In Portraying Performer Image in Record Album Cover Art, Ken Bielen explains how album cover art authenticates recording artists by using elements that authenticate the performer in the particular genre. He considers albums issued from the 1950s to the 1980s, the golden era of record album cover art. The whole album package is studied including the front and back covers, the inside cover, the inner sleeve, and the text (liner notes) on the album jacket. Performers in rock and roll, folk and folk rock, soul and disco, psychedelic, Americana nostalgia, and singer-songwriter genres are included in this study of hundreds of record album covers.

The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. The Hearing Eye makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this groundbreaking collection explores the more allusive - and elusive - references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly contemporary visual artists.
There are scholarly essays on the painters Rose Piper (Graham Lock), Norman Lewis (Sara Wood), Bob Thompson (Richard H. King), Romare Bearden (Robert G. O'Meally, Johannes Volz) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Robert Farris Thompson), as well an account of early blues advertising art (Paul Oliver) and a discussion of the photographs of Roy DeCarava (Richard Ings). These essays are interspersed with a series of in-depth interviews by Graham Lock, who talks to quilter Michael Cummings and painters Sam Middleton, Wadsworth Jarrell, Joe Overstreet and Ellen Banks about their musical inspirations, and also looks at art's reciprocal effect on music in conversation with saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Jane Ira Bloom.
With numerous illustrations both in the book and on its companion website, The Hearing Eye reaffirms the significance of a fascinating and dynamic aspect of African American visual art that has been too long neglected.

For the first time ever, Melanie C, aka Sporty Spice, tells her amazing life story in her own words and gives a full and honest account of what life was really like in The Spice Girls. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ___________ 'What a woman and what a book!' Elizabeth Day 'Fabulous ... There is so much I really relate to, growing up as a young girl, the 90s, all the stuff you went through.' Zoe Ball 'Amazing ... Absolutely brilliant.' Chris Evans 'Sporty Spice telling it like it is.' Independent 'An amazing story ... An incredibly profound, vulnerable and honest look into the highs and lows of the Spice Girls.' Steven Bartlett 'Really lovely.' Chris Moyles ___________ For the first time ever, Melanie C, aka Sporty Spice, tells her amazing life story in her own words and gives a full and honest account of what life was really like in The Spice Girls. I never told my story before because I wasn't ready. Now, finally, I am. 25 years ago, The Spice Girls, a girlband that began after answering an advert in the paper, released our first single. 'Wannabe' became a hit and from that moment, my life changed for ever. I was suddenly part of one of the biggest music groups in history, releasing hit after hit, performing to our wonderful fans and spreading the message of Girl Power to the world. It was everything I'd dreamed of growing up, and I've had some incredible times... The BRITs! The movie! Travelling the world playing iconic venues like Madison Square Garden, The O2, Wembley Stadium and The London 2012 Olympics!!! When you're a woman, though, that power can be easily taken away by those around you, whether by pressure, exhaustion, shaming, bullying or a constant feeling like you aren't enough. I have been known as Sporty Spice, Mel C, Melanie C or just plain old Melanie Chisholm, but what you will read within the pages of this book is who I truly am, and how I found peace with that after all these years. I have really enjoyed reminiscing and getting everything down on the page, and, though revisiting some of my darkest times was hard, I hope this book can be inspiring and empowering as well as entertaining and give you a bit of a laugh.

This book argues for the importance of popular music in negotiations of national identity, and Germanness in particular. By discussing diverse musical genres and commercially and critically successful songs at the heights of their cultural relevance throughout seventy years of post-war German history, Soundtracking Germany describes how popular music can function as a language for "writing" national narratives. Running chronologically, all chapters historically contextualize and critically discuss the cultural relevance of the respective genre before moving into a close reading of one particularly relevant and appellative case study that reveals specific interrelations between popular music and constructions of Germanness. Close readings of these sonic national narratives in different moments of national transformations reveal changes in the narrative rhetoric as this book explores how Germanness is performatively constructed, challenged, and reaffirmed throughout the course of seventy years.

