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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Indie
Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk is the first
book-length portrait of punk as a musical style with an emphasis on
how punk developed in relation to changing ideas of race in
American society from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Drawing on
musical analysis, archival research, and new interviews, Damaged
provides fresh interpretations of race and American society during
this period and illuminates the contemporary importance of that
era. Evan Rapport outlines the ways in which punk developed out of
dramatic changes to America's cities and suburbs in the postwar
era, especially with respect to race. The musical styles that led
to punk included transformations to blues resources, experimental
visions of the American musical past, and bold reworkings of the
rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues sounds of the late 1950s and
early 1960s, revealing a historically oriented approach to rock
that is strikingly different from the common myths and conceptions
about punk. Following these approaches, punk itself reflected new
versions of older exchanges between the US and the UK, the changing
environments of American suburbs and cities, and a shift from the
expressions of older baby boomers to that of younger musicians
belonging to Generation X. Throughout the book, Rapport also
explores the discourses and contradictory narratives of punk
history, which are often in direct conflict with the world that is
captured in historical documents and revealed through musical
analysis.
Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk is the first
book-length portrait of punk as a musical style with an emphasis on
how punk developed in relation to changing ideas of race in
American society from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Drawing on
musical analysis, archival research, and new interviews, Damaged
provides fresh interpretations of race and American society during
this period and illuminates the contemporary importance of that
era. Evan Rapport outlines the ways in which punk developed out of
dramatic changes to America's cities and suburbs in the postwar
era, especially with respect to race. The musical styles that led
to punk included transformations to blues resources, experimental
visions of the American musical past, and bold reworkings of the
rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues sounds of the late 1950s and
early 1960s, revealing a historically oriented approach to rock
that is strikingly different from the common myths and conceptions
about punk. Following these approaches, punk itself reflected new
versions of older exchanges between the US and the UK, the changing
environments of American suburbs and cities, and a shift from the
expressions of older baby boomers to that of younger musicians
belonging to Generation X. Throughout the book, Rapport also
explores the discourses and contradictory narratives of punk
history, which are often in direct conflict with the world that is
captured in historical documents and revealed through musical
analysis.
As the satanic President Razour attempts to bring forward
Armageddon to prevent humanity repenting, the fate of us all rests
in the hands of Cleric20, a hedonistic loner with a chequered past,
and his robot sidekick, GiX. An action-packed literary shock to the
senses that mixes flights of comic fantasy with bouts of brutal
violence. Mankind's only hope seems to be having a very bad day.
Can Cleric20 halt Razour's devilish plans after an experimental
bioweapon deployed to kill him accidentally gives him superpowers?
Has the Devil inadvertently created a hero who could actually stop
him? Little can prepare you for this spiritually-charged,
cyber-noir thrill ride.
After discovering a derelict record plant on the edge of a northern
English city, and hearing that it was once visited by David Bowie,
Karl Whitney embarks upon a journey to explore the industrial
cities of British pop music. Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle,
Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Glasgow, Belfast, Birmingham, Coventry,
Bristol: at various points in the past these cities have all had
distinctive and highly identifiable sounds. But how did this
happen? What circumstances enabled those sounds to emerge? How did
each particular city - its history, its physical form, its accent -
influence its music? How were these cities and their music
different from each other? And what did they have in common? Hit
Factories tells the story of British pop through the cities that
shaped it, tracking down the places where music was performed,
recorded and sold, and the people - the performers, entrepreneurs,
songwriters, producers and fans - who made it all happen. From the
venues and recording studios that occupied disused cinemas,
churches and abandoned factories to the terraced houses and back
rooms of pubs where bands first rehearsed, the terrain of British
pop can be retraced with a map in hand and a head filled with music
and its many myths.
During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s,
New York City poets and musicians played together, published each
other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In
"Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and
punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to
the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry,
and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem. Kane
reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their
way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling
writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and
performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet
Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore
Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials
and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians
drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance
of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New
York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing
of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of
poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno,
and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this
crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of
New York City.
On their debut, The Clash famously claimed to be "bored with the
USA," but The Clash wasn't a parochial record. Mick Jones' licks on
songs such as "Hate and War" were heavily influenced by classic
American rock and roll, and the cover of Junior Murvin's reggae hit
"Police and Thieves" showed that the band's musical influences were
already wide-ranging. Later albums such as Sandinista! and Combat
Rock saw them experimenting with a huge range of musical genres,
lyrical themes and visual aesthetics. The Clash Takes on the World
explores the transnational aspects of The Clash's music, lyrics and
politics, and it does so from a truly transnational perspective. It
brings together literary scholars, historians, media theorists,
musicologists, social activists and geographers from Europe and the
US, and applies a range of critical approaches to The Clash's work
in order to tackle a number of key questions: How should we
interpret their negotiations with reggae music and culture? How did
The Clash respond to the specific socio-political issues of their
time, such as the economic recession, the Reagan-Thatcher era and
burgeoning neoliberalism, and international conflicts in Nicaragua
and the Falkland Islands? How did they reconcile their
anti-capitalist stance with their own success and status as a
global commodity? And how did their avowedly inclusive,
multicultural stance, reflected in their musical diversity, square
with the experience of watching the band in performance? The Clash
Takes on the World is essential reading for scholars, students and
general readers interested in a band whose popularity endures.
The first book of its kind in English, Beyond No Future: Cultures
of German Punk explores the texts and contexts of German punk
cultures. Notwithstanding its "no future" sloganeering, punk has
had a rich and complex life in German art and letters, in German
urban landscapes, and in German youth culture. Beyond No Future
collects innovative, methodologically diverse scholarly
contributions on the life and legacy of these cultures. Focusing on
punk politics and aesthetics in order to ask broader questions
about German nationhood(s) in a period of rapid transition, this
text offers a unique view of the decade bookended by the "German
Autumn" and German unification. Consulting sources both published
and unpublished, aesthetic and archival, Beyond No Future's
contributors examine German punk's representational strategies,
anti-historical consciousness, and refusal of programmatic
intervention into contemporary political debates. Taken together,
these essays demonstrate the importance of punk culture to
historical, political, economic, and cultural developments taking
place both in Germany and on a broader transnational scale.
*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* The brand new memoir from the Sunday
Times bestselling author of The Road Beneath My Feet. Taking 36
songs from his back catalogue, folk-punk icon Frank Turner explores
his songwriting process. Find out the stories behind the songs
forged in the hedonistic years of the mid-2000s North London scene,
the ones perfected in Nashville studios, and everything in between.
Some of these songs arrive fully-formed, as if they've always been
there, some take graft and endless reworking to find 'the one'. In
exploring them all, Turner reflects with eloquence, insight and
self-deprecating wit on exactly what it is to be a songwriter. From
love songs and break-up songs to political calls-to-arms; songs
composed alone in a hotel room or in soundcheck with the Sleeping
Souls, this brilliantly written memoir - featuring exclusive photos
of handwritten lyrics and more - is a must-have book for FT fans
and anyone curious about how to write music.
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