"Highway 61 Revisited" resonates because of its enduring emotional appeal. Few songwriters before Dylan or since have combined so effectively the intensely personal with the spectacularly universal. In "Like a Rolling Stone", his gleeful excoriation of Miss Lonely (Edie Sedgwick? Joan Baez? A composite "type"?) fuses with the evocation of a hip new zeitgeist to produce a veritable anthem. In "Ballad of a Thin Man", the younger generation's confusion is thrown back in the establishment's face, even as Dylan vents his disgust with the critics who laboured to catalogue him. And in "Desolation Row", he reaches the zenith of his own brand of surrealist paranoia, that here attains the atmospheric intensity of a full-fledged nightmare. Between its many flourishes of gallows humour, this is one of the most immaculately frightful songs ever recorded, with its relentless imagery of communal executions, its parade of fallen giants and triumphant local losers, its epic length and even the mournful sweetness of Bloomfield's flamenco-inspired fills. In this book, Mark Polizzotti examines just what makes the songs on "Highway 61 Revisited" so affecting, how they work together as a suite, and how lyrics, melody, and arrangements combine to create an unusually potent mix. He blends musical and literary analysis of the songs themselves, biography (where appropriate) and recording information (where helpful). And he focuses on Dylan's mythic presence in the mid-60s, when he emerged from his proletarian incarnation to become the American Rimbaud. The comparison has been made by others, including Dylan, and it illuminates much about his mid-sixties career, for in many respects "Highway 61" is rock 'n' roll's answer to "A Season in Hell".

From bestselling biographer Sean Smith comes the fascinating and tumultuous true story behind Sir Tom Jones, the nation's treasure, sage of The Voice and living music legend. Celebrating his 75th birthday this year, Tom Jones' life has been an unforgettable rollercoaster ride. From starting out in a little Welsh mining town where he married his sweetheart at just 16, who could have known that seven years later he would go on to become a major musical hit that would propel him to Bel Air? Through intimate interviews, Smith uncovers all this and more, including the years Tom spent as little more than a Vegas lounge singer, before being rediscovered in the late '80s and becoming a maestro on the music scene once again. As revealing as it is entertaining, this is the definitive story of a great talent who is showing no signs of slowing down.

Greil Marcus's study of American rock 'n' roll is justly regarded as one of the most accomplished examples of contemporary music writing. Using a handful of artists -- a brace of bluesmen, The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley -- Marcus illuminates and interprets the American Dream in rigorous prose, touching on myth, landscape and oral tradition. The result is an invigorating and wholly original study -- here in its revised, sixth edition -- that remains a high watermark in cultural criticism.

Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings recognizes the importance and innovativeness of the musician and artist Joni Mitchell and the need for a collection that theorizes her work as musician, composer, cultural commentator and antagonist. It showcases pieces by established and early career academics from the fields of popular music and literary studies on subjects such as Mitchell's guitar technique, the politics of aging in her work, and her fractious relationship with feminism. The collection features close readings of specific songs, albums, and performances while also paying keen attention to Mitchell's wider cultural contributions and significance.

Queen and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Blow Your Mind is a collection of cutting-edge philosophical essays on the rock group Queen, founded in 1970 and originally featuring lead vocalist Freddie Mercury. Queen's reputation and fan following continue to grow in the twenty-first century. These insightful and provocative chapters include: uncover the origins of Queen's unique style in prog rock, vulgarity, and lower versus higher Romanticism examine Queen's view of love, friendship, and erotic relationships draw upon three timeless Queen songs, "We Will Rock You," "We Are the Champions," and "Don't Stop Me Now" and Socrates's behavior in the Apology, to understand the "rocking" nature of philosophy identify the connections between ancient matriarchal religion and Queen's love for strong female imagery explore how Brian May's astrophysics brings to bear the issues of absolute versus relative spacetime and how the philosophies of Newton, Mach, and Einstein contribute to Queen's creative output analyze the structure of Queen's sound to answer the inevitable question, How can four people make all that music? expose what Queen's songs tell us about the contemporary theory of mental illness and therapy scrutinize Roger Taylor's stark impressions of ordinary life and death, and their alignment to the cynical musings of Diogenes of Sinope and Seneca's blunt observations on the shortness of life look at the movie Highlander through the music of Queen and reveal how both song and cinema convey the philosophy of bushido, the soul of the samurai