Chronicles the work of Norberto Tavares, a Cabo Verdean musician and humanitarian who served as the conscience of his island nation during the transition from Portuguese colony to democratic republic. Based on twenty years of collaborative fieldwork, Songs for Cabo Verde: Norberto Tavares's Musical Visions for a New Republic focuses on the musician Norberto Tavares but also tells a larger story about postcolonial nation building, musical activism, and diaspora life within the Lusophone sphere. It follows the parallel trajectories of Cabo Verdean independence and Tavares's musical career over four decades (1975-2010). Tavares lived and worked in Cabo Verde, Portugal, and the United States, where he died in New Bedford, Massachusetts at age fifty-four. Tavares's music serves as a lens through which we can view Cabo Verde's transition from a Portuguese colony to an independent, democratic nation, one that was shaped in part through the musician's persistent humanitarian messages.

Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright (b. 1973) is famous around the world for his multi-faceted musical style, shown through both his recorded output and his engaging live performances. In this book, Katherine Williams combines his aspects of his life story with scholarly readings drawn from several methodologies. Popular music studies, opera, queer studies, music and geography, the sound-box: all combine to give a rich biographical and interpretative overview of Wainwright's life and music. Williams brings together close musical analysis with such varied disciplinary perspectives with a tone that is both in-depth and scholarly, and accessible. The book is a must-read for fans, students and scholars alike.

Why do rap MCs present their studio recorded lyrics as "live and direct"? Why do they so insistently define abilities or actions, theirs or someone else's, against a pre-existing signifier? This book examines the compositional practice of rap lyricists and offers compelling answers to these questions. Through a 40 year-span analysis of the music, it argues that whether through the privileging of chanted call-and-response phrases or through rhetorical strategies meant to assist in getting one's listening audience open, the focus of the first rap MCs on community building and successful performer-audience cooperation has remained prevalent on rap records with lyrics and production techniques encouraging the listener to become physically and emotionally involved in recorded performances. Relating rap's rhetorical strategy of posing inferences through intertextuality to early call-and-response routines and crowd-controlling techniques, this study emphasizes how the dynamic and collective elements from the stage performances and battles of the formative years of rap have remained relevant in the creative process behind this music. It contends that the customary use of identifiable references and similes by rap lyricists works as a fluid interchange designed to keep the listener involved in the performance. Like call-and-response in live performances, it involves a dynamic form of communication and places MCs in a position where they activate the shared knowledge of their audience, making sure that they "know what they mean," thus transforming their mediated lyrics into a collective and engaging performance.

The Organic Globalizer is a collection of critical essays which takes the position that hip-hop holds political significance through an understanding of its ability to at once raise cultural awareness, expand civil society's focus on social and economic justice through institution building, and engage in political activism and participation. Collectively, the essays assert hip hop's importance as an "organic globalizer:" no matter its pervasiveness or reach around the world, hip-hop ultimately remains a grassroots phenomenon that is born of the community from which it permeates. Hip hop, then, holds promise through three separate but related avenues: (1) through cultural awareness and identification/recognition of voices of marginalized communities through music and art; (2) through social creation and the institutionalization of independent alternative institutions and non-profit organizations in civil society geared toward social and economic justice; and (3) through political activism and participation in which demands are articulated and made on the state. With editorial bridges between chapters and an emphasis on interdisciplinary and diverse perspectives, The Organic Globalizer is the natural scholarly evolution in the conversation about hip-hop and politics.

From Biggie to Pac, Lil' Kim to Lauryn Hill, Hip-Hop Legends Alphabet features an A-Z of the OG MCs, DJs, and lyrical masterminds behind the freshest flows and dopest beats in music history. Written and illustrated to introduce hip-hop greats to a new generation of fans.

for SATB or SSA, piano, and optional bass and drum kit ad lib.
This fantastic backing CD, recorded by a professional jazz trio, is ideal for use in both rehearsals and concerts. Compatible with the mixed-voice and upper-voice versions of A Little Jazz Mass, it is sure to inspire breathtaking performances from all choirs

(Book). Electric guitar players can choose from a library full of guitar books, but comparatively little has been written about the other 50% of the electric guitar: the amplifier. This book takes a giant step toward redressing the balance, providing the first overall view of amp-dom, including: how amps work, profiles of the major manufacturers, 'transistor dinosaurs' and their place in amp history, reissues vs. vintage amps, and troubleshooting. Terms are defined in the margin as they are introduced, and plenty of photos and diagrams illuminate the text.

