Books on Music

<I>saw this http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...789455?v=glance on Sherburne's blog...was wondering if anybody here has read it yet? </I>.

Reading "Audio Culture" at the moment and it's an excellent anthology.

i've got groaning shelves full of this stuff.. i'd definitely recommend Tape Delay by Charles Neal, great anthology of interviews with the main players of whatever we're supposed to call the industrial scene these days..

also, This Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad (sp?) - 20-30 page potted histories of all the brilliant, whining bastard children of america - Dinosaur Jr, Husker Du, Big Black, Butthole Surfers (a laff riot of a story), Minutemen etc...

Bass Culture by Lloyd Bradly is the best book i've read on reggae, Rude Boy by Chris Salewicz the worst.

and Eno's Year With Swollen Appendices is a gem.
"morning - installed new son et lumiere piece at the Geneva Biennialle.
evening - knocked one out over Prussian Fat Babes Monthly".

(not an actual quote )

Anyone read David Keenan's Englands Hidden Reverse? A friend tells me its great, albeit with a slight oversaturation of David Tibet interviews. Apparently gives really great incite into just how fucked up Coil really are.

Speaking of which i had a friend who was in London and got invited to a Coil party, with, of course, the catch that you had to where nothing but shoes and socks. It just aint easy being Sleazy

the Keenan book isn't bad at all, although i did think Tibet was too prominent, at the expense of NWW and Coil...

England's Hidden Reverse

Englands Hidden Reverse is a great read, i've returned again and again to it. It focuses very much on the social interralationships in the 'industrial' scene, taking up where the Coum/ TG book left off and branching out to encompass several lost bands of the era.... my only slight complaint is that the music itself isn't really analysed, critically or otherwise... the anecdotes etc are occasionally informative but i think the music of NWW,Coil and C93 is sufficiently dense and symbol-laden to merit a more thorough investigation into the meanings behind it all, whether this be the various literary references (touched upon, especially Tibet's) or the samples/ sound sources used.... as it stands the music is often left alone, to speak for itself, as if the intentionality behind it is irrelevant (i mean, this is hardly pop music and i don't feel it was ever intended to be standalone)...

or maybe this is just an extension of my latent musical geekiness and my dissatisfaction with the unknowable?

Ocean of Sound Lipstick Traces

satanmcnugget said:

saw this http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0826416152/103-8621346-4789455?v=glance on Sherburne's blog...was wondering if anybody here has read it yet?



Things I've read and enjoyed


<p><li><A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1852427434/metasoul"><i>Ocean of Sound</i> (1995) - David Toop [Amazon.com]</A>
My favourite music book


<p><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674535812/metasoul">Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of 20th Century (1989) - Greil Marcus [Amazon.com]</a>
music and politics

<p><li> <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802136885/metasoul"><i>Last Night a DJ saved My Life</i> [Amazon.com]</A>
dj and dance culture

<p><li> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415058759/metasoul">Cut 'N' Mix: Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music - Dick Hebdige [Amazon.com]</a>
black music, versioning

Thanks woebot and k-punk, for the forum
Wish you the best of luck

Jan

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when i read cut & mix (yonks ago) i remember being most amused that dick thought that the future of sounsystem culture lay in British rap (he bigs up Smiley culture)
oh how i laughed

cant bring myself to mention the G word here.(wot a fool i wuz)

Ocean of Sound is one of my fave books on music, the fragmented,digressive nature of the text is a perfect foil for the music he's talking about.

has anyone mentioned More Brilliant Than The Sun yet .....
again the text 's stylings amplifiy the music (especially the stuff on Drexciya)

satanmcnugget said:

as soon as i hunt down the book on Dennis Brown, im grabbing that Audio Culture one as well.....provided i can find it anytime soon here in Canaduh

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Mr Nugget, the Dennis Brown book has pretty bad distribution - I reckon you'll like it though. Try the reggae stores online like Ernie B or Dubvendor... if you don't get any luck I can try and sort you ahhhht.

dubversion said:

the Keenan book isn't bad at all, although i did think Tibet was too prominent, at the expense of NWW and Coil...

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Yep, and thanks for the lend.

