Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Indie
By June 1993, when Washington, D.C.'s Fugazi released their third full-length album In on the Kill Taker, the quartet was reaching a thunderous peak in popularity and influence. With two EPs (combined into the classic CD 13 songs) and two albums (1990's genre-defining Repeater and 1991's impressionistic follow-up Steady Diet of Nothing) inside of five years, Fugazi was on creative roll, astounding increasingly large audiences as they toured, blasting fist-pumping anthems and jammy noise-workouts that roared into every open underground heart. When the album debuted on the now-SoundScan-driven charts, Fugazi had never been more in the public eye. Few knew how difficult it had been to make this popular breakthrough. Disappointed with the sound of the self-produced Steady Diet, the band recorded with legendary engineer Steve Albini, only to scrap the sessions and record at home in D.C. with Ted Niceley, their brilliant, under-known producer. Inadvertently, Fugazi chose an unsure moment to make In on the Kill Taker: as Nirvana and Sonic Youth were yanking the American rock underground into the media glare, and "breaking" punk in every possible meaning of the word. Despite all of this, Kill Taker became an alt-rock classic in spite of itself, even as its defiant, muscular sound stood in stark contrast to everything represented by the mainstreaming of a culture and worldview they held dear. This book features new interviews with all four members of Fugazi and members of their creative community.
As a performer, songwriter and actor, Will Oldham has carved a singular path through the worlds of indie folk and cinema. Now the critically acclaimed, enigmatic artist presents his life's work: the lyrics to more than two hundred songs spanning the 1980s to the present, each with annotations that impart new meaning to his music. Oldham's aphoristic meditations-on death, patience and turning carelessness into a virtue-are, like his lyrics, profound, earthy and often funny. They reveal flashes of Oldham's philosophy, the sources and circumstances that inspired his lyrics and the literary ambition of his songwriting. Separated from their aural form, Oldham's lyrics become a new kind of poetry-candid, awkward and wise-with influences as diverse as Rabindranath Tagore and The Mekons. A book that will delight his longtime fans and inspire young songwriters, Songs of Love and Horror reveals an artist who has captured extraordinary poetry in music despite being "a stranger among my own language".
Two decades after the Sex Pistols and the Ramones birthed punk music into the world, their artistic heirs burst onto the scene and changed the genre forever. While the punk originators remained underground favorites and were slow burns commercially, their heirs shattered commercial expectations for the genre. In 1994, Green Day and The Offspring each released their third albums, and the results were astounding. Green Day's Dookie went on to sell more than 15 million copies and The Offspring's Smash remains the all-time bestselling album released on an independent label. The times had changed, and so had the music.While many books, articles, and documentaries focus on the rise of punk in the '70s, few spend any substantial time on its resurgence in the '90s. Smash! will be the first to do so, detailing the circumstances surrounding the shift in '90s music culture away from grunge and legitimizing what many first-generation punks regard as post-punk, new wave, and generally anything but true punk music. With astounding access to all the key players of the time, including members of Green Day, The Offspring, NOFX, Rancid, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, and many others, renowned music writer Ian Winwood will at last give this significant, substantive, and compelling story its due. Punk rock bands were never truly successful or indeed truly famous, and that was that--until it wasn't. Smash! is the story of how the underdogs finally won and forever altered the landscape of mainstream music.
The candid, hilarious, shocking, occasionally horrifying, and surprisingly moving New York Times bestselling autobiography of punk legends NOFX, their own story in their own words NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories is the first tell-all autobiography from one of the world's most influential and controversial punk bands. Fans and non-fans alike will be shocked by the stories of murder, suicide, addiction, counterfeiting, riots, bondage, terminal illness, the Yakuza, and drinking pee. Told from the perspective of each of the band's members, this book looks back at more than thirty years of comedy, tragedy, and completely inexplicable success.
The Stranglers occupy a paradoxical position within the history of popular music. Although major artists within the punk and new-wave movements, their contribution to those genres has been effectively quarantined by subsequent critical and historical analyses. They are somehow "outside" the realm of what responsible accounts of the period consider to be worthy of chronicling. Why is this so? Certainly The Stranglers' seedy and intimidating demeanor, and well-deserved reputation for misogyny and violence, offer a superficial explanation for their cultural excommunication. However, this landmark work suggests that the unsettling aura that permeated the group and their music had much more profound origins; ones that continue to have disturbing implications even today. The Stranglers, it argues, continue to be marginalised because, whether by accident or design, they brought to the fore the underlying issues of identity, status and structure that must by necessity be hidden from society's conscious awareness. For this, they would not be forgiven.
