Grown Up All Wrong: 75 Great Rock and Pop Artists from Vaudeville to Techno

Grown Up All Wrong: 75 Great Rock and Pop Artists from Vaudeville to Techno Review

Two generations of American music lovers have grown up listening with Robert Christgau, attuned to his inimitable blend of judgment, acuity, passion, erudition, wit, and caveat emptor. His writings, collected here, constitute a virtual encyclopedia of popular music over the past fifty years. Whether honoring the originators of rock and roll, celebrating established artists, or spreading the word about newer ones, the book is pure enjoyment, a pleasure that takes its cues from the sounds it chronicles.

A critical compendium of points of interest in American popular music and its far-flung diaspora, this book ranges from the 1950s singer-songwriter tradition through hip-hop, alternative, and beyond. With unfailing style and grace, Christgau negotiates the straits of great music and thorny politics, as in the cases of Public Enemy, blackface artist Emmett Miller, KRS-One, the Beastie Boys, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. He illuminates legends from pop music and the beginnings of rock and roll--George Gershwin, Nat King Cole, B. B. King, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley--and looks at the subtle transition to just plain "rock" in the music of Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and others. He praises the endless vitality of Al Green, George Clinton, and Neil Young. And from the Rolling Stones to Sonic Youth to Nirvana, from Bette Midler to Michael Jackson to DJ Shadow, he shows how money calls the tune in careers that aren't necessarily compromised by their intercourse with commerce.

Rock and punk and hip-hop, pop and world beat: this is the music of the second half of the twentieth century, skillfully framed in the work of a writer whose reach, insight, and perfect pitch make him one of the major cultural critics of our time.

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Nina Simone: Break Down and Let It All Out

Nina Simone: Break Down and Let It All Out Review

One of the last divas of jazz, Nina Simone (1933 - 2003) was one of the finest songwriters and musicians of her day. For over 40 years she and her music defied categorization. Trained as a classical pianist, she performed blues, jazz, protest songs, gospel, pop, hymns, and folk tunes. Simone covered the songs of artists and musicians that she admired, from Bob Dylan to Duke Ellington to the Beatles to George Gershwin. Jazz lover and music journalist Sylvia Hampton met and befriended the soul diva in the late 1950s. After that first meeting, they became close friends, corresponding regularly throughout Simone's lengthy international career. Hampton and her brother David Nathan delve into Hampton's collection of memorabilia, to create a vivid portrait of the singer.

Yes Yes Y'all: The Experience Music Project Oral History Of Hip-hop's First Decade

Yes Yes Y'all: The Experience Music Project Oral History Of Hip-hop's First Decade Review

Hip-hop today is ubiquitous, dominating not only the music industry but also popular culture around the world. Like rock and roll before it, it has permanently transformed music, art, dance and fashion while capturing millions of listeners - and this vast cultural revolution was all started by a bunch of street kids in the ravaged Bronx of the 1970s. Documenting hip-hop's remarkable genesis, this book tells its stories in voices that bristle with vitality, character, humour and menace, tracing the music from DJ Kool Herc's first parties in 1973 through the release of "Rapper's Delight" in 1979 and the rise of the new school in the mid 1980s. Fricke and Ahearn weave an electric narrative from the accounts of over 50 of hip-hop's founders and stars, old school and new, including Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc, Melle Mel, Grand Wizard Theodore, Grandmaster Caz, Rahiem, Fab 5 Freddy, Tony Tone and DMC. A wealth of previously unseen photographs, flyers and posters illustrate the text. This work is a chorus of voices, a tale of artistry in the face of extraordinary adversity, and the definitive history of a revolution created with nothing more than a microphone, a turntable and a dance floor.

When I Get Home: Songs

When I Get Home: Songs Review

You’ve heard Garrison Keillor and the Guy's All-Star Shoe Band perform on the radio. Now you can enjoy their feel-good music on this collection.

A Prairie Home Companionlisteners are frequently treated to a song—sometimes to a familiar tune, sometimes to original music—with words by Garrison Keillor.

In them, he sings of home, love, friendship, family, faith, or just plain fun. These sixteen songs, specially recorded for this collection, are some of his best.

“I carry this solemn mug around in public to encourage strangers to mind their manners, but when I get home I am glad to make faces, quack like a duck, dance a little dance, and even sing a little. For many years now I have felt at home on the radio. These are some of the songs.”—Garrison Keillor

Tracks:
1. What Floats Your Boat
2. My Grandfather’s Clock
3. My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose
4. Homestead on the Farm
5. Everybody Knows It
6. Home on the Range 7. Boy’s Best Friend
8. Frankie and Johnny
9. What’ll I Do
10. Old Backstage
11. There Once Was a Shy Young Man
12. My Minnesota Home
13. Nearer My God to Thee
14. Only for You
15. Goodbye to My Uncles
16. Tell My Ma

All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics

All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics Review

In the fifteen years since Tipper Gore and Frank Zappa feuded over raunchy lyrics, a furious but confused debate has raged over popular music's effect on character. In a new book that shatters the assumptions of pop music's critics and defenders alike, Carson Holloway shows that music is both more dangerous and more beneficial than we think.

Conservative complaints about popular music focus on lyrics alone and appeal only to public decency and safety. Liberals, swift to the defense of any self-expression, simultaneously celebrate rock's liberating ethos and deny its cultural influence. Neither side appreciates the true power of music or is willing to examine its own musical tastes.

Previous ages, Holloway finds, were not as naive as our own. Plato and Aristotle, who saw that music can awaken the soul to reason or inflame it with passion, insisted on the cultivation of temperance through musical education. Rousseau and Nietzsche likewise recognized music's power, though these modern prophets of passion encouraged precisely the sort of music that the ancients would have deplored. The curious exception to this political concern with music is found in the intervening Enlightenment-the source of American politics. In their rejection of the classical notion of "statecraft as soulcraft," Locke and his contemporaries blinded themselves to the influence of culture on the character of citizens.

Only in recent years, as pop fare has reached extremes of depravity, have some Americans-most famously Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind-begun to worry about the destructive potential of music. Bloom looked beyond lyrics to the music itself, but in his elitism failed to consider music's full moral influence. Holloway, by contrast, is sympathetic to pop's appeal, and his well-rounded study compels us to take all music seriously. What he proposes-a rediscovery of the musical wisdom of Plato and Aristotle-will completely change the way we think about music.

All That Was Promised

All That Was Promised Review

When a Methodist minister meets a Mormon missionary, his life is changed forever. But this new convert soon finds himself struggling to recognize the promised blessings of the gospel when violent persecution shakes the fledgling Church in Wales. Told with passion and heart, this triumphant tale is guaranteed to uplift and inspire.

All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77

All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77 Review

A penetrating and entertaining exploration of New York’s music scene from Cubop through folk, punk, and hip-hop.

From Tony Fletcher, the acclaimed biographer of Keith Moon, comes an incisive history of New York’s seminal music scenes and their vast contributions to our culture. Fletcher paints a vibrant picture of mid-twentieth-century New York and the ways in which its indigenous art, theater, literature, and political movements converged to create such unique music.

With great attention to the colorful characters behind the sounds, from trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie to Tito Puente, Bob Dylan, and the Ramones, he takes us through bebop, the Latin music scene, the folk revival, glitter music, disco, punk, and hip-hop as they emerged from the neighborhood streets of Harlem, the East and West Village, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. All the while, Fletcher goes well beyond the history of the music to explain just what it was about these distinctive New York sounds that took the entire nation by storm. 33 photos