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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Indie
As one of the people who defined punk's protest art in the 1970s
and 1980s, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) deserves to be much better-known.
She produced confrontational album covers for the legendary
anarchist band Crass and later went on to do the same for Northern
indie legends the Charlatans, among others. More recently, her work
was recognised the day after Donald Trump's 2016 election victory,
when the front page of the Daily Mirror ran her 1989 painting Oh
America, which shows the Statue of Liberty, head in hands. This is
the first book to critically assess an extensive range of Vaucher's
work. It examines her unique position connecting avant-garde art
movements, counterculture, punk and even contemporary street art.
While Vaucher rejects all 'isms', her work offers a unique take on
the history of feminist art. -- .
Independent rock, known as "indie rock" (rock independent of the
major label corporations), is music dedicated to the art of rock:
it's adventurous, eclectic, defiant, inventive, and restlessly
creative. For over 40 years, indie bands have prided themselves on
the back-breaking efforts of self-promotion, self-produced albums,
homemade album cover art, and even, for the stalwart artist,
self-run record labels. Encyclopedia of Indie Rock chronicles the
history and development indie rock, providing students, scholars,
and music fans with an extensive overview of the musical and
cultural phenomenon. Inside this engaging volume readers will find
over 150 entries on the singers and songwriters, producers, labels,
and icons who have shaped the genre from the humble beginnings of
lo-fi homemade records in the 1960s through the history of seasoned
veterans who mastered the fine art of staying afloat despite every
obstacle that the cutthroat industry threw at them. Among the
featured: BLArcade BLFire BLBlack Flag BLDIY (Do It Yourself)
BLgrunge BLJesus and Mary Chain BLlo-fi BLMelvins BLPavement
BLPerforming Songwriter BLThe Ramones Righteous Babe Records BLriot
grrl BLThe Smiths BLSonic Youth BLSST Records BLSub-Pop Records
BLSXSW BLWomen in Indie Rock BLFrank Zappa volume also includes a
timeline; a resource guide, which includes recommended books and
articles, Web sites, and festivals; and indices in both the front
and back of the book to make navigation very user-friendly.
Necessary and entertaining reading for any indie rock fan who has
ever adorned their locker, backpack, or car with a band's logo,
Smith captures the history and evolution of the movement in this
thorough, illuminatingencyclopedia.
This text explores the possibility of drawing upon a punk ethos to
inspire and invigorate sociology. It uses punk to think creatively
about what sociology is and how it might be conducted and aims to
fire the sociological imaginations of sociologists at any stage of
their careers, from new students to established professors.
Rough Trade's Book of the Year Electronic Sound Magazine's Book of
the Year Mute Records is one of the most revered and influential
independent music labels of all time. Through the music of its
tight-knit community of artists - ranging from Cabaret Voltaire,
Throbbing Gristle, Nick Cave's The Birthday Party and Einsturzende
Neubauten to Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Erasure, Laibach and Goldfrapp -
it has had an incalculable impact on popular music for forty years.
This authoritative, sumptuously illustrated history of the label
features stunning artwork and photography - much of it previously
unseen - and insights from those who have worked with the label.
Text contributions from key players, together with ground-breaking
shots and video stills from lengendary photographers, make this
book the definitive chronicle of the iconic label, which today has
offices in the USA, UK, Germany and France and an unparalleled
reputation worldwide.
Keith Morris is a true punk icon. No one else embodies the sound of
Southern Californian hardcore the way he does. With his
waist-length dreadlocks and snarling vocals, Morris is known the
world over for his take-no-prisoners approach on the stage and his
integrity off of it. Over the course of his forty-year career with
Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and OFF!, he's battled diabetes, drug
and alcohol addiction, and the record industry...and he's still
going strong. My Damage is more than a book about the highs and
lows of a punk rock legend. It's a story from the perspective of
someone who has shared the stage with just about every major figure
in the music industry and has appeared in cult films like The
Decline of Western Civilization and Repo Man. A true Hollywood tale
from an L.A. native, My Damage reveals the story of Morris's
streets, his scene, and his music--as only he can tell it.