It's ambitious, and I was more interested in the "scene" and the ideas than the music anyway. Recommended but it's really expensive for someone with a casual interest (and for me, who used to be obsessive, but is now obsessed with other things!)

I remember reading that a paperback version of England Hidden Reverse (without the cd) was annunced for the future and sure will be less expensive.

All the great book about music that i have read (the Reynols, Toop, Eshun, Morley, Moynihan, Bangs etc.) have been cited in this tread, what about a good (not great, simply good) book about atrocious music? Read "the music is all that matter" by Paul Stump about English Progressive Rock (Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, etc.). Progressive Rock lovers hated it!!! I think it still the only book on Prog that try a little of analisys (a little, not too much unfortunately) instead that uncritical unashamed fan(prog)boy praise.

francesco

the auditory culture reader http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1859736181/102-4015620-5582538?v=glance

some really nice pieces in this (although some drop into pomo drivel)- sound maps and church bells, isolation of sound (eg: through car journeys/walkmans etc) and a section (which is why i bought it) on soundsystems, which unfortunately isn't that good. it makes you realise how interesting and readable jacques attali is.


norman c. stolzoff 'wake the town and tell the people: dancehall culture in jamaica'
'academic' (written for phd) study of the development of soundsystems from days of slavery up to mid 1990s. really good section on politics of dubplates and hierarchy of artists.

beth lesser 'king jammy'

classic look at dancehall at dawn of digital era. wicked photos (although the effects piss me off) if you like 'sleng teng', beg borrow or steal...


steve blush 'american hardcore: a tribal history'

brutal, raw and opinionated (like the music) telling of h/c in early 1980s, with many interviews w/participants (bad brains, mackaye, mike watt, danzig, harvey cromag etc) quite funny actually- the author thinks hardcore died in the mid-80s and everything post that is basically 'art fag' music.


mark andersen & mark jenkins 'dance of days : two decades of punk in the nation's capital'

couldn't be more different from the above- a much softer, more liberal approach to h/c (one of the authors was/is in positive force), focussing on the DC scene- really good on rites of spring/embrace. sums up the difference between the 'intellectual' and 'street fighting' ends of h/c. could do with uk versions of these last two books.

Englands Hidden Reverse=Very Good!

Yes it was a bit pricey,but also very beautiful.
Lot of gossip about the Industrial scene in England.
Very informative and personal reading about Coil,NWW and C93.
Well done.I give it a 4,5 out of 5
Gejonte

This thread is excellent, I should have checked it earlier...anyway I'm wondering, does anyone know some key books that changed how writers approach music? Sort of like what Simon Reynolds talks about in Generation Ecstasy (er...Energy Flash) about how popular music tends to drive "progress" in music and self-styled "progressive" music is generally left to follow it from behind, building from what "The Kids" already created, that sort of thing? Looking at music from a bottom-up populist historical perspective rather than from the Big Important Artists/Auteurs-style histories (a la Ken Burns "JAZZ" series), too.

Also I want to emphasize how great "Love Saves the Day" is, easily one of the best music histories I've ever read.

rip it up and start again

Just ordered (on a very famous Internet Book/CD store) this:




so that's great news, also it's HUGE, 752 pages!!!; the not so great news you have to wait until end of April to get a copy!

thanks Simon!!!

Terrific cover.

its large but it's not THAT large

it's actually about 560 pages!!!

i wonder where they got that figure from?

at one point it was going to have a long discography of the obvious canonical stuff, just the list of the album and singles alone took up a huge amount of space, and then a second discography on the more esoteric stuff, with commentary, which turned out really vast -- over 20 thousand words. but in the end we had to pull both the discogs to save space.

so praps the the 752 pages was based on that

incidentally the discogs are going to be on available on the Faber website.

big up Francesco and all pre-order cru

really looking forward to this book.
hopefully it will mean more re-issues and people rethinking music too.

"Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties" by Ian MacDonald. Awesome book ... just lock yourself away with it and a pile of Beatles CD's.

"Head On/Repossessed" by Julian Cope - his autobiography. The first volume, especially, is priceless.

And while we're on Saint Julian, check out Krautrocksampler ... even if you don't like Krautrock the breathless descriptions will have you rushing out to buy those Amon Duul records.