Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 provides the first broad scholarly discussion of this music since 1990. The book critically examines key moments in the history of black British popular music from 1940s jazz to 1970s soul and reggae, 1990s Jungle and the sounds of Dubstep and Grime that have echoed through the 2000s. While the book offers a history it also discusses the ways black musics in Britain have intersected with the politics of race and class, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, and debates about media and technology. Contributors examine the impact of the local, the ways that black music in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and London evolved differently and how black popular music in Britain has always developed in complex interaction with the dominant British popular music tradition. This tradition has its own histories located in folk music, music hall and a constant engagement, since the nineteenth century, with American popular music, itself a dynamic mixing of African-American, Latin American and other musics. The ideas that run through various chapters form connecting narratives that challenge dominant understandings of black popular music in Britain and will be essential reading for those interested in Popular Music Studies, Black British Studies and Cultural Studies.

Rock Brands: Selling Sound in a Media Saturated Culture, edited by Elizabeth Barfoot Christian, is an edited collection that explores how different genres of popular music are branded and marketed today. The book's core objectives are addressed over three sections. In the first part of Rock Brands, the authors examine how established mainstream artists/bands are continuing to market themselves in an ever-changing technological world, and how bands can use integrated marketing communication to effectively "brand" themselves. This branding is intended as a protection so that technology and delivery changes don't stifle the bands' success. KISS, AC/DC, Ozzy Osbourne, Phish, and Miley Cyrus are all popular musical influences considered in this part of the analysis. In the second section, the authors explore how some musicians effectively use attention-grabbing issues such as politics (for example, Kanye West and countless country musicians) and religion (such as with Christian heavy metal bands and Bon Jovi) in their lyrics, and also how imagery is utilized by artists such as Marilyn Manson to gain a fan base. Finally, the book will explore specific changes in the media available to market music today (see M.I.A. and her use of new media) and, similarly, how these resources can benefit music icons even after they are long gone, as with Elvis and Michael Jackson. Rock Brands further examines gaming, reality television, and social networking sites as new outlets for marketing and otherwise experiencing popular music. What makes some bands stand out and succeed when so many fail? How does one find a niche that isn't just kitsch and can stand the test of time, allowing the musician to grow as an artist as well as grow a substantial fan base? Elizabeth Barfoot Christian and the book's contributors expertly navigate these questions and more in Rock Brands: Selling Sound in a Media Saturated Culture.

Rap music and its gangster rap variant are now far too important and influential in American life to be ignored by the general public and research communities alike. Artists and promoters alike have made a number of questionable claims about the authenticity and impact of their music that have been taken for granted and not been critically assessed. Those who have written about from communications, music and cultural studies have provided an important but relatively fixed narrative that leaves the central claims and impacts of this entrepreneur unaddressed. It is in this context that the author Benjamin Bowser began studying hip hop and gangster rap precisely because the influence of this movement and music on African American adolescents HIV infection risk takers. At the same time, the frequent use of the N-word by gangster rappers has become a major unaddressed issue in civil rights that has also not been studied. Furthermore, an important reason to study these unaddressed issues is to not only better understand them, but to offer solutions to the problems they pose and to improve the quality of life of all involved. Within the rapidly growing literature on hip hop and gangster rap, Gangster Rap and Its Social Cost stands out from the rest because it provides a number of unique contributions. First, based upon a community case study, the author asserts that gangster rap has empowered white racists and, as a consequence, has reduced the quality of life and civil rights of listeners and non-listeners alike. Second, this book goes to great length to make a serious distinction between gangster rap and hip hop. Disentangling one from the other opens the door to a more focused and critical analysis of gangster rap and provides an outline of the unmet potential of rap in hip hop. Third, national surveys are used as evidence in the debate about the size and characteristics of the rap and hip hop listener audiences. There are some surprises here that should reframe the controversy on who listens to and buys rap music. Fourth, there is a first generation of psychological and social scientific research on rap music that is summarized through 2011. Finally, the problems in gangster rap are not inevitable and we do not have to live with them. They can be effectively addressed without attacking the civil liberties of gangster rappers or their corporate sponsors. Gangster Rap and Its Social Cost is must reading for young adults, parents, those who both enjoy and dislike rap music, and students in sociology, psychology, ethnic studies, communication, music, community studies and public health.