Arising from the street corners and underground clubs, Rebel Music:
Resistance through Hip Hop and Punk, challenges standardized
schooling and argues for equity, peace, and justice. Rebel Music is
an important, one-of-a-kind book that takes readers through fun,
radical, educational chapters examining Hip Hop and Punk songs,
with each section addressing a particular social issue. Rebel Music
values the experiences found in both movements as cultural capital
that is de-valued in the current oppressive, standard, test-driven,
rule-bound, and corporate schooling experience, making youth "just
another brick in the wall." This collection is a "rebel yell" to
administrators, teachers, parents, police, politicians, and
counsellors who demonize Hip Hop and Punk to listen up and respect
youth culture. Finally, Rebel Music is a celebration of radical
voices and an organizing tool for those who use music to challenge
oppression.
Belfast punk and the Troubles is an oral history of the punk scene
in Belfast from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s. The book explores
what it was like to be a punk in a city shaped by the violence of
the Troubles, and how this differed from being a punk elsewhere. It
also asks what it means to have been a punk - how punk unravels as
a thread throughout the lives of the people interviewed, and what
that unravelling means in the context of post-peace-process
Northern Ireland. In doing so, it suggests a critical understanding
of sectarianism, subjectivity and memory politics in the North, and
argues for the importance of placing punk within the segregated
structures of everyday life described by the interviewees. Adopting
an innovative oral history approach drawing on the work of Luisa
Passerini and Alessandro Portelli, the book analyses a small number
of oral history interviews with participants in granular detail.
Outlining the historical context and the cultural memory of punk,
the central chapters each delve into one or two interviews to draw
out the affective, imaginative and political ways in which punks
and former punks evoke their memories of taking part in the scene.
Through this method, it analyses the punk scene as a structure of
feeling shaped through the experience of growing up in wartime
Belfast. Belfast punk and the Troubles is an intervention in
Northern Irish historiography stressing the importance of history
from below, and will be compelling reading for historians of
Ireland and of punk, as well as those interested in innovative
approaches to oral history. -- .
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.
' An extraordinary history... The range of voices breathing new
life into past events is vast' **** Mojo ' The Morrissey and Marr
recollections are particularly revealing' The Word The Buzzcocks.
Joy Division. The Fall. The Smiths. The Stone Roses. The Happy
Mondays. Oasis. Manchester has proved to be an endlessly rich seam
of pop-music talent over the last 30 years. Highly opinionated and
usually controversial, stars such as Mark E. Smith, Morrissey, Ian
Brown and the Gallagher brothers have always had plenty to say for
themselves. Here, in John Robb' s new compilation, Manchester' s
gobbiest musicians tell the story of the city' s thriving music
scene in their own words. When the Buzzcocks put on the Sex Pistols
at Lester Free Hall in 1976, they kickstarted a musical revolution
and a fervent punk scene exploded. In 1979 the legendary Tony
Wilson founded Factory Records, the home of Joy Division/New Order
and later the Happy Mondays. The Hacienda, the Factory nightclub,
became notorious in the late 1980s as a centre of the influential
Madchester scene, led by the Mondays and the Stone Roses, with a
unique style and sound of its own. Then, from the ashes of
Madchester rose u ber-lads Oasis, the kings of Britpop and the
biggest UK band of the 1990s. John Robb is a leading music
journalist and the author of the bestselling biography of the Stone
Roses. His other books include Punk: An Oral History, The
Charlatans ... We Are Rock and The Nineties: What the F**k Was That
All About? He lives in Manchester.
