Black Sabbath's Master of Reality has maintained remarkable historical status over several generations; it's a touchstone for the directionless, and common coin for young men and women who've felt excluded from the broader cultural economy. John...

1985. Dinosaur, still without the Jr. Not hardcore anymore, but not yet anything else either. First live shows: fearsomely loud. First record, a fearsome mess: a raw miscellany thrown together from small-town ennui, the apathy of the middle classes, and...

When Johnny Cash signed to Rick Rubin's record label in 1993, he was already in the wax museum of memory, a fondly regarded but totally marginalized legend, unheard on the radio and unseen on the charts. His odyssey from oldies act to folk hero depended...

Christopher R. Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing - even occasionally stompingon vinyl that sounded too...

Nas was playing a role on Illmatic, even if it was himself. By constructing this persona, Nas not only laid out his own career for the next decade plus, but the careers of dozens of other rappers who were able to use their considerable skills to develop...

Many albums could be cited to support the claim that great suffering yields great art. Elliott Smith's XO should not be one of them. Smith's 1998 major label debut defies the "tortured singer-songwriter" stereotype, and takes up this defiance as a...

By pulling Kid A from its canonical status and grounding the album in various contexts, Marvin Lin explains not only why Radiohead suddenly adopted a new songwriting methodology, but also how properties like "genre" and "authenticity" distracted us from...

Before Ralph Ellison became one of America’s greatest writers, he was a musician and a student of jazz, writing widely on his favorite music for more than fifty years. Now, jazz authority Robert O’Meally has collected the very best of Ellison’s inspired,...

Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) was one of the founding figures of the 1960s folk revival, but he was far more than that. A pioneer of modern acoustic blues, a fine songwriter and arranger, a powerful singer, and one of the most influential guitarists of the...

In four years the teenage members of the Runaways did what no other group of female rock musicians before them could: they released four albums for a major label and toured the world. The Runaways busted down doors for every girl band that followed. Joan...

The most readable and comprehensive guide to enjoying over five hundred years of classical music -- from Gregorian chants, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Johannes Brahms, Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, and beyond.The Vintage Guide to...

Just about every human being knows how to listen to music, but what does it take to make music? Is musicality something we are born with? Or a skill that anyone can develop at any time? If you don't start piano at the age of six, is there any hope? Is...

The definitive biography of Alan Lomax-from John Szwed,"the best music biographer in the business" (L.A. Weekly). One of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, Alan Lomax was best known for bringing legendary musicians like Woody Guthrie,...

Documents the lesser-known story of the legendary soul performer's stirring Boston Garden concert in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, describing how he fought to prevent the concert's cancellation and his role in preventing riots in...

Providing a fresh approach to the social history of the Victorian era, this book examines the history and development of the tonic sol-fa sight-singing system, and its impact on British society. Instead of focusing on the popular classical music canon,...

“I don't think I'm easy to talk about. I've got a very irregular head. And I'm not anything that you think I am anyway.”—Syd Barrett’s last interview, Rolling Stone, 1971 Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett (1946–2006) was, by all accounts, the very definition of...

With over 150,000 copies sold worldwide, This Is a Call, is the definitive biography of Dave Grohl, the story of a singular career that includes Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and Them Crooked Vultures. Based on ten years of original,...

Twenty-seven years in the making (1940–67), this tapestry of nearly two hundred American popular and protest songs was created by three giants of performance and musical research: Alan Lomax, indefatigable collector and preserver; Woody Guthrie,...

A vivid, dramatic account of how half a dozen kinds of modern music--punk rock, art rock, disco, salsa, rap, minimalist classical--emerged in new forms and cross-pollinated all at once in the middle seventies in NYC.Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa...

Aspects of beauty in the music of Mozart It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same...