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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Indie
Totally Wired features 32 interviews with the post-punk era's most
innovative musicians and colourful personalities. From Ari Up, Jah
Wobble, David Byrne, Edwyn Collins, it also includes conversations
with the most influential of label bosses, managers, record
producers, DJs and journalists - such as John Peel and Paul Morley.
Crackling with argument and anecdote, these conversations bring a
rich human dimension post-punk's exceptional characters, from their
earliest days to their glorious and sometimes disastrous musical
adventures. Along with interviews, we get 'overviews': further
reflections by Simon Reynolds on key icons and crucial scenes,
including John Lydon and Public Image Ltd, Ian Curtis and Joy
Division, and the lineage of glam grotesquerie running from
Siouxsie & The Banshees to the New Romantics to Leigh Bowery.
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.
Comics and the punk movement are powerfully and inextricably
linked. Each has a do-it-yourself ethos and a rebellious spirit to
defy authority that complements the other. Though this link seems
obvious, this collection of insightful and provocative works
provides for first time a thorough analysis of the intersections
between comics and punk. It also seeks to expand the discussion
beyond the standard US and UK punk scenes to include the influence
punk has had on comics produced in other countries, such as Spain
and Turkey. Exhaustively researched, this collection is an
invaluable work for scholars and fans of comics and punk.
This book explores for the first time the punk phenomenon in
contemporary China. As China has urbanised within the context of
explosive economic growth and a closed political system, urban
subcultures and phenomena of alienation and anomie have emerged,
and yet, the political and economic differences between China and
western societies has ensured that these subcultures operate and
are motivated by profoundly different structures. This book will be
of interest to cultural historians, media studies and urban studies
researchers, and (ex-) punk rockers.
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.
A pioneering "horror-punk" band, the Misfits are legends in their
own time. This discography tells the story of the band in all of
its incarnations through all of their recorded output-both official
and unauthorized releases. Discographies are provided for both
present and former members' solo projects and bands, along with a
wealth of rare record sleeves, photos and vintage posters
documenting the evolution of the band and the brand.
Irish Independent Music Book of the Year Guardian Book of the Week
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.
In 1979, from the basement of a London squat, the Raincoats
reinvented what punk could be. They had a violin player. They came
from Portugal, Spain, and England. Their anarchy was poetic.
Working with the iconic Rough Trade Records at its radical
beginnings, they were the first group of punk women to actively
call themselves feminists. In this short book - the first on the
Raincoats - author Jenn Pelly tells the story of the group's
audacious debut album, which Kurt Cobain once called "wonderfully
classic scripture." Pelly builds on rare archival materials and
extensive interviews with members of the Raincoats, Sleater-Kinney,
Bikini Kill, Hole, Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, and more. She
draws formal inspiration from the collage-like The Raincoats itself
to explore this album's magic, vulnerability, and strength.
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.
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