An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the
Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. At the
turn of the 21st century, the Brazilian punk and hardcore music
scene joined forces with political militants to foster a new social
movement that demanded the universal right to free public
transportation. These groups collaborated in numerous venues and
media: music shows, protests, festivals, conferences, radio
stations, posters, albums, slogans, and digital and printed
publications. Throughout this time, the single demand for free
public transportation reconceptualized notions of urban space in
Brazil and led masses of people across the country to protest. This
book shows how the anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeoisie stance present
in the discourse of a number of Brazilian bands that performed from
the late 1990s to the beginning of the 21st century in the
underground music scenes of Florianopolis and Sao Paulo encountered
a reverberation in the rhetoric emanating from the Campaign for the
Free Fare, subsequently known as the Free Fare Movement (Movimento
Passe Livre, or MPL). This allowed the engaged bands and the
movement for free public transportation to contribute to each
other's development. The book also includes reflections on the Bus
Revolt that occurred in the northeastern city of Salvador,
unveiling traces of the punk and anarcho-punk movements, and the
Revolution Carnivals that occurred in the city of Belo Horizonte,
an event that mixed lectures, vegetarianism, protests, soccer, and
punk rock music.
Full of information about living without a permanent residence,
this complete collection of the "Dwelling Portably" zines from 1980
through 2012 contains helpful and informative tips for living far
outside of cities and bereft of technology. All of the tips and
advice have been edited down to what remains relevant in a
technologically changing world, and it is crammed full of
informative tips for biking, tents, showering, cooking, and living.
Whether camping on the edges, living simply, or getting by on the
road and loving it, this book is for modern nomads choosing
alternative lifestyles to working 9-5 in the same place.
After punk's arrival in 1976, many art students in the northern
English city of Leeds traded their paintbrushes for guitars and
synthesizers. In bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and
Delta 5 to the Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget, these
artists-turned-musicians challenged the limits of what was deemed
possible in rock and pop music. Taking avant-garde ideas to the
record-buying public, they created Situationist antirock and art
punk, penned deconstructed pop ditties about Jacques Derrida, and
took the aesthetics of collage and shock to dark, brooding
electro-dance music. In No Machos or Pop Stars Gavin Butt tells the
fascinating story of the post-punk scene in Leeds, showing how
England's state-funded education policy brought together art
students from different social classes to create a fertile ground
for musical experimentation. Drawing on extensive interviews with
band members, their associates, and teachers, Butt details the
groups who wanted to dismantle both art world and music industry
hierarchies by making it possible to dance to their art. Their
stories reveal the subversive influence of art school in a regional
music scene of lasting international significance.
In Mavericks of Sound: Conversations with the Artists Who Shaped
Indie and Roots Music, music scholar David Ensminger offers a
collection of vivid and compelling interviews with legendary roots
rock and indie artists who bucked mainstream trends and have
remained resilient in the face of enormous shifts in the music
world. As the success of the concerts at Austin City Limits have
revealed, the fan bases and crowds for indie and roots music often
blur and overlap. In Mavericks of Sound, Ensminger brings to light
the highways and byways trod by these music icons over the course
of their careers and the ways in which their music-making has been
affected by, and influenced, the burgeoning indie and roots music
movements. Ranging from seminal modern singer-songwriters to
rockabilly renegades and indie rockers, Mavericks of Sound features
a set of broad, penetrating, and insightful conversations imbued
with a sense of musical history and heritage. Ensminger captures
firsthand accounts from singer songwriters like Texas Country
musician Tom Russell and first wave indie artist and folk rocker
Peter Case; rockabilly artists Junior Brown and the Reverend Horton
Heat; American indie rock icons such as 11th Dream Day's Janet
Bean, Pere Ubu's Dave Thomas, Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider,
and Swans members Michael Gira and Jarboe; English and New Zealand
figures such as folk legend Richard Thompson, The Clean's David
Kilgour and The Waterboys' Mike Scott; and folk, country and rock
legends such as Merle Haggard, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Ralph
Stanley, Neko Case, and Yo La Tengo. Mavericks of Sound is the
perfect work for contemporary indie, roots, Americana, country, and
folk music fans who want to understand the unique artistry and
unbound passion behind America's musical innovators that readily
broke and remolded rules.
