57 Varieties is an amazing page-turning journey through the music scene of the early 1980s featuring an exclusive collection of never-republished vintage interviews with some of the biggest names in music: including Queen, Bob Marley, AC/DC, The Beach Boys, Paul & Linda McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Jam, The Damned, Marc Bolan, Malcolm McLaren, The Buzzcocks, Iggy Pop, The Who, X-Ray Spex, Blondie, The Stranglers, Dr Feelgood, Ian Dury, Spandau Ballet and many, many more.

Timbre is among the most important and the most elusive aspects of music. Visceral and immediate in its sonic properties, yet also considered sublime and ineffable, timbre finds itself caught up in metaphors: tone "color", "wet" acoustics, or in Schoenberg's words, "the illusory stuff of our dreams." This multi-disciplinary approach to timbre assesses the acoustic, corporeal, performative, and aesthetic dimensions of tone color in Western music practice and philosophy. It develops a new theorization of timbre and its crucial role in the epistemology of musical materialism through a vital materialist aesthetics in which conventional binaries and dualisms are superseded by a vibrant continuum. As the aesthetic and epistemological questions foregrounded by timbre are not restricted to isolated periods in music history or individual genres, but have pervaded Western musical aesthetics since early Modernity, the book discusses musical examples taken from both "classical" and "popular" music. These range, in "classical" music, from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, the belcanto opera and electronic music to saturated music; and, in "popular" music, from indie through soul and ballad to dark industrial.

If given another chance to write for the series, which albums would 33 1/3 authors focus on the second time around? This anthology features compact essays from past 33 1/3 authors on albums that consume them, but about which they did not write. It explores often overlooked and underrated albums that may not have inspired their 33 1/3 books, but have played a large part in their own musical cultivation. Questions central to the essays include: How has this album influenced your worldview? How does this album intersect with your other creative and critical pursuits? How does this album index a particular moment in cultural history? In your own personal history? Why is the album perhaps under-the-radar, or a buried treasure? Why can't you stop listening to it? Bringing together 33 1/3's rich array of writers, critics, and scholars, this collection probes our taste in albums, our longing for certain tunes, and our desire to hit repeat--all while creating an expansive "must-listen" list for readers in search of unexplored musical territories.

The story of Afro-Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos stitches together histories of 1960s-1980s jazz, psychedelia, world music, experimentalism and post-punk. Based in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, New York City and Paris, Naná played with musicians as varied as Egberto Gismonti, Don Cherry, Pat Metheny, Ralph Towner, Arto Lindsay, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon, Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Os Mutantes, and Milton Nascimento. This book traces the 15 years (1964-1979) leading up to Naná's Saudades (1979, ECM), an album evoking his sonic memories of Brazil that he recorded while in Germany. Saudades features berimbau, a one-stringed instrument that looks like a bow and arrow, alongside onomatopoetic vocals and the strings of the Radio Symphony Stuttgart. Daniel B. Sharp hears Naná's playing as a counterargument against dishonest notions of the primitive just as world music emerged as a genre. With a gourd, a stick, a wire, a wicker basket, and a stone, Naná made music as complex and contemporary as the ARP synthesizers in vogue at the time.

The Eighties were about big ideas writ large - new money, new style, gender fluidity, gay pride, attritional politics, the 'special relationship', nuclear fear, AIDS, cocaine, ecstasy, tabloid royalty, the rise of urban pop, and ultimately geopolitical chaos. Using a big narrative approach, Dylan Jones' history of the decade in pop frames the decade through some of its most important and popular hits, choosing records which either epitomised their time, or ushered in a new cultural shift. So we move seamlessly from Rapper's Delight and the genre defining moment of hip hop into The Specials' spectral, Ghost Town; from ABC and the apotheosis of New Pop (The Look of Love) to Madonna's breakthrough moment with Like a Virgin, and so on. In the '80s each year brought a new twist as technology shifted and genres snowballed, MTV reigned supreme and the story of pop became globalised. It was a decade of excess in all areas, especially ambition, but it was in the transcendent moments of pop perfection that the '80s found its true art-form. Subjective and idiosyncratic, SHINY AND NEW takes us from downtown New York to post-industrial Manchester, in the first widescreen attempt to weave together the stories, the songs and events that re-shaped music and society.

Political campaigning affects numerous realms under the communication umbrella with each channel seeking to influence as many individuals as possible. In higher education, there is a growing scholarly interest in communication issues and subjects, especially on the role of music, in the political arena. Music and Messaging in the African Political Arena provides innovative insights into providing music and songs as an integral part of sending political messages to a broader spectrum of audiences, especially during political campaigns. The content within this publication covers such topics as framing theory, national identity, and ethnic politics, and is designed for politicians, campaign managers, political communication scholars, researchers, and students.

The Hispanic rite, a medieval non-Roman Western liturgy, was practiced across the Iberian Peninsula for over half a millennium and functioned as the most distinct marker of Christian identity in this region. As Christians typically began every liturgical day throughout the year by singing a vespertinus, this chant genre in particular provides a unique window into the cultural and religious life of medieval Iberia. The Hispanic rite has the largest corpus of extant manuscripts of all non-Roman liturgies in the West, which testifies to the importance placed on their transmission through political and cultural upheavals. Its chants, however, use a notational system that lacks clear specification of pitch and has kept them barred from in-depth study. Text, Liturgy and Music in the Hispanic Rite is the first detailed analysis of the interactions between textual, liturgical, and musical variables across the entire extant repertoire of a chant genre central to the Hispanic rite, the vespertinus. By approaching the vespertini through a holistic methodology that integrates liturgy, melody, and text, author Raquel Rojo Carrillo identifies the genre's norms and traces the different shapes it adopts across the liturgical year and on different occasions. In this way, the book offers an unprecedented insight into the liturgical edifice of the Hispanic rite and the daily experience of Christians in medieval Iberia.

This book explores an album of popular music with a remarkable significance to a violent wave of postcolonial tensions in the Netherlands in the 1970s. Several "actions" were claimed by a small number of first-generation descendants of ca. 12,500 reluctant migrants from the young independent state of Indonesia (former Dutch East Indies). Transferred in 1951, this culturally coherent group consisted of ex-Royal Dutch Colonial Army personnel and their families. Their ancient roots in the Moluccan archipelago and their protestant-christian faith defined their minority image. Their sojourn should have been temporary, but frustratingly turned out to be permanent. At the height of strained relations, Massada rose to the occasion. Astaganaga (1978) is a telling example of the will to negotiate a different diasporic Moluccan identity through uplifting contemporary sounds.