'I've been on six-week tours of America and it breaks you open, but to do it straight off the bat, in the middle of winter, with three new girls... I was thinking, If we survive this, it'll be a miracle... but it was the best time we've ever had.' The first official book from Noel Gallagher, this is the behind-the-scenes story of his biggest ever solo tour and the making of the critically-acclaimed album Who Built The Moon?. Join Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds as they embark on the Stranded On The Earth world tour - a phenomenal year-long journey around the globe, taking in dates across the USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Europe and Southeast Asia. With photography by Sharon Latham, who was granted unprecedented access, this fully illustrated book documents life on the road for one of the world's most successful artists; featuring unseen images and candid interviews with Noel and the band.

The first non-stop rock video channel was launched in the US in 1981. As a unique popular culture form, MTV warrants attention, and in this, the first study of the medium, originally published in 1987, Ann Kaplan examines the cultural context of MTV and its relationship to the history of rock music. The first part of the book focuses on MTV as a commercial institution, on the contexts of production and exhibition of videos, on their similarity to ads, and on the different perspectives of directors and viewers. Does the adoption of adolescent styles and iconography signal an open-minded acceptance of youth's subversive stances; or does it rather suggest a cynicism by which profit has become the only value? In the second part of the book, Kaplan turns to the rock videos themselves, and from the mass of material that flows through MTV she identifies five distinct types of video: the 'romantic', the 'socially conscious', the 'nihilistic', the 'classical', and the 'postmodern'. There are detailed analyses of certain videos; and Kaplan focuses particularly on gender issues in videos by both male and female stars. The final chapter explores the wider implications of MTV. What does the channel tell us about the state of youth culture at the time?

Britain played a key role in Bob Dylan's career in the 1960s. He visited Britain on several occasions and performed across the country both as an acoustic folk singer and as an electric-rock musician. His tours of Britain in the mid-1960s feature heavily in documentary films such as D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back and Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home and the concerts contain some of his most acclaimed ever live performances. Dylan influenced British rock musicians such as The Beatles, The Animals, and many others; they, in turn, influenced him. Yet this key period in Dylan's artistic development is still under-represented in the extensive literature on Dylan. Tudor Jones rectifies that glaring gap with this deeply researched, yet highly readable, account of Dylan and the British Sixties. He explores the profound impact of Dylan on British popular musicians as well as his intense, and at times fraught, relationship with his UK fan base. He also provides much interesting historical context - cultural, social, and political - to give the reader a far greater understanding of a defining period of Dylan's hugely varied career. This is essential reading for all Dylan fans, as well as for readers interested in the tumultuous social and cultural history of the 1960s.

Heavy metal is a violent, head-bashing music complete, in its live performances, with its own arena of rage and celebration, the mosh pit. It is a music in the red corner of society, loud, angry, and, to a well-tuned ear, practically intolerable. And yet, the art form radiates a message about American adolescents well worth examining and comprehending: Its devotees, primarily adolescent boys, are alienated from their world and angry about its future. Heavy metal speaks throbbingly the message of rage, loneliness, and cynicism.In this sensitive book, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett synthesizes the stories and experiences of seventy male and thirty-eight female "metalheads" in a successful attempt to understand the often crippling results of a society and an image of the nuclear family steeped in conformity, self-denial, and obedience. The vacuum such an atmosphere creates in the individual can be temporarily obliterated by a heavy metal concert, which Arnett sees as a substitute manhood ritual. This conclusion is just one of the many striking hypotheses the author advances in this dynamic study of a music and its followers.Of the one hundred metalheads interviewed for this volume, ten have allowed themselves to be profiled in depth--the reader becomes fully acquainted with Jack, for instance, and with the multiple crosses decorating his body, his black rose tattoo, and his tumultuous family life; or with slim and well-groomed Jean dressed entirely in black, her favorite color, and wearing the temperament of withdrawal.This is a unique study filled with compassion for a disenfranchised subculture and the respect to want to understand it.