There are undercurrents and peripheral taste preferences that are a defining part of our individual and collective cultural experience. Music is no exception. George Plasketes adapts the iconic "A-side/B-side" dichotomy from the 45 r.p.m. for use as a unique conceptual, critical, historical, and cultural framework for exploring and threading together a variety of popular music and media texts. The profiles and perspectives focus on the peripheries; on texts which might be considered "B-sides""overlooked, underappreciated, and unsung cases, creators, patterns and productions that have unassumingly, but significantly, marked popular culture, music and media during the past 40 years. The underappreciated yet enduring contributions of a variety of creative individuals in music, television and film are a centerpiece of this volume: actress Doris Day's son, Terry Melcher, a 1960s music producer whose imprint is on the surf, country blues, garage pop and most importantly the folk rock genre; Hans Fenger's kid chorus cover project, a musical variation of "outsider art" that became representative of the tribute wave that began in the 1990s and continues today; versatile guitarist virtuoso Ry Cooder's extensive film soundtrack work; World Music "missionary efforts" of American artists beyond Paul Simon's Graceland, including Neil Diamond's precursor with Tap Root Manuscript in the 1970s and the exotic adventures of Henry Kaiser and David Lindley in Madagascar and Norway"to name just a few examples. These B-sides represent undercurrents, but they resonate as overtones in the mainstream of music and culture, many as historical hinges. Collectively, these B-sides are an A-side antidote of outskirt observations, individual snapshots of artists, artifacts and rituals, genres and generations, producers and musical productions in television, film and video. They constitute an important connect-the-dots cultural chronicle with a multi-layered context"social, legal, historic, economic, technological, generational, aesthetic"for interpreting the interrelations between creators and institutions, the music market place, the production of culture and important connections between the peripheral and the popular.

This book offers an in-depth study of the globalization of contemporary South Korean idol pop music, or K-Pop, visiting K-Pop and its multiple intersections with political, economic, and cultural formations and transformations. It provides detailed insights into the transformative process in and around the field of Korean pop music since the 1990s, which paved the way for the recent international rise of K-Pop and the Korean Wave. Fuhr examines the conditions and effects of transnational flows, asymmetrical power relations, and the role of the imaginary "other" in K-Pop production and consumption, relating them to the specific aesthetic dimensions and material conditions of K-Pop stars, songs, and videos. Further, the book reveals how K-Pop is deployed for strategies of national identity construction in connection with Korean cultural politics, with transnational music production circuits, and with the transnational mobility of immigrant pop idols. The volume argues that K-Pop is a highly productive cultural arena in which South Korea's globalizing and nationalizing forces and imaginations coincide, intermingle, and counteract with each other and in which the tension between both of these poles is played out musically, visually, and discursively. This book examines a vibrant example of contemporary popular music from the non-Anglophone world and provides deeper insight into the structure of popular music and the dynamics of cultural globalization through a combined set of ethnographic, musicological, and cultural analysis. Widening the regional scope of Western-dominated popular music studies and enhancing new areas of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and cultural studies, this book will also be of interest to those studying East Asian popular culture, music globalization, and popular music.

Pete Seeger is one of the most recorded artists in American history, and his recording catalog tells us not just the story of his career but the story of our culture and its political and social history. A Pete Seeger Discography: Seventy Years of Recordings is a comprehensive listing of the 45s, 78s, LPs, and CDs recorded by Seeger in his various incarnations: with the Almanac Singers, with the Weavers, as a solo artist, and with other musicians and contributors. David King Dunaway provides information, with easy to use cross-references, on rare recordings and archival collections. The discography offers details on Seeger's recording history, including the album title, song(s), other artists on the recording, the publisher and number, and the year or exact recording date if known, as well as the original release date and the re-releases of each recording. Structured to make locating details easy for readers, the recordings are organized chronologically and categorized by albums, singles, private pressings, and foreign releases. Readers can easily cross-reference through album and song title indexes and a contributing artist index. An appendix listing the unreleased archival holdings of the Smithsonian Folkways collection under Moe Asch completes the volume, and a photospread with more than 30 of Seeger's album covers convey a pictorial recording history of this well-loved artist. The authors gratefully acknowledge Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, for their funding assistance in preparing this discography.

Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain explores the efforts of the current government in southern Spain to establish flamenco music as a significant patrimonial symbol and marker of cultural identity. Further, it aims to demonstrate that these Andalusian efforts form part of the ambitious project of rethinking the nation-state of Spain, and of reconsidering the nature of national identity. A salient theme in this book is that the development of notions of style and identity are mediated by social institutions. Specifically, the book documents the development of flamenco's musical style by tracing the genre's development, between 1880 and 1980, and demonstrating the manner in which the now conventional characterization of the flamenco style was mediated by krausist, modernist, and journalist institutions. Just as importantly, it identifies two recent institutional forces, that of audio recording and cinema, that promote a concept of musical style that sharply contrasts with the conventional notion. By emphasizing the importance of forward-looking notions of style and identity, Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain makes a strong case for advancing the Spanish experiment in nation-building, but also for re-thinking nationalism and cultural identity on a global scale.

While some people find new opportunities in the postindustrial economy, many working-class men find their social and economic well-being collapse as blue-collar jobs are outsourced and offshored to the global labor market. Faced with limited options to earn a living-wage, many of these blue-collar workers are instead changing who they are, embracing a deviant, rebellious identity expressed by the contemporary southern rock revival musicians studied in this book. Although loosely based in the traditional culture and lifestyle of the southeastern United States, contemporary southerness has little to do with region but instead is a way to rebel from the very institutions blue-collar men traditionally used as the basis of their masculine pride: family, education, employment, military service, and religion. This contemporary form of southerness reflected in their music also involves deviance, as many of these men adorn themselves with the highly controversial confederate flag, binge drink alcohol, brawl with one another and use drugs. Combining interviews, participant observation and a lyrical analysis, this book explores these aspects of rebellious southerness through music as it exists in the ideal sense and as individual men try to live up to these subcultural ideals in their daily lives. The southern rock revival is a new social movement carving out a place for an alternative way to live while simultaneously perpetuating stereotypes about poor men, reinforcing social disadvantage and marginalization.

Since the 1980s, music videos have been everywhere, and today almost all of the most-viewed clips on YouTube are music videos. However, in academia, music videos do not currently share this popularity. Music Video After MTV gives music video its due academic credit by exploring the changing landscapes surrounding post-millennial music video. Across seven chapters, the book addresses core issues relating to the study of music videos, including the history, analysis, and audiovisual aesthetics of music videos. Moreover, the book is the first of its kind to truly address the recent changes following the digitization of music video, including its changing cycles of production, distribution and reception, the influence of music videos on other media, and the rise of new types of online music video. Approaching music videos from a composite theoretical framework, Music Video After MTV brings music video research up to speed in several areas: it offers the first account of the research history of music videos, the first truly audiovisual approach to music video studies and it presents numerous inspiring case studies, ranging from classics by Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham to recent experimental and interactive videos that interrogate the very limits of music video.

WHAT A STORY! WHAT A LIFE! A FASCINATING MEMOIR FROM A LEGENDARY MUSIC BUSINESS EXECUTIVE WHO…

Signed the little-known David Bowie…

Owned the Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust albums…

Looked after the The Rolling Stones…

Helped reorganise The Beatles' Apple Corp…

Worked with Mickie Most on The Animals, Herman's Hermits, Donovan, Jeff Beck, and Lulu…

Managed The Tremeloes, The New Seekers, and The Sweet…

Masterminded a landmark court case that disrupted music publishers exploiting songwriters including Elton John…

Started GTO Records, the company that signed Donna Summer, Billy Ocean, The Walker Brothers and Heatwave…

AND WHO…

Had dinner with John Lennon…

Tea with Colonel Parker…

Left Led Zeppelin's cash in a safe and lost the key…

Threw Rod Stewart out of his office…

Turned down chances to manage Queen and Andrea Bocelli…

Almost tempted Stevie Wonder away from Motown…

And foolishly allowed Iggy Pop to stay in his house!