A new collection of unseen photographs of New York City's 1970s punk heyday, by one of the icons of the city's golden age of new wave, Blondie's Chris Stein. A new collection of unseen photographs of New York City's 1970s punk heyday, by one of the icons of the city's golden age of music, Blondie's Chris Stein. For the duration of the 1970s - from his days as a student at the School of Visual Arts through the foundation of the era-defining band Blondie and his subsequent reign as epicenter of punk's golden age - Chris Stein kept an unrivaled photographic record of the downtown New York City scene. Following in the footsteps of the successful book Negative, this spectacular new book presents a more personal and more visceral collection of Stein's photographs of the era. The images presented here take readers from self-portraits in his run-down East-Village apartment to candid photographs of pop-cultural icons of the time and evocative shots of New York City streetscapes in all their most longed-for romance and dereliction. An eclectic cast of cultural characters - from William Burroughs to Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol to Iggy Pop - appear here exactly as they were in the day, juxtaposed with children playing hopscotch on torn-down blocks, riding the graffiti-ridden subway, or cruising the burgeoning clubs of the Bowery. At once a chronicle of one music icon's life among his punk and New-Wave heroes and peers, and a love letter to the city that was the backdrop and inspiration for those scenes, Point of View transports us to another place and time.
Nineteen seventy-seven. New York City. Dark. Dangerous. Thrilling. Punk Rock. Blondie. David Bowie. Drinking. Drugs. Happening at the speed of light.THSeventeen-year old Laura quaking within her skin while the bursting punk rock revolution explodes around her starts a band with her teenage friends called the Student Teachers. She's the drummer. They play legendary clubs a CBGB Max's Kansas City Hurrah a they rehearse madly write songs and tour the East Coast.THAll between final exams at school.THIn comes Jimmy Destri from Blondie. He thinks the Student Teachers are terrific! And then a he falls in love with Laura. He pulls her into the glamorous life of Blondie and introduces her to David Bowie. Bowie takes an interest in Laura's band attends their rehearsals and sets them up to open for Iggy Pop at the Palladium on Halloween 1979. It's exhilarating! It's the beginning of amazing success in rock 'n' roll!THUntil it all comes to a stunning stop.THAfter playing a show at Town Hall in 1980 Laura is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Does it all fall apart?THLater at a dinner with Bowie he whispers something to Laura. And it helps her save her life.THIn prose that flows like music Laura Davis-Chanin presents a rich work of narrative nonfiction that is not only deeply personal but also revealing of the punk rock heyday in New York City. Infused with rare photographs this book is a journey through a unique ephemeral life experience.
What does a hemispheric Americas look like when done through the lens of punk music, visuals and literature? That is the core premise of this book, presented through a collage of analytical, aesthetic and experiential takes on punk across the continent. This book challenges the dominant vision of punk - particularly its white masculine protagonists and deep Anglocentrism - by analysing punk as a critical lens into the disputed territories of 'America', a term that hides the heterogeneous struggles, global histories, hopes and despairs of late twentieth and early twenty-first century experience. Compiling academic essays and punk paraphernalia (interviews, zines, poetry and visual segments) into a single volume, the book seeks to explore punk life through its multiple registers, through vivid musical dialogues, excessive visual displays and underground literary expression. The kaleidoscopic accounts include everything from sustained academic inquiry and photo portraits to anarchist manifestos and interview excerpts with notable punk figures. The result is a radically heterogenous mixture that seeks to reposition punk and las Americas as intrinsically bound up in each other's history: for better and for worse. Out of critical pasts, within an urgent present and toward many different possible futures. This volume critically refashions punk to suggest it emerges from within the long-term historical experience of las Americas in all their plurality and is useful as a mode of critique towards the hegemonic dimensions of America in its imperial singularity. The book is rooted in a theory of 'radical heterogeneity' and thus represents a collage-like juxtaposition of punk perspectives from across the entire hemisphere and via divergent contributions: academic, experiential and aesthetic. Readership for this collection will include both academic and general readers. Primary readership will be academic. It will appeal to researchers, scholars, educators and students in the following fields: American studies, Latin American studies, media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, history, music, ethnomusicology, anthropology, art, literature. General readership will be among those interested in the following areas - anarchism, music, subculture, literature, independent publishing, photography.
A ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A joy to read' Guardian 'I loved this book' Irvine Welsh 'What a story! I adored it' Lauren Laverne As a DJ and broadcaster on radio, tv and the live music scene, Annie has been an invigorating and necessarily disruptive force. She walked in the door at Radio One in 1970 as its first female broadcaster. Fifty years later she continues to be a DJ and tastemaker who commands the respect of artists, listeners and peers across the world. Hey Hi Hello tells the story of those early days at Radio One, the Ground Zero moment of punk and the arrival of acid house and the Second Summer of Love in the late 80s. Funny, warm and candid to a fault, including encounters with Bob Marley, Marc Bolan, The Beatles and interviews with Little Simz and Billie Eilish, this is a portrait of an artist without whom the past fifty years of British culture would have looked very different indeed.
Inaugural pick for the Pitchfork Book Club GQ's One of the Best Books to Read Right Now How can so many people pledge allegiance to punk, something with no fixed identity? Depending on who and where you are, punk can be an outlet, excuse, lifestyle, escapism, conversation, community, ideology, sales category, social movement, punishable offense, badge of authenticity, reason to drink beer forever, or an aesthetic of belligerent incompetence. And if someone has a strong belief about what punk is, odds are they have even stronger feelings about what punk is not. Sam McPheeters championed many different versions. Over the course of two decades, he fronted Born Against, released dozens of records and fanzines, and toured seventeen times across the northern hemisphere. In this collection of essays, profiles, criticism, and personal history, he examines the diverse realms he intersected--New York hardcore, Riot Grrrl, Gilman street, the hidden enclaves of Olympia, and New England, and downtown Los Angeles--and the forces of mental illness and creative inspiration that drove him, and others, in the first place.
Art school Britain in the 1960s and 1970s - a hotbed of experimental DIY creativity blurring the lines between art and music. In Blank Canvas, multi-genre musician turned university lecturer Simon Strange paints a picture of the diverse range of people who broke down the barriers between art, life and the creative self. Tracing lines from the Bauhaus 'blank slate' through the white heat of the Velvet Underground and the cutting edge of the Slits, Blank Canvas draws on interviews with giants of the genre across music, gender and race spectrums, from Brian Eno to Pauline Black, Cabaret Voltaire to Gaye Advert. Illustrated is a picture of two decades erupting in a devastatingly diverse flow of outspoken originality as an eclectic range of musical styles and cultures fused. Does modern day music education suffocate the soul and inhibit the impact of the bohemian artist? This book asks questions of today's artists, musicians, and educators, looking for the essence of creativity and suggests how lessons learnt in and around art school education show a path for the cultural evolution of both musicians and artists hoping to create the future. Audience will include university students at all levels in popular music, popular culture and creative arts education. Academics, educators and researchers working in popular culture and creativity. May also appeal to a more general reader interested in popular culture and creativity. With a Blank Canvas, anything is possible...
Live at the Safari Club: A People's History of HarDCore is the uncensored oral history of a notorious underground punk venue in the nation's capital, told by the bands, fans, zinesters, promoters, graffiti artists, scenesters, senators' kids and activists who made it happen. Over 200 exclusive interviews with and photos of members of Gorilla Biscuits, Bold, Sick of it All, Worlds Collide, Ignition, Swiz, Avail, Rancid, Nirvana, Danzig, Bad Religion, Tom Waits' band, Bad Brains, Hole, Hatebreed, Clutch, My Morning Jacket, and more.
Despite releasing records only on independent labels and receiving virtually no radio play, Dead Kennedys routinely top both critic and fan polls as the greatest punk band of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their sound was inventive and tetchy, and front man Jello Biafra's lyrics were incisive and often scathing. This chronicle--the first in-depth book written about Dead Kennedys--uses dozens of firsthand interviews, photos, and original artwork to offer a new perspective on a group that was mired in controversy almost from its inception. It examines and applauds the band's key role in transforming punk rhetoric, both polemical and musical, into something genuinely threatening and enormously funny. Author Alex Ogg puts the local and global trajectory of punk into context and, while not flinching from the wildly differing takes the individual band members have on the evolution of the band, attempts to be celebratory--if not uncritical.