Dance music has seen an unprecedented explosion in the 21st century as a stampede of subgenres, such as dance-pop and EDM (electronic dance music), have come to define the pop music scene worldwide. In this collection of original interviews, 33 hitmakers from 11 countries discuss their lives and careers in this still-unfolding new age--including Alcazar's Andreas Lundstedt, DJ Dave Aude, Bimbo Jones, DJ Chris Cox, Darude, Inaya Day, Deepend, Freemasons, D.O.N.S./Warp Brothers' Oliver Goedicke, DJ Xenia Ghali, Gryffin, Harrison, In-Grid, Kimberley Locke, DJ Paul Oakenfold, Suzanne Palmer, DJ Ralphi Rosario, Sak Noel, DJ Richard Vission and many more. Special commentary provided by Moto Blanco's Danny Harrison and clubland queen Martha Wash.

This thoroughly revised third edition of Allan F. Moore's ground-breaking book, now co-authored with Remy Martin, incorporates new material on rock music theory, style change and the hermeneutic method developed in Moore's Song Means (2012). An even larger array of musicians is discussed, bringing the book right into the 21st century. Rock's 'primary text' - its sounds - is the focus of attention here. The authors argue for the development of a musicology particular to rock within the context of the background to the genres, the beat and rhythm and blues styles of the early 1960s, 'progressive' rock, punk rock, metal and subsequent styles. They also explore the fundamental issue of rock as a medium for self-expression, and the relationship of this to changing musical styles. Rock: The Primary Text remains innovative in its exploration of an aesthetics of rock.

A riveting look at the transformative year in the lives and careers of the legendary group whose groundbreaking legacy would forever change music and popular culture. They started off as hysteria-inducing pop stars playing to audiences of screaming teenage fans and ended up as musical sages considered responsible for ushering in a new era. The year that changed everything for the Beatles was 1966-the year of their last concert and their first album, Revolver, that was created to be listened to rather than performed. This was the year the Beatles risked their popularity by retiring from live performances, recording songs that explored alternative states of consciousness, experimenting with avant-garde ideas, and speaking their minds on issues of politics, war, and religion. It was the year their records were burned in America after John's explosive claim that the group was "more popular than Jesus," the year they were hounded out of the Philippines for "snubbing" its First Lady, the year John met Yoko Ono, and the year Paul conceived the idea for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. On the fiftieth anniversary of this seminal year, music journalist and Beatles expert Steve Turner slows down the action to investigate in detail the enormous changes that took place in the Beatles' lives and work during 1966. He looks at the historical events that had an impact on the group, the music they made that in turn profoundly affected the culture around them, and the vision that allowed four young men from Liverpool to transform popular music and serve as pioneers for artists from Coldplay to David Bowie, Jay-Z to U2. By talking to those close to the group and by drawing on his past interviews with key figures such as George Martin, Timothy Leary, and Ravi Shankar-and the Beatles themselves-Turner gives us the compelling, definitive account of the twelve months that contained everything the Beatles had been and anticipated everything they would still become.

Though the distance between opera and popular music seems immense today, a century ago opera was an integral part of American popular music culture, and familiarity with opera was still a part of American "cultural literacy." During the Ragtime era, hundreds of humorous Tin Pan Alley songs centered on operatic subjects-either directly quoting operas or alluding to operatic characters and vocal stars of the time. These songs brilliantly captured the moment when popular music in America transitioned away from its European operatic heritage, and when the distinction between low- and high-brow "popular" musical forms was free to develop, with all its attendant cultural snobbery and rebellion. Author Larry Hamberlin guides us through this large but oft-forgotten repertoire of operatic novelties, and brings to life the rich humor and keen social criticism of the era. In the early twentieth-century, when new social forces were undermining the view that our European heritage was intrinsically superior to our native vernacular culture, opera-that great inheritance from our European forebearers-functioned in popular discourse as a signifier for elite culture. Tin Pan Opera shows that these operatic novelty songs availed this connection to a humorous and critical end. Combining traditional, European operatic melodies with the new and American rhythmic verve of ragtime, these songs painted vivid images of immigrant Americans, liberated women, and upwardly striving African Americans, striking emblems of the profound transformations that shook the United States at the beginning of the American century.

Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show * Cracklin' Rosie * Forever In Blue Jeans * I Am... I Said * Kentucky Woman * September Morn * Solitary Man * Sweet Caroline.

The death of Amy Winehouse at the age of 27 was a tragedy. She was one of the brightest music stars in years -a brilliant, original song writer with a mighty voice and great personal charm. Amy was loveable, but troubled. She was as notorious for her messy personal life, drug addiction and alcoholism, as she was celebrated for her songs, and her death in 2011, while shocking, was not unexpected. Amy was also the latest in a series of iconic music stars who died at the same young age; starting with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones whose death in 1969 was followed by Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970, Jim Morrison in 1971, and Kurt Cobain in 1994. All were gifted. All were dissipated. All were 27. The 27 Club was first used as a collective term for these lost souls after a comment by Kurt Cobain's mother. 'He's gone and joined that stupid club,' she said after Kurt shot himself. 'I told him not to ...' In this ground-breaking book, Howard Sounes delivers a detailed and insightful study of Amy Winehouse's life, and sets that life in the context of the 27 Club. That six big music stars died at 27 -- along with 44 less well-known names -- is on one level a coincidence. But behind this coincidence Sounes reveals is a disturbing common narrative that explains how these artists met their fate, and casts new light on Amy's death in particular.

This is the story of the Cavern Club - the most famous club in the world. The Cavern saw the birth of the Beatles and Merseybeat, and more. Respected author, music journalist and Merseybeat historian Spencer Leigh - with a little help from Sir Paul McCartney, who provides the Foreword - tells the Cavern's history by talking to the owners, hundreds of musicians who played at the club, the backroom staff and fans. Spencer paints a vivid picture of the Cavern, from its days as a jazz club, through the Beatles years to the present.

From "The Heart of Saturday Night" through "Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards," a rare look at the creative process of the Grammy-winning visionary artist Via exclusive interviews with engineers and producers and quoted commentary from Tom Waits himself, this book investigates the artistic process behind his unique sound--a sound which has mutated over his career and proved nearly impossible to mimic, although many have tried. One of the most fascinating singers and songwriters working today and considered by many to be a genius, Waits has ridden his own trends for the better part of 40 years, defying any and all notion of convention outside the context of his own sub-genre. An investigatory thread runs throughout the book, and the treasure trove of information and insight will prove a must for any fan of this most enigmatic and revered of craftsmen. A complete discography is included.

'The Beatles are coming! The Beatles are coming!' While the chant will be familiar to any Beatles fan, there was a time before the band took the world by storm, when they were little more than an inexperienced, though talented, semi-professional group of musicians in dire need of practice. Their agent Allen Williams first sent them to Germany in August 1960 and through their experiences and difficulties in Hamburg, the Beatles not only became proficient musicians, but more importantly began to build the reputation that would eventually make them the most popular band in the world. The Beatles in Hamburg is the first detailed, objective analysis of the events and personalities that shaped the Beatles as performers, composers and musicians, and the role that Hamburg itself played in their remarkable story. Ian Inglis illuminates this obscure period in Beatles history, providing a revealing view of a crucial, formative period for the group. Written by one of the world's leading scholars of the Beatles and their music, the book will be of immense interest to fans of the group, as well as those interested in the history of popular music and the social history of the 1960s.

In this book, native popular musicologists focus on their own popular music cultures from Germany, Austria and Switzerland for the first time: from subcultural to mainstream phenomena; from the 1950s to contemporary acts. Starting with an introduction and two chapters on the histories of German popular music and its study, the volume then concentrates on focused, detailed and yet concise close readings from different perspectives (including particular historical East and West German perspectives), mostly focusing on the music and its protagonists. Moreover, these analyses deal with very original specific genres such as Schlager and Krautrock as well as transcultural genres such as Punk or Hip Hop. There are additional chapters on characteristically German developments within music media, journalism and the music industry. The book will contribute to a better understanding of German, Austrian and Swiss popular music, and will interconnect international and especially Anglo-American studies with German approaches. The book, as a consequence, will show close connections between global and local popular music cultures and diverse traditions of study.