WHO KNEW?

West Germany after the Second World War was a country in shock: estranged from its recent history, and adrift from the rest of Europe. This proved to be fertile ground for a generation of musicians who, from the 1960s onwards, would develop the experimental sounds that became known as Krautrock.

Faust, Neu!, Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Amon Düül II, Can, Kraftwerk - the influence of these groups upon popular music is incalculable. Future Days is an in-depth study of the music and the groups who made it.

Since the turn of the century, the impact of digital technologies on the promotion, production and distribution of music in the Philippines has both enabled and necessitated an increase in independent musical practices. In the first in-depth investigation into the independent music scene in the Philippines, Monika E. Schoop exposes and portrays the as yet unexplored restructurings of the Philippine music industries, showing that digital technologies have played an ambivalent role in these developments. While they have given rise to new levels of piracy, they have also offered unprecedented opportunities for artists. The near collapse of the transnational recording industry in the Philippines stands in stark contrast to a thriving independent music scene in the county's national capital region, Metro Manila, which cuts across musical genres and whose members successfully adjust to a rapidly evolving industry scenario. Independent practices have been facilitated by increased access to broadband Internet, the popularity of social media platforms and home recording technology. At the same time, changing music industry structures often leave artists with no other option but to operate independently. Based on extensive fieldwork online and offline, the book explores the diverse and innovative music production, distribution, promotion and financing strategies that have become constitutive of the independent music scene in twenty-first-century Manila.

U2's significant career far exceeds that of most average successful rock bands, with a prolific output of thirteen well-received studio albums and a sometimes relentless touring schedule. The band is famous for uniquely drawing together music, art, faith, and activism, all within a lucrative career that has given each of these elements an unusual degree of social and cultural resonance. Broad-minded musically and intellectually, U2'soutput is thematically rich, addressing a slew of topics, from questions of faith to anxieties about commercialism to outright political statements. With one of the largest fan bases in the history of rock music, U2 and their work require contextualization and exploration. In U2: Rock 'n' Roll to Change the World, Timothy D. Neufeld takes up this challenge. Neufeld explores U2's move from the youthful idealism of a band barely able to play instruments through its many phases of artistic expression and cultural engagement to its employment of faith and activism as a foundation for its success. This book outlines how U2 reshaped the very musical and even political culture that had originally shaped it, demonstrating through close readings of its musical work the dynamic interplay of artistic expression and social engagement.

The Beatles loom large over the musical landscape even now that nearly a half-century has passed since the four men from Liverpool played their last notes together. While the story of their stunning rise and brief but brilliant time together on top of the pop music world is undoubtedly fascinating, it would ring hollow without the scores of incredible songs that accompanied each milestone. These songs are the focus of rock writer Jim Beviglia's latest foray into the catalogs of rock royalty. Counting Down the Beatles: Their 100 Finest Songs features Beviglia's list of the best songs in the band's unparalleled oeuvre. Ranked in descending order from #100 to #1, each song is accompanied by a lengthy essay providing information on the song's writing and recording, context on where it falls within the band's timeline, and the author's analysis and explanation why it deserves its position in this hallowed canon. Every fan of the Beatles, from attendees at their first U.S.tour to the newest generation's devotees, will find this collection an informative, insightful, and entertaining adventure. Not only will it reveal little-known facts, but it just may start some arguments and settle a few debates.

Liverpool has gained a national and international reputation for popular music, most recently recognised in its designation as a UNESCO City of Music. This book examines Liverpool's popular music through the history of the places where it has been performed and examines their role and significance. It explores the richness of Liverpool's live performance scene and tells a story of changing music sites, sounds and experiences. In doing so it highlights music's contribution to the city's history and identity, and in turn shows how the city's architectural and urban form has shaped its musical life and character. The book shows how music is bound up with changes in the social, cultural and economic life of cities more generally, particularly provincial, `post-industrial' cities in the UK, Europe and US. It also highlights the significance of places that enable people to come together and collectively participate in music events. The book touches on groups and artists involved with many diverse musical style and brings new and fascinating information on well-known historic venues such as the Cavern Club and the Blue Angel, as well as new ones such as the Echo Arena. With a glossary of artists and venues, previously unpublished photographs, illustrations and music maps. Liverpool's musical landscapes are investigated in unprecedented detail and depth.