In the 1990s, there was only one real punk rock band still standing. Rancid. Other so-called punk acts had bent the term so much they were unrecognisable as punk or had become a caricature of the expression. Or worse of themselves. Childhood friends Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman formed Rancid in 1991. Heralding from the punk scene in Gilman Street, Berkeley, they were members of the ground-breaking outfit Operation Ivy. After Op Ivy's demise, the duo recruited Brett Reed on drums and by the release of their second LP in 1994, the enigmatic Lars Frederiksen on guitar and vocals. In 1994 came the inspirational, platinum-selling ...And Out Came The Wolves. The band were soon a fixture on MTV, radio and even Saturday Night Live. At this point, many would have disappeared into the stratosphere, but not Rancid. They worked tirelessly in the punk network, giving plenty back and keeping true to those crucial two elements of punk - liberation and unity. In 2021, they remain the most credible punk band on the planet. Rancid Tracks describes their nine studio albums, track by track, and covers compilations, stand-alone singles, splits, rarities, and unofficial releases.
A Kunstlerroman by British contemporary artist Sue Webster, which combines personal memoir with an exploration of the ongoing influence of youth, music, and Siouxsie and the Banshees on her life and work. Emanating from a poignant unpacking of objects and memories--which Webster has turned into a private exhibition to coincide with the publica-tion--this book positions the Banshees and the artist herself alongside visual references to everyone from David Bowie and the Sex Pistols to William Burroughs and Salvador Dali--using the Banshees and the punk scene amid which she grew up as an entry point to reflect on the cultural and personal evolutions of the last decades. More than 300 illustrations combine ephemera with artwork and reveal the connection between influence and art: objects documenting her fanaticism of the Banshees, from record covers and photographs to ticket stubs and lyrics; paraphernalia from books, artists, and cultural figures that relate to the Banshees and that world of 1970s and early 1980s post-punk; personal effects from diary pages to unseen photographs; and selected artworks by Sue Webster and longtime partner Tim Noble.
Christmas Day 1977, a day to be spent with family and loved ones, unless of course you'd decided to spend it with The Sex Pistols. The punk band, at the centre of a tabloid frenzy and banned from just about every venue in the country, had booked themselves into a small club in Huddersfield to perform a benefit in support of striking West Yorkshire fire fighters. That evening, the band took to the stage to perform what would become their final UK gig. There to capture the chaos was photographer Kevin Cummins. No stranger to The Sex Pistols, he'd been there at that gig at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall just 18 months previously. Kevin incurred the fury of his own family to forgo Christmas in order to travel across The Pennines to document the event. Every frame Kevin shot is here, for the first time, in this book of more than 150 colour and black and white photographs, each beautifully capturing Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook as they play together for the last time in their home country. Just weeks later The Pistols would break up and a year later, Sid would be dead. "You've had the Queen's speech. Now you're going to get the Sex Pistols at Christmas. Enjoy." - Johnny Rotten
Joy Division's career has often been shrouded by myths. But the
truth is surprisingly simple: over a period of several months, Joy
Division transformed themselves from run-of-the-mill punk wannabes
into the creators of one of the most atmospheric, disturbing, and
influential debut albums ever recorded. Chris Ott carefully picks
apart fact from fiction to show how Unknown Pleasures came into
being, and how it still resonates so strongly today.
Uncompromising and innovative, hardcore punk in Washington, DC, birthed a new sound and nurtured a vibrant subculture aimed at a specific segment of the city's youth. Shayna L. Maskell explores DC's hardcore scene during its short but storied peak. Led by bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat, hardcore in the nation's capital unleashed music as angry and loud as it was fast and minimalistic. Maskell examines the music's aesthetics and the unique impact of DC's sociopolitical realities on the sound and the scene that emerged. As she shows, aspects of the music's structure merged with how bands performed it to put across distinctive representations of race, class, and gender. But those representations could be as complicated and contradictory as they were explicit. A fascinating analysis of a punk rock hotbed, Politics as Sound tells the story of how a generation created music that produced--and resisted--politics and power.