Unearthing the messy and sprawling interrelationships of place, wellbeing, and popular music, this book explores musical soundscapes of health, ranging from activism to international charity, to therapeutic treatments and how wellbeing is sought and attained in contexts of music. Drawing on critical social theories of the production, circulation, and consumption of popular music, the book gathers together diverse insights from geographers and musicologists. Popular music has become increasingly embedded in complex and often contradictory discourses of wellbeing. For instance, some new genres and sub-cultures of popular music are associated with violence, drug-use, and the angst of living, yet simultaneously define the hopes and dreams of millions of young people. At a service level, popular music is increasingly used as a therapeutic modality in holistic medicine, as well as in conventional health care and public health practice. The genre of popular music, then, is fundamental to human wellbeing as an active and central part of people's emotional lives. By conceptually and empirically foregrounding place, this book demonstrates how - music whether from particular places, about particular places, or played in particular places " is a crucial component of health and wellbeing.

As a founder member of the world's most successful instrumental group, the Shadows, and a chart-topper in his own right, bassist Jet Harris scaled the heights of superstardom in the 1960s. A helpless alcoholic for most of his adult life, he also sank to unimaginable depths of despair, leaving a string of broken hearts and shattered lives in his wake. In this unauthorised biography author Dave Nicolson examines his eventful life and career, and how he eventually overcame his addiction to the bottle and fought his way back to centre stage. In the second part of the book, a series of revealing interviews with those friends and artists who knew him best -- Cliff Richard, Bruce Welch, Tony Meehan, Brian 'Licorice' Locking, Billie Davis and others -- completes this unique and intimate portrait of a music legend.

The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. The Who. The Kinks. The Jefferson Airplane. Joe Cocker. Quicksilver Messenger Service. The Yardbirds. Harry Nilsson. At the heart of their music, and of hundreds of others, was one man and a piano: Nicky Hopkins.For three generations, rock'n'roll has been the heartbeat of our world, and Nicky Hopkins defines rock'n'roll. For thirty years, before his tragically early death in 1994, Nicky Hopkins put his mark on some of the most unforgettable popular music ever made. This is the definitive work on rock music's greatest session player, and one of its unsung heroes. As Nils Lofgren (E Street Band) put it, "Nicky wrote the book on rock 'n' roll piano." This is the book about how he did it.

Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and David Bowie are among three of the most influential figures in twentieth-century popular music and culture, and innumerable scholars and biographers have explored the history of their influence. However, critical historiography reminds us that such scholarship is responsible not just for documenting history but also for producing it. In brief, there is always some kind of logic underwriting these historiographies, drawing boundaries through and around our thinking. In Philosophizing Rock Performance: Dylan, Hendrix, Bowie, Wade Hollingshaus capitalizes on this notion by embracing a set of historiographical logics that re-imagine these three artists. Noting how Dylan, Hendrix, and Bowie first established their reputations amid the anti-establishment sentiments that emerged in Western counties during the 1960s and early 1970s, he connects them with the concurrent formative phase of Continental philosophy in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Ranciere, Guy Debord, and Michel Foucault. In Philosophizing Rock Performance, Hollingshaus draws on the work of these latter Continental thinkers to explore how we might otherwise think about Dylan, Hendrix, and Bowie. This work is ideal for those in the fields of music history, performance studies, philosophy, American and European cultural and intellectual history, and critical theory.

This book explores the relationships between popular music, technology, and the changing media ecosystem. More precisely, it looks at infrastructures and practices of music making and consuming primarily in the post-Napster era of digitization - with some chapters looking back on the technological precursors to digital culture - marked by the emergence of digital tools and platforms such as YouTube or Spotify. The first section provides a critical overview of theories addressing popular music and digital technology, while the second section offers an analysis of the relationship between musical cultures, taste, constructions of authenticity, and technology. The third section offers case studies on the materialities of music consumption from outside the western core of popular music production. The final section reflects on music scenes and the uses and discourses of social media.