Popular music, today, has supposedly collapsed into a 'retromania' which, according to leading critic Simon Reynolds, has brought a 'slow and steady fading of the artistic imperative to be original.' Meanwhile, in the estimation of philosopher Alain Badiou, a significant political event will always require 'the dictatorial power of a creation ex nihilo'. Everywhere, it seems, at least amongst commentators of a certain age and type, pessimism prevails with regards to the predominant aesthetic preferences of the twenty first century: popular music, supposedly, is in a rut. Yet when, if ever, did the political engagement kindled by popular music amount to more than it does today? The sixties? The punk explosion of the late 1970s? Despite an on-going fixation upon these periods in much rock journalism and academic writing, this book demonstrates that the utilisation of popular music to promote political causes, on the one hand, and the expression of dissent through the medium of 'popular song', on the other hand, remain widely in practice today. This is not to argue, however, for complacency with regards to the need for expressions of political dissent through popular culture. Rather, the book looks carefully at actual usages of popular music in political processes, as well as expressions of political feeling through song, and argues that there is much to encourage us to think that the demand for radical change remains in circulation. The question is, though, how necessary is it for politically-motivated popular music to offer aesthetic novelty?

"The Funk Era and Beyond" is the first scholarly collection to discuss funk music in America and delve into the intricate and complex nature of the word and its accompanying genre. While pleasure and performance are often presumed to be mutually exclusive of intellectuality, funk offers immense possibilities for a new critical rubric. As these writings demonstrate, funk is reflected in myriad forms and context and has been the catalyst for stylistic innovation. Contributors employ a multitude of methodologies to examine this unique musical field's relationship to African American culture and to music, literature, and visual art as a whole.

In Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, Macon Holt provides the imaginative and analytical resources to think with contemporary pop music to investigate the ambivalences of contemporary culture and the potentials in it for change. Drawing on Kodwo Eshun's practice of Sonic Fiction and Mark Fisher's analytical framework of capitalist realism, Holt explores the multiplicities contained in contemporary pop from sensation to abstraction and from the personal to the political. Pop Music and Hip Ennui unravels the assumptions embedded in the cultural and critical analysis of popular music. In doing so, it provides new ways to understand the experience of listening to pop music and living in the sonic atmosphere it produces. This book neither excuses pop's oppressive tendencies nor dismisses the pleasures of its sensations.

Is there such a thing today as music that's meaningfully new? In our contemporary era of remixing and retro styles, cynics and romantics alike cry "It's all been done before" while record labels and media outlets proclaim that everything is new. Coded into our daily conversations about popular music, newness as an artistic and cultural value is too often taken for granted. Nothing Has Been Done Before instigates a fresh debate about newness in American pop, rock 'n' roll, rap, folk, and R&B made since the turn of the millennium. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach that combines music criticism, philosophy, and the literary essay, Robert Loss follows the stories of a diverse cast of musicians who seek the new by wrestling with the past, navigating the market, and speaking politically. The transgressions of Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft". The pop spectacle of Katy Perry's 2015 Super Bowl halftime show. Protest songs against the war in Iraq. Nothing Has Been Done Before argues that performance heard in a historical context always creates a possibility for newness, whether it's Kendrick Lamar's multi-layered To Pimp a Butterfly, the Afrofuturist visions of Janelle Monae, or even a Guided By Voices tribute concert in a local dive bar. Provocative and engaging, Nothing Has Been Done Before challenges nothing less than how we hear and think about popular music-its power and its potential.

For over thirty years, Saxon has been led from the front by charismatic and larger-than-life vocalist Biff Byford. In 'Never Surrender', he tells his story for the first time, from his working class childhood as a terribly shy schoolboy in Yorkshire through the mega-days of the early Eighties to the bands Twenty-First Century rise to fame once more. Sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, but always brutally honest, 'Never Surrender' lifts the lid on the myths surrounding Saxon, as well as revealing the hard work and heartaches it takes to make it to the top and stay there.

Legendary music producer, Gordon Raphael has spent four decades working with musicians, performers and songwriters to create unique genre-defining sounds. His work with THE STROKES, REGINA SPEKTOR and THE LIBERTINES has made him one of the world's most sought-after music producers. What's his secret? This book gives an insider's view into how music is created and recorded, sharing insights into the artistic discoveries that happen when a group of talented musicians find the right studio, the right producer and the right sound. Like sitting on the purple velvet couch at New York's fabled Transporterraum Studio, this rock 'n' roll memoir gives an All Access Pass to the processes and techniques, the people and the performances. It's the early 2000s and, for the first time, young people who've grown up hating their parent's rock music, have found a reason in the songs of NYC newcomers THE STROKES to drop their electronica, house and techno for guitars, Converse, leather jackets-to form their own bands. Focussing on the eight-year period from the demise of the Seattle grunge scene to the rebirth of a thrilling cultural shift in New York and London that reimagined rock 'n' roll. Gordon Raphael shares his tales of musical glory and loss, creative triumphs and breakups. It's a bumpy ride with a killer soundtrack.