Both more and less than a band, Pussy Riot is continually
misunderstood by the Western media. This book sets the record
straight. After their scandalous performance of an anti-Putin
protest song in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the
imprisonment of two of its members, the punk feminist art
collective known as Pussy Riot became an international phenomenon.
But, what, exactly, is Pussy Riot, and what are they trying to
achieve? The award-winning author Eliot Borenstein explores the
movement's explosive history and takes you beyond the hype.
Appearing in early 70s New York City as primal prototype street
punks, Suicide are now hailed as one of the most important and
influential groups of the 20th century, inspiring that decade's
major musical movements but too feared and shunned to be awarded
their rightful acclaim at the time. Confronting shocked audiences
with their electronic "New York blues", singer Alan Vega and
instrumentalist Martin Rev fearlessly mirrored the city's sleazy
underbelly and decay on blood-freezing gutter-scapes such as 'Ghost
Rider' and 'Frankie Teardrop' while invoking doo-wop purity on
timeless love songs like 'Cheree' and 'Dream Baby Dream'.The book
charts Suicide's uncompromising roller coaster from formative days
in performance art and avant garde experimentation to chaotic early
shows at drug-infested downtown hotbed the Project of Living
Artists.Along with detailed accounts of Suicide's influences,
contemporaries and environment which spawned them, the book will
position the duo as one of New York's most pivotal but derided
outfits as the story moves through their pioneering first album,
1978's shockingly violent UK tour supporting The Clash and
subsequent recordings, live sorties and respective parallel solo
careers, going up to the present day. The author's eye witness
accounts and extensive first-hand interviews with Alan Vega and
Martin Rev are joined by conversations with producers Craig Leon,
Marty Thau and Bob Blank, contemporaries including Blondie, Jayne
County and the New York Dolls and fans such as Nick Cave, Bobby
Gillespie and The Clash; adding to a definitive account of this
most unique group. With an introduction by Lydia Lunch
Nicknamed the "Godmother of Punk," Patti Smith rose to fame during
the 1970s New York counterculture movement where she welcomed a new
breed of rock and roll. Smith sanctioned the presence of a
strong-willed woman in the mainstream rock community by breaking
not only the fragile glass ceiling, but also the "rules" about
women on the rock stage. Smith pushed right up to the front of the
punk scene, stripping down sexual, religious, and emotional
barriers to create a raw, viscerally personal message. In Patti
Smith: America's Punk Rock Rhapsodist, musician and historian Eric
Wendell delves into the volatile mix of religious upbringing and
musical and literary influences that gave shape to Smith's lyrics,
music, and artistic output. Wendell explores how Smith's
androgynous stage presence pulled the various societal triggers,
adding a new layer of meaning to popular music performance.
Songwriter and singer, performance artist and poet, Smith created
work that drew together biography, history, and music into a
powerful collage of an artist who shaped a generation of musicians.
For poets and performers, as well as fans of Patti Smith and punk
rock history, Patti Smith: America's Punk Rock Rhapsodist is the
perfect introduction to Smith's achievements and the politics and
art of a generation that is still felt.
This book examines the birth of punk in the UK and its
transformation, within a short period of time, into post-punk.
Deploying innovative concepts of 'critical mass', 'social networks'
and 'music worlds', and using sophisticated techniques of 'social
network analysis', it teases out the events and mechanisms involved
in punk's 'micro-mobilisation', its diffusion across the UK and its
transformation in certain city-based strongholds into a variety of
interlocking post-punk forms. Nick Crossley offers a detailed
review of prior work in this area, a rich exploration of new
empirical data and a highly innovative and robust approach to the
study of 'music worlds'. Written in an accessible style, this book
is essential reading for anybody with an interest in either UK punk
and post-punk or the impact of social networks on cultural life and
the potential of social network analysis to explore this impact. --
.
In March 1977, John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon of the punk band the Sex
Pistols looked over the Berlin wall onto the grey, militarized
landscape of East Berlin, which reminded him of home in London.
