the normal-looking baby who has telekinetic powers—I feel downright ordinary! The story is beautiful, shocking, repulsive, exhilarating, and deeply moving all at once, and might challenge your conceptions of what you consider weird, deformed, beautiful, ugly, normal, or socially acceptable. Surprisingly, the novel was a bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award in 1989. 

I remember reading this book over the summer when I was on the road with a recording company. It is filled with anecdotes about the metaphysical, transcendental, spiritual, and mystic properties of music. The thing I find so fascinating about these stories is not if they are true or not, but the belief systems of these ancient people, and the power and faith they put into music.

There’s a reason why so many books set in Venice revolve around death, heaven (aka Paradise), mystery, and love lost & found. There’s a story lying in wait around every alley corner, under every bridge, and at the bottom of every canal. It’s no surprise that Anne Rice, the queen of Vampire lit, set Cry to Heaven in Venice. Her novel is impeccably researched and written, bringing to life the castriti of the 18th century—men who were castrated to become sopranos for the opera houses and royal courts. Beneath the decadence of the surface of Anne Rice’s Venice lies a dark underbelly.

This book is a nonfiction history of the concept of Spherics – the idea that music and astronomy are intimately connected. It starts by talking about Pathagorous and works our way chronologically up to Einstein. There are a lot of books on the topic of Music of the Spheres (and a Coldplay album), but this is the best book I’ve found to fully understand the concept. 

Black feminist scholar and cultural critic Daphne A. Brooks has a solution to the vexing conundrum of the simultaneous centrality of African American women to the development of 20th and 21st-century music and the persistent devaluation of their contributions: she listens closely to their work in its historical, social, and aesthetic context. In her dazzling discussions of the cultural productions of an expansive array of musicians, artists, and critics—Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, Valerie June, Janelle Monáe, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Beyoncé, Carrie Mae Weems, and Wangechi Mutu make appearances—Brooks offers incisive and provocative readings that highlight the transformative intellectual and creative labor of African American women. This luminous book reveals and exemplifies the radical possibilities of Black women’s sound.

This book helped me understand the lives of young male jazz musicians in the early 20th century. A wacky, ecstatic, fragmented, kaleidoscopic, memoir—nostalgic always for Bloomington, Indiana, and his college days in the early 1920s. There Carmichael met his pals Monk and Bix, both of whom died too young. He dedicates the book to them and remembers them fondly. Monk, a surrealistic poet, and Bix, a great musical genius, they understood each other immediately. Bix responded to one of Monk’s poems saying, “I am not a swan.” There is a Dadaist flavor to Monk’s writing, as well as some of Hoagy’s: “The years had pants.” Intertwined with these memories is the slow, jerky progress of Carmichael’s journey from a would-be composer to a famous songwriter.

What makes Hangire such a great ass-kicking novel is that it’s clear the author knows guns and gunfight strategy. The action is crisp, but aggressively realistic. Tension never ceases—if it’s not shooting up bad guys, it’s with a dash of romance or a smidge of mystery. The writing is confident and action-packed. Even the title, am I right? 

Space Is the Place opened so many windows for me into a world of esoteric spirituality fused with mind-blowing musical and theatrical creativity. John Szwed was a member of my PhD dissertation committee, although it was pretty hard to track him down, and he was wrapping up this book as I finished my own. I’d seen Sun Ra at my college and thought of the Arkestra as a kind of spaced-out novelty act, not knowing anything about Ra’s history: his celestial epiphanies; his long immersion in big-band jazz, including his stint with the great Fletcher Henderson; the cadre of stellar musicians he recruited and molded for the Arkestra; his entrepreneurial streak. When I turned to the study of music and spirituality, Szwed’s biography became an indispensable source. Afrofuturism has become a very hot topic in contemporary cultural studies, and there’s no better way into its arcane mysteries than through this… show more.

An early and still one of the best works on the subject, Green's The World of Musical Comedy is the book that introduced generations of musical theatre fans to the art form. It was first published in 1960 and that first edition was my first encounter with the great songwriters and musicals of the American theatre. Green later revised and updated the book and the fourth edition stops at 1980 but the book remains in print. I still recommend it as the best way to discover the classic works in the world of musicals.

I love this picture book biography about composer Erik Satie. It has all the ingredients I love—lyrical language, fascinating details, and most of all a compelling story, in this case, about a man as odd and enchanting as his music that sounded happy and sad, like “kick line songs and ancient chants, but mixed together.” His most famous musical composition is Gymnopédie. Although Satie was a musical misfit and struggled throughout his life, in the end, he succeeded, leaving the world with a legacy of unforgettable music.