It was a scene that had many names: some original members referred
to themselves as punks, others, new romantics, new wavers, the
bats, or the morbids. "Goth" did not gain lexical currency until
the late 1980s. But no matter what term was used, "postpunk"
encompasses all the incarnations of the 1980s alternative movement.
"Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace "is a visual and oral history of
the first decade of the scene. Featuring interviews with both the
performers and the audience to capture the community on and off
stage, the book places personal snapshots alongside professional
photography to reveal a unique range of fashions, bands, and
scenes.
"Fellow rock stars, casual members of the public, lords and media
magnates, countless thousands of people will talk of their
encounters with this driven, talented, indomitable creature, a man
who has plumbed the depths of depravity, yet emerged with an
indisputable nobility. Each of them will share an admiration and
appreciation of the contradictions and ironies of his incredible
life. Even so, they are unlikely to fully comprehend both the
heights and the depths of his experience, for the extremes are
simply beyond the realms of most people's understanding."
?An American Demon is Jack Grisham's story of depravity and redemption, terror and spiritual deliverance. While Grisham is best known as the raucous and provocative front man of the pioneer hardcore punk band TSOL (True Sounds of Liberty), his writing and true life experiences are physically and psychologically more complex, unsettling, and violent than those of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. Eloquently disregarding the prefabricated formulas of the drunk-to-sober, bad-to-good tale, this is an entirely new kind of life lesson: summoned through both God and demons, while settling within eighties hardcore punk culture and its radical-to-the-core (and most assuredly non-evangelical) parables, Grisham leads us, cleverly, gorgeously, between temporal violence and bigger-picture spirituality toward something very much like a path to salvation and enlightenment. An American Demon flourishes on both extremes, as a scary hardcore punk memoir and as a valuable message to souls navigating through an overly materialistic and woefully self-absorbed "me first" modern society. An American Demon conveys anger and truth within the perfect setting, using a youth rebellion that changed the world to open doors for this level of brash destruction. Told from the point of view of a seminal member of the American Punk movement -- doused in violence, rebellion, alcoholism, drug abuse, and ending with beautiful lessons of sobriety and absolution -- this book is as harrowing and life-affirming as anything you're ever going to read.
In this revealing history, author, historian, and musician Ian Glasper explores in minute detail the influential and esoteric UK anarcho-punk scene of the early 1980s. Where some of the colorful punk bands from the first half of the decade were loud, political, and uncompromising, their anarcho-punk counterparts were even more so, totally prepared to risk their liberty to communicate the ideals they believed in so passionately. With Crass and Poison Girls opening the floodgates, the arrival of bands such as Amebix, Chumbawamba, Flux of Pink Indians, and Zounds heralded a new age of honesty and integrity in underground music. New, exclusive interviews and hundreds of previously unreleased photographs document the impact of all of the scene's biggest names--and a fair few of the smaller ones--highlighting how anarcho-punk took the rebellion inherent in punk from the very beginning to a whole new level of personal awareness.
It's 1982 and the Ramones are in a gutter-bound spiral. Following a run of inconsistent albums and deep in the throes of internal tensions the legendary quartet is about to crash and burn.THEnter Richie Ramone.THThen a 26-year-old from New Jersey named Richard Reinhardt he's snapped up by the group to be their new drummer and instantly goes from the obscurity of the underground club scene to membership in the most famous punk-rock band of all time revitalizing the pioneering outfit with his powerful precise and blindingly fast beats a composing classic cuts like the menacing anthem Somebody Put Something in My Drink and becoming the only Ramones percussionist to sing lead vocals for the group. With the Ramones he performs over five hundred shows at venues all around the world and records three storming studio albums a before abruptly quitting the band and going deep underground. To most fans this crucial figure in the band's history has remained a mystery his tale untold.THUntil now.THEI Know Better Now: My Life Before During and After the RamonesE is the firsthand four-on-the-floor account of a life in rock 'n' roll and in one of its most influential acts a straight from the sticks of the man who kept the beat. |
You may like...
Architects of Self-Destruction: The Oral…
John Gentile, Brad Logan
Paperback
R397
Discovery Miles 3 970
|