This book explores the relationships between rock and roll, social protest, and authenticity to consider how rock and roll could function as social protest music. The author begins by discussing the nature and origins of rock and roll and the nature of social protest and social protest music within the wider context of the evolution of the commercial music industry and the social and technological infrastructure developed for the mass dissemination of popular music. This discussion is followed by an examination of the causes of the public disapproval originally expressed toward rock and roll, and how they illuminate its social protest and subversive quality. By further investigating the nature of authenticity and its relationship to social protest and to commercialization, the author considers how social protest and commercialization are antithetical. This conclusion, if correct, has broad implications for human culture in advanced industrial society.

This is the definitive biography of rap supergroup and cultural icons, Wu-Tang Clan (WTC). Heralded as one of the most influential groups in modern music-hip hop or otherwise-WTC created a rap dynasty on the strength of seven gold and platinum albums that launched the careers of such famous rappers as RZA, GZA, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, and more. During the '90s, they ushered in a hip-hop renaissance, rescuing rap from the corporate suites and bringing it back to the gritty streets where it started. In the process they changed the way business was conducted in an industry known for exploiting artists. Creatively, Wu-Tang pushed the boundaries of the artform dedicating themselves to lyrical mastery and sonic innovation, and one would be hard pressed to find a group who's had a bigger impact on the evolution of hip hop. S.H. Fernando Jr., a veteran music journalist who spent a significant amount of time with The Clan during their heyday of the '90s, has written extensively about the group for such publications as Rolling Stone, Vibe, and The Source. Over the years he has built up a formidable Wu-Tang archive that includes pages of unpublished interviews, videos of the group in action in the studio, and several notepads of accumulated memories and observations. Using such exclusive access as well as the wealth of open-source material, Fernando reconstructs the genesis and evolution of the group, delving into their unique ideology and range of influences, and detailing exactly how they changed the game and established a legacy that continues to this day. The book provides a startling portrait of overcoming adversity through self-empowerment and brotherhood, giving us unparalleled insights into what makes these nine young men from the ghetto tick. While celebrating the myriad accomplishments of The Clan, the book doesn't shy away from controversy-we're also privy to stories from their childhoods in the crack-infested hallways of Staten Island housing projects, stints in Rikers for gun possession, and million-dollar contracts that led to recklessness and drug overdoses (including Ol' Dirty Bastard's untimely death). More than simply a history of a single group, this book tells the story of a musical and cultural shift that started on the streets of Shaolin (Staten Island) and quickly spread around the world. Biographies on such an influential outfit are surprisingly few, mostly focused on a single member of the group's story. This book weaves together interviews from all the Clan members, as well as their friends, family and collaborators to create a compelling narrative and the most three-dimensional portrait of Wu-Tang to date. It also puts The Clan within a social, cultural, and historical perspective to fully appreciate their impact and understand how they have become the cultural icons they are today. Unique in its breadth, scope, and access, From The Streets of Shaolin is a must-have for fans of WTC and music bios in general.

A monumental oral biography filled with raucous joy, aching loss and terrible poignancy, Elvis & the Memphis Mafia is the first book to capture the King - the man and the phenomenon - in his full complexity. Through revealing interviews with three of Elvis' s closest friends, who were also his protectors and rescuers, Nash achieves the first true mapping of Elvis' s psyche. Billy Smith - Elvis' s first cousin and the person he reputedly loved most after his own mother - Marty Lacker - best man at his wedding and foreman of the ' Memphis Mafia' , the King' s handpicked group of gatekeepers and confidants - and Lamar Fike - the touring crew member who accompanied him into the Army - were with Elvis from his teens to his final days and provide unique access to the greatest of all rock and roll legends. The revelations cut through every aspect of Elvis' s life, from the childhood seeds of his drug dependency, through his fear for his mother' s life and his plan to change his identity, to his bizarre self-mutilation. No one who reads this symphonic blending of three proud, ribald, sad and ultimately wistful voices can fail to be profoundly moved.