Showing titles in Music

There are rappers who everyone loves and there are rappers who every rapper loves, and Corey Woods, a.k.a. Raekwon the Chef, is one of the few who is both. His versatile flow, natural storytelling, and evocative imagery have inspired legions of fans and a new generation of rappers. Raekwon is one of the founding members of Wu-Tang Clan, and his voice and cadence are synonymous with the sound that has made the group iconic since 1991.

Jon Savage's oral history of Joy Division is the last word on the band that ended with the suicide of Ian Curtis in Macclesfield on May 18, 1980. It weaves together interviews conducted by the author, but never used in the making of the film Joy Division, which told the story of the band in their own words, as well as those of their peers, collaborators, and contemporaries.

The smooth veneer of the duo's songs made Steely Dan popular and famous in the 1970s, but the polish glossed over the underlying layers of anger, disappointment, sleaze, and often downright weirdness lurking just beneath the surface. The elliptical lyrics—were—and continue to be-an endless source of fascination. What kind of person was capable of writing such songs? Donald Fagen has always kept his true self hidden behind walls of irony, confounding most journalistic enquiries. Nightfly cracks open the door to reveal the life behind the lyrics.

Black Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. It is composed of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959-1967. Also includes Amiri Baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.

In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo's beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood.

Purple Rain is a song, an album, and a film - each one a commercial success and cultural milestone. How did this semiautobiographical musical masterpiece that blurred R&B, pop, dance, and rock sounds come to alter the recording landscape and become an enduring touchstone for successive generations of fans?

Matt Pinfield is the ultimate music fan. He's the guy who knows every song, artist, and musical riff ever recorded, down to the most obscure band's B-side single on its vinyl-only EP import. As a child, music helped Pinfield make sense of the world. Later he would approach his music idols after concerts and explain why he loved their music. As an adult, rock music inspired his career, fueled relationships, and, at times, became a life raft.

In 1975, this unknown band from Weirton, West Virginia SHOCKED the Baltimore music scene – becoming "The Beatles of Baltimore." Rolling Stone magazine deemed their first album "one of the year’s most impressive debuts." In 2015, they listed it as one of the "50 best prog albums of all time."

The Go-Go’s debut album, Beauty and the Beat, rose to the top of the charts in 1981 and their hit songs "We Got the Beat", "Our Lips Are Sealed", “Vacation”, and "Head Over Heels" (to name a few) served as a soundtrack to our lives in the ‘80s. Now, after the release of their Critics Choice Award-winning Showtime documentary, and in anticipation of their forthcoming induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and their 2021 West Coast shows, Gina takes fans behind the scenes for a rare look at her personal images documenting the band's wild journey.

In the summer of 1981, Mark Brown was a teenager working at a 7-11 store when he wasn't rehearsing with his high school band, Phantasy. Come fall, Brown, now called BrownMark, was onstage with Prince at the Los Angeles Coliseum, opening for the Rolling Stones in front of 90,000 people. Raw, wry, real, this book takes us from his musical awakening as a boy in Minneapolis to the cold call from Prince at 19, from touring the world with The Revolution and performing in Purple Rain to inking his own contract with Motown.

Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact, and disguised their sources. In Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs. Gioia tells a 4,000-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval.

You can now develop your vocal power, presence, and influence on others and all within the comfort and privacy of your own home.Presence, charisma, and star quality lead directly to your state of mind and the way you inhabit your body.

The spectacular story of ‘80s Hair Metal! What hidden mayhem truly lurked behind the curtain as outrageous bands such as Poison were having Nothing But a Good Time, only to find out later that Every Rose Has Its Thorn… “For both devoted fans and people who just hum the tunes, this is the definitive account of Hair Metal's history, including all of the behind-the-scenes drama and spectacle—a well-written and exciting adventure.”—Jonathan P. Brazee, USA Today Bestselling writer and multiple Nebula and Dragon Award finalist. An intoxicating chronicle detailing the sensational arc ...

Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for more than a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote “3 Chains o’ Gold”, Prince’s “rock video opera”, as well as the star’s last testament. According to Prince's former fiancée, Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like”.

Doctor Dread has committed his life to producing reggae music and releasing it on his label, RAS Records. He has become one of the world's foremost reggae producers and has worked with almost all the genre's icons: Bunny Wailer, Black Uhuru, Ziggy and Damian Marley, Gregory Isaacs, and others. This audiobook, full of behind-the-scenes stories, has shocking chapters that reveal aspects of reggae never before explored.

Everyone knows Michael Jackson - the myth. This is the revealing true story of Michael Jackson - the man. To Frank Cascio, Michael Jackson was many things - second father, big brother, boss, mentor, and teacher, but most of all he was a friend. Though Cascio was just a few years old when he first met Jackson in 1984, at the peak of the pop star’s career, Jackson was at the center of his life for the next twenty-five years.

From the voice of a generation: the most highly anticipated autobiography of the year, and the story of a man who wanted The Who to be called The Hair; wanted to be a sculptor, a journalist, a dancer and a graphic designer; became a musician, composer, librettist, fiction writer, literary editor, sailor; drank too much and nearly died; detached from his body in an airplane, on LSD, and nearly died; planned to write his memoir when he was 21; and published this book at 67.

He is the proud torchbearer of the Beatles, the greatest band in the history of popular music, and one of the most closely-studied artists in show business, yet secrets and surprises remain in the life of Sir Paul McCartney. The full story is told in Fab. Howard Sounes, author of the acclaimed Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, spent more than two years investigating every aspect of Sir Paul’s life and work, including interviewing over 200 people.

A weave of biography, criticism, and memoir, Shine Bright is Danyel Smith’s intimate history of Black women’s music as the foundational story of American pop. Smith has been writing this history for more than five years. But as a music fan, and then as an essayist, editor (Vibe, Billboard), and podcast host (Black Girl Songbook), she has been living this history since she was a latchkey kid listening to “Midnight Train to Georgia” on the family stereo.

"Unvarnished. Funny. Leaving no stone unturned"...So say the publishers about this audiobook I've written. What I say is that this is the story of my life, told as clear as a Texas sky and in the same rhythm that I lived it. It's a story of restlessness and the purity of the moment and living right. Of my childhood in Abbott, Texas, to the Pacific Northwest, from Nashville to Hawaii, and all the way back again. Of selling vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias while hosting radio shows and writing song after song, hoping to strike gold.