A tour-de-force history of Jews, blues, and the birth of a new industry. On the south side of Chicago in the late 1940s, two immigrants, one a Jew born in Russia, the other a black blues singer from Mississippi met and changed the course of musical history. Muddy Waters electrified the blues, and Leonard Chess recorded it. Soon Bo Diddly and Chuck Berry added a dose of pulsating rhythm, and Chess Records captured that, too. Rock & roll had arrived, and an industry was born. In a book as vibrantly and exuberantly written as the music and people it portrays, Rich Cohen tells the engrossing story of how Leonard Chess, with the other record men, made this new sound into a multi-billion-dollar business aggressively acquiring artists, hard-selling distributors, riding the crest of a wave that would crash over a whole generation. Full of absorbing lore and animated by a deep love for popular music, Machers and Rockers is a smash hit.

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. In this book, Benjamin Lapidus seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty musical sound, especially those who have historically gone unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews, and musicological analysis, Lapidus examines how interethnic collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music. Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. For the first time, Lapidus studies this sound in detail and in its context. He offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of segregation and racism the musicians experienced, Lapidus treats music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, he recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that has come to be emulated internationally.

British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977 explains how the definitive British rock performers of this epoch aimed, not at the youthful rebellion for which they are legendary, but at a highly self-conscious project of commenting on the business in which they were engaged. They did so by ironically appropriating the traditional forms of Victorian music hall. Faulk focuses on the mid to late 1960s, when British rock bands who had already achieved commercial prominence began to aspire to aesthetic distinction. The book discusses recordings such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album, the Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society, and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and television films such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus that defined rock's early high art moment. Faulk argues that these 'texts' disclose the primary strategies by which British rock groups, mostly comprised of young working and lower middle-class men, made their bid for aesthetic merit by sampling music hall sounds. The result was a symbolically charged form whose main purpose was to unsettle the hierarchy that set traditional popular culture above the new medium. Rock groups engaged with the music of the past in order both to demonstrate the comparative vitality of the new form and signify rock's new art status, compared to earlier British pop music. The book historicizes punk rock as a later development of earlier British rock, rather than a rupture. Unlike earlier groups, the Sex Pistols did not appropriate music hall form in an ironic way, but the band and their manager Malcolm McLaren were obsessed with the meaning of the past for the present in a distinctly modernist fashion.

This book explores how, and why, the blues became a central component of English popular music in the 1960s. It is commonly known that many 'British invasion' rock bands were heavily influenced by Chicago and Delta blues styles. But how, exactly, did Britain get the blues? Blues records by African American artists were released in the United States in substantial numbers between 1920 and the late 1930s, but were sold primarily to black consumers in large urban centres and the rural south. How, then, in an era before globalization, when multinational record releases were rare, did English teenagers in the early 1960s encounter the music of Robert Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, Memphis Minnie, and Barbecue Bob? Roberta Schwartz analyses the transmission of blues records to England, from the first recordings to hit English shores to the end of the sixties. How did the blues, largely banned from the BBC until the mid 1960s, become popular enough to create a demand for re-released material by American artists? When did the British blues subculture begin, and how did it develop? Most significantly, how did the music become a part of the popular consciousness, and how did it change music and expectations? The way that the blues, and various blues styles, were received by critics is a central concern of the book, as their writings greatly affected which artists and recordings were distributed and reified, particularly in the early years of the revival. 'Hot' cultural issues such as authenticity, assimilation, appropriation, and cultural transgression were also part of the revival; these topics and more were interrogated in music periodicals by critics and fans alike, even as English musicians began incorporating elements of the blues into their common musical language. The vinyl record itself, under-represented in previous studies, plays a major part in the story of the blues in Britain. Not only did recordings shape perceptions and listening habits, but which artists were available at any given time also had an enormous impact on the British blues. Schwartz maps the influences on British blues and blues-rock performers and thereby illuminates the stylistic evolution of many genres of British popular music.

