100 books like Please, Pretty Lights

This isn’t a particularly party-hearty (hardly?) novel, seeing as the music nerds satirized (and glorified) are mostly just f’ed up on wax, not honey oil or absinthe or something.  It will indeed make you laugh and give others a contact high of hilarity if they’re in the same room with you.

If you’ve ever wondered if humanity could survive without music, Dave O’Leary’s The Music Book is for you. Set in Seattle during the post-Nirvana/Pearl Jam period, the story follows earnest, likable Rob through nightclubs, strip bars, and a prison on an alcohol-enhanced quest for love and an answer to his question about what music actually means to the world. A truly unique and compelling story.

When I first read Girl, I thought Blake Nelson was a woman. That’s how convincingly this male author writes—diary-style—in the voice of female protagonist Andrea. Andrea’s a typical high school student in the Pacific Northwest who lives and breathes music and thrift-store clothing. But through her friendship with another like-minded woman, she becomes way more involved in the Portland, Oregon grunge scene than she ever imagined she would. One thing I love about Girl is the way we experience the world exclusively through Andrea’s eyes. She sees the world as it happens, without editorializing or offering any sweeping commentaries. I found this book impossible to put down.

This is the only nonfiction selection on my list. If you live in the Boston area and love music, you’ve probably read Brett Milano’s music reviews in the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, or Phoenix. He’s also written numerous books—both fiction and nonfiction—about various types of music. Vinyl Junkies is a wonderful read, even if you’re not particularly interested in music, because although many people featured in it are well-known in the music and art worlds (Peter Buck, Robert Crumb), on a higher level, the book’s really about collecting and collectors in general. Why do people collect? What’s the difference between simply accumulating stuff and curating a collection? And where does one draw the line? 

This book not only introduces readers to the sections and instruments in an orchestra, it does so in lyrical, rhythmic, rhyming verse. Readers will love saying – and hearing – sounds like “pling…plung,” “lootle-oots,” and “bumble, boom…crash!” As a bonus, readers learn musical terms like “arpeggio,” “glissando,” and “diminuendo.” The illustrations are colorful and dynamic and remind me of a movie I loved as a child – Fantasia!

Natalie Hodges had me at stage fright and quantum physics.

In poignant descriptions of her life as a violinist-in-training, I recognized a kindred tormented soul. Both of us abandoned classical music in our 20s, drained by the dilemma she so aptly articulates: “Why keep trying to love something that doesn’t love you back.” But Hodges’s relationship to music, like mine, did not end there.

Moving beyond painful memories, she dances between the hard and soft sciences to reveal the interplay of music, improvisation, and elastic time. The book itself is a virtuosic riff on personal reinvention.

Unlike most music business books that are full of legalese and require an advanced degree, this book is written by a musician who appreciated the business but held firm to their creativity. The explanations of terms and anecdotes about why those terms matter and their practical application, helped me navigate a number of contracts as well as learning how to cope with and make lemonade from my bad business decisions. Though a little out of date in regards to advanced technologies and changes in the current business of music, there is still valuable information as we have to remember that the entertainment business builds new structures on top of old concepts. At its core these scenarios, terms, and industry hustles still apply.

Daphne A. Brooks’ book is a revolutionary work, centering more than a century of innovations by Black women in popular music who have been marginalized, overlooked, or erased.

Situating Zora Neale Hurston as a sound archivist and performer and Lorraine Hansberry as a cultural critic alongside blues pioneers such as Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith and contemporary artists like Janelle Monáe and Valerie June, Brooks doesn’t merely fill in blind spots.

She exposes how those blind spots reflect the partial, subjective view of white male critics and historians.

Showing us a different way of seeing and listening to culture, Brooks has informed and inspired my thinking, and some of the best work I’ve done as a journalist, including this piece about Elizabeth Cotten, whose music fueled the 1960s folk revival.

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.” 

A Subversive History of Music is not just fascinating, but scholarly, thought-provoking, and accessible.

I’ve always believed that music springs from the least expected sources, most of them “unofficial”, and Gioia seems to agree. The central idea is this: musical innovation never springs from society’s officially approved sources, but from its despised outsiders, those with little or no power in everyday life – women, black people, young people – who develop their ideas in isolation from the mainstream.

Very often they live in port cities like New Orleans or Liverpool, which are flooded with influences from elsewhere.