Pop Rock category: 3054 books

Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations...

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Kanye West created the most compelling body of pop music by an American artist during the period. Having risen from obscurity as a precocious producer through the ranks of Jay Z's Roc-A-Fella records, by the time he released My Beautiful Dark Twisted...

The essays contained in this volume address some of the most visible, durable and influential of African American musical styles as they developed from the mid-1960s into the 21st-century. Soul, funk, pop, R&B and hip hop practices are explored both singly and in their many convergences, and in...

The sequel to the New York Times bestseller Whatever You Say I Am, chronicling the last 20 years of rapper Eminem's life, based on new, exclusive interviews with the artist, his friends, family, and associates. In 1999, a former dishwasher from Detroit became the most significant, controversial,...

Oasis's incendiary 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe managed to summarize almost the entire history of post-fifties guitar music from Chuck Berry to My Bloody Valentine in a way that seemed effortless. But this remarkable album was also a social document that came closer to narrating the collective...

In Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, the first book to explore the deep legacy of "The Singing Brakeman" from a twenty-first century perspective, Barry Mazor offers a lively look at Rodgers' career, tracing his rise from working-class obscurity to the pinnacle of renown that came with such hits as "Blue Yodel"...

Nico was revered as ‘the most beautiful creature who ever lived’. She was Andy Warhol’s femme fatale and the High Preistess of Weird, yet few knew her real name or her wretched origins. When she called herself ‘a Nazi anarchist junkie’, they thought she was joking. Bob Dylan wrote...

For many years, John Lennon has been seen as the crazed and eccentric Beatle who provided some of the most memorable melodies the music world has ever known. After remaking pop in his own image with The Beatles, the erstwhile would-be artist and Liverpudlian reprobate went on to carve out a significant...

For his 2007 critically acclaimed 33 1/3 series title, Let's Talk About Love, Carl Wilson went on a quest to find his inner Céline Dion fan and explore how we define ourselves by what we call good and bad, what we love and what we hate. At once among the most widely beloved and most reviled...

Relive the incredible history of the King of Pop - in reverse - with Michael Jackson: Rewind. By the time Michael Jackson passed away in 2009, he had sold an estimated 750 million records worldwide over his career; He had won 26 American Music awards and 13 Grammy awards as well as the Grammy Lifetime...

From rank outsiders to pop stardom a decade later, The Damned blazed an anarchic trail through punk rock to achieve massive chart success. A beacon for the Sex Pistols and The Clash to follow, they flung down the musical gauntlet in 1976 with Britain’s first punk single ‘New Rose’. Smashing...

Patti Smith is one of pop culture’s true troubadours. Emerging from the New York punk scene of the mid-seventies whilst mixing poetry, underground theatre, jazz and rock, she has left a rebellious and individual legacy like no other. Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard and Bruce...

Pavement wrapped up at Easley Recording in Memphis. They mixed the tracks and recorded overdubs in New York. They took a step back and assessed the material. It was a wild scene. They had fully fleshed-out songs and whispers and rumors of half-formed ones. They had songs that followed a hard-to-gauge...

Hymns to the Silence is a thoroughly informed and enlightened study of the art of a pop music maverick that will delight fans the world over. In 1991, Van Morrison said, Music is spiritual, the music business isn't. Peter Mills' groundbreaking book investigates the oppositions and harmonies within...