This book explores the highly-valued, and often highly-charged, ideal of authenticity in hip-hop - what it is, why it is important, and how it affects the day-to-day life of rap artists. By analyzing the practices, identities, and struggles that shape the lives of rappers in the London scene, the study exposes the strategies and tactics that hip-hop practitioners engage in to negotiate authenticity on an everyday basis. In-depth interviews and fieldwork provide insight into the nature of authenticity in global hip-hop, and the dynamics of cultural appropriation, globalization, marketization, and digitization through a combined set of ethnographic, theoretical, and cultural analysis. Despite growing attention to authenticity in popular music, this book is the first to offer a comprehensive theoretical model explaining the reflexive approaches hip-hop artists adopt to 'live out' authenticity in everyday life. This model will act as a blueprint for new studies in global hip-hop and be generative in other authenticity research, and for other music genres such as punk, rock and roll, country, and blues that share similar issues surrounding contested artist authenticity.

An authoritative, easy-to-understand text covering all aspects of arranging. This beautifully bound edition contains a compact disc with examples performed by jazz greats such as George Benson, Freddie Hubbard, Hubert Laws and Don Sebesky's complete orchestra. The comb binding creates a lay-flat book that is perfect for study and performance.

Emphasizing the diversity of twentieth-century collage practices, Rona Cran's book explores the role that it played in the work of Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Dylan. For all four, collage was an important creative catalyst, employed cathartically, aggressively, and experimentally. Collage's catalytic effect, Cran argues, enabled each to overcome a potentially destabilizing crisis in representation. Cornell, convinced that he was an artist and yet hampered by his inability to draw or paint, used collage to gain access to the art world and to show what he was capable of given the right medium. Burroughs' formal problems with linear composition were turned to his advantage by collage, which enabled him to move beyond narrative and chronological requirement. O'Hara used collage to navigate an effective path between plastic art and literature, and to choose the facets of each which best suited his compositional style. Bob Dylan's self-conscious application of collage techniques elevated his brand of rock-and-roll to a level of heightened aestheticism. Throughout her book, Cran shows that to delineate collage stringently as one thing or another is to severely limit our understanding of the work of the artists and writers who came to use it in non-traditional ways.

New paperback edition of the best-selling biography of the flamboyant frontman of the group Queen. An intimate account of Freddie Mercury's life by the man who was his personal assistant for the last 12 years of his life. A widely-acclaimed, celebrity -studded account of the tragi-comedy that was Freddie Mercury's outrageous life. Contains intimate photographs taken from the author's personal collection.

ENew York TimesE Bestseller EA Perfect Union of Contrary ThingsE is the authorized biography of musician and vintner Maynard James Keenan. Co-author Sarah Jensen's 30-year friendship with Keenan gives her unique insight into his history and career trajectory. The book traces Keenan's journey from his Midwest childhood to his years in the Army to his time in art school from his stint at a Boston pet shop to his place in the international spotlight and his influence on contemporary music and regional winemaking. A comprehensive portrayal of a versatile and dedicated artist EA Perfect Union of Contrary ThingsE pays homage to the people and places that shaped the man and his art.THUntil now Maynard's fans have had access to only an abridged version of his story. EA Perfect Union of Contrary ThingsE presents the outtakes the scenes of disappointment and triumph and the events that led him to take one step after the next to change direction to explore sometimes surprising opportunities. Included are sidebars in his own words often humorous anecdotes that illuminate the narrative as well as commentary by his family members friends instructors and industry colleagues. The book also features a foreword by Alex Grey an American visionary artist and longtime friend of Keenan. Accompanying the text are photos of Keenan from childhood to the present.THMaynard's story is a metaphor for the reader's own evolution and an encouragement to follow one's dreams hold fast to individual integrity and work ceaselessly to fulfill our creative potential.