Bloomsbury Academic imprint: 2928 books

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...

Extravagantly opaque, willfully vaporous - Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released by the estimable British label Warp Records in 1994, rejuvenated ambient music for the Internet Age that was just dawning. In the United States, it was Richard D. James's first full length on Sire Records...

It was 1969, and Miles Davis, prince of cool, was on the edge of being left behind by a dynamic generation of young musicians, an important handful of whom had been in his band. Rock music was flying off in every direction, just as America itself seemed about to split at its seams. Following the circumscribed...

When Genres Collide is a provocative history that rethinks the relationship between jazz and rock through the lens of the two oldest surviving and most influential American popular music periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. Writing in 1955, Duke Ellington argued that the new music called rock...

Hangin' Tough, the second album by the New Kids on the Block, has sold more than seventeen million copies worldwide since it was released in 1988. But the album and the band have also been dismissed, derided and deemed uncool by the music establishment. Almost thirty years later, the New Kids...

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, you'd do best to hone your chops and avoid clichés (like the one that begins this sentence) by learning from the prime movers. How to Write About Music offers a selection of the best writers on what is perhaps our most universally beloved...

In January of 1979, the great soul artist Donny Hathaway fell fifteen stories from a window of Manhattan's Essex House Hotel in an alleged suicide. He was 33 years old and everyone he worked with called him a genius. Best known for "A Song for You,†? "This Christmas,†? and classic duets...

The Organic Globalizer is a collection of critical essays which takes the position that hip-hop holds political significance through an understanding of its ability to at once raise cultural awareness, expand civil society's focus on social and economic justice through institution building, and engage...

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 Jesus and Mary Chain's swooning debut Psychocandy seared through the underground and through the pop charts, shifting the role of noise within pop music forever. Post-punk and pro-confusion, Psychocandy became the sound of a generation poised on the brink of revolution, establishing Creation Records...

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...

Twenty years after its release, Phish's double-CD collection A Live One has something rare and precious going for it: it still doesn't sound like anybody else. Oversized, perverse, requiring an unusual amount of listener background knowledge? Yes to all. Yet the collective improvisations it captures,...

He was the leading light of the Beat Generation writers and the most dynamic author of his time, but Jack Kerouac also had a lifelong passion for music, particularly the mid-century jazz of New York City, the development of which he witnessed first-hand during the 1940s with Charlie Parker, Dizzy...

Words like "inspiring," "expansive," and "moving" are regularly used to describe Sigur Rós's ( ), and yet the only words heard on the record itself are a handful of meaningless nonsense syllables. The album has no title-or rather, its title is no title: just an empty...