Lydon went up to the wall and extended his middle finger. He didn't
know it at the time, but the Sex Pistols' reputation had preceded
his gesture, as young people in the "Second World" busily
appropriated news reports on degenerate Western culture as punk
instruction manuals. Soon after, burgeoning Polish punk impresario
Henryk Gajewski brought the London punk band the Raincoats to
perform at his art gallery and student club-the epicenter for
Warsaw's nascent punk scene. When the Raincoats returned to
England, they found London erupting at the Rock Against Racism
concert, which brought together 100,000 "First World" UK punks and
"Third World" Caribbean immigrants who contributed their cultures
of reggae and Rastafarianism. Punk had formed networks reaching
across all three of the Cold War's "worlds". The first global
narrative of punk, Punk Crisis examines how transnational punk
movements challenged the global order of the Cold War, blurring the
boundaries between East and West, North and South, communism and
capitalism through performances of creative dissent. As author
Raymond A. Patton argues, punk eroded the boundaries and political
categories that defined the Cold War Era, replacing them with a new
framework based on identity as conservative or progressive. Through
this paradigm shift, punk unwittingly ushered in a new era of
global neoliberalism.
When considered in a broader social context, The Clash stand as one
of the most important musical acts in rock history. Original punks
who transcended the music's minimalist origins, The Clash lived and
breathed the idea that they could change the world with their art.
In The Clash: The Only Band That Mattered, respected music critic
Sean Egan examines The Clash's career and art through the prism of
the uniquely interesting and fractious UK politics of the 1970s and
'80s, without which they simply would not have existed. Tackling
such subjects as The Clash's self-conscious tussles with their
record label, the accusations of selling out that dogged their
footsteps, their rivalry with the similarly leaning but less purist
Jam, the paradoxical quality of their achieving multiplatinum
success, and even whether their denunciations of Thatcherism were
proven wrong, Egan has come up with new insights into a much
discussed group. Clash fans, Clash haters, social historians, and
political students will all find themselves entertained by his
thought-provoking conclusions.
Punk. London.1977. Most people blinked and missed it. Many spent a
decade trying to catch up. Derek Ridgers stumbled across it by
accident, where it was, in the beating filthy heart of the Roxy in
middle of a derelict slum called Covent Garden. Stumbling through
the moshpits trying to keep hold of a borrowed camera. 1977. Punk
London brings you 152 pages of photography featuring the birth of
the the most exciting cultural phenomenon in UK history. Currents
and vibes, flows and backwash, trends and anti-trends splashing
around in the cauldron of youth culture in the city of London, and
the lost rebels haunting their suburban bedrooms - jumping the
train uptown to get into the legendary Roxy. All converged, for one
priceless moment, an outpouring of a truly original, DIY, anarchic,
underground scene. Ridgers captured the first wave. Kids in the
crowd, never before seen. The punks who made their own clothes
because you couldn't buy punk clothes. The punks who got beaten up
time and again for making themselves into targets. Rebellion before
it got easy. You won't see these kids anywhere in the magazines.
They weren't trying to get famous. 1977 will happen again. 1977 is
happening somewhere, for someone, right now.
After punk's arrival in 1976, many art students in the northern
English city of Leeds traded their paintbrushes for guitars and
synthesizers. In bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and
Delta 5 to the Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget, these
artists-turned-musicians challenged the limits of what was deemed
possible in rock and pop music. Taking avant-garde ideas to the
record-buying public, they created Situationist antirock and art
punk, penned deconstructed pop ditties about Jacques Derrida, and
took the aesthetics of collage and shock to dark, brooding
electro-dance music. In No Machos or Pop Stars Gavin Butt tells the
fascinating story of the post-punk scene in Leeds, showing how
England's state-funded education policy brought together art
students from different social classes to create a fertile ground
for musical experimentation. Drawing on extensive interviews with
band members, their associates, and teachers, Butt details the
groups who wanted to dismantle both art world and music industry
hierarchies by making it possible to dance to their art. Their
stories reveal the subversive influence of art school in a regional
music scene of lasting international significance.
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