What are the best music books/biographies? Recently read a Beatles and an Allman Brothers one. Looking for more good books to learn music history. I know Keith Richards, Led Zeppelin, Motley Crue ones are famously wild
Ran across this article this morning Top 10 books about musical subcultures Spoiler From a study of hip-hop written a decade before it existed to the lethal story of death metal, a critic chooses writers documenting single-minded scenes with obsessive passion Helping create the myth of the rock star … Pamela Des Barres (front) with her band the GTOs in 1969, posing for Teenset magazine. Photograph: Ed Caraeff/Morgan Media/Getty Images Kelefa Sanneh Wed 5 Jan 2022 07.10 EST 56 I still have the mixtape that transformed me, at 14, from a casual consumer of whatever music my friends liked into a zealous partisan of punk rock. It’s an odd little cassette: 60 minutes of music, cohesive enough to suggest that punk rock was a thing, but variegated enough to suggest that could be just about anything. There was, apparently, a whole ocean of music more or less like this stuff. All I had to do was dive in. Punk rock is, perhaps, an unusually fractious genre: for decades, punks argued about what – and who – was or wasn’t punk. They drew lines, divided subgenres into sub-subgenres, and sometimes performed rituals of excommunication. (Green Day, probably the most popular punk group of all time, were banned from their local club, and denounced as enemies of the movement by Maximum Rocknroll, the definitive American punk fanzine.) For a while, punk rock was all I cared about, but in the years that followed I was pleased to discover that punk wasn’t quite as unusual as I first thought: every musical genre is in some sense a community of musicians and listeners, which means that every genre is also a tribe, defined by tribal rules of inclusion and exclusion. And so when I set out to write a history of popular music, I decided to go genre by genre, hoping to explain how these communities endured, evolved and splintered. In Major Labels, I settled on seven “major” genres: rock’n’roll, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music and pop. Of course, each of these contains multitudes, and one of the pleasures of writing the book was the chance to read, or revisit, countless works of single-minded musical scholarship: books that dive deep into a genre, or a scene, or a sound. This is one of the paradoxes of musical fandom: the more you cherish the ability to listen to a wide range of styles, the more grateful you should be to the musicians stubborn enough to find something they loved and stick to it. And the more grateful you should be, too, to the writers who were imaginative and perceptive enough to notice that something was going on, and write about it. 1. Deep Down in the Ghetto by Roger D Abrahams In 1964, a folklorist based in Philadelphia managed a neat trick: he published one of the most important books ever written about hip-hop, long before hip-hop actually existed. In this classic study, Abrahams records and analyses a trove of mid-century Black oral literature, setting down street-corner rhymes, tall tales and boasts – some of which are as violent, and as bawdy, as the rap records that shocked the world in the decades to come. 2. The Nashville Sound by Paul Hemphill Hemphill was not exactly a Nashville insider, which explains part of the charm of this book, published in 1970: he captured the genius and the weirdness of a country-music industry that was just starting to think of itself as such. Like virtually everyone who came after him, he noted that the genre seemed split between “traditionalists” and “the new breed”. He noticed that the town was full of performers who were “modernising the simple music of their rural southern childhoods and blurring the distinction between country and pop music” – and of course it still is. So what if it didn’t last? … Culture Club in 1983. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images Advertisement 3. Like Punk Never Happened by Dave Rimmer A very strange book: a sharp treatise on the aesthetics of pop, masquerading as a just-in-time biography of Boy George and Culture Club. In fact by the time this book was published, in 1985, Culture Club’s time at the top of the charts was pretty much over. Knowing this adds some wistfulness to Rimmer’s narrative. And it adds some context to his argument, which is that, in the aftermath of the punk explosion, a new “pop” sensibility emerged, rebelling against the punk-rock rebellion by steadfastly refusing to be rebellious. So what if it didn’t last? Who says great pop is supposed to last? 4. I’m With the Band by Pamela Des Barres When this book was published, at the peak of the hair-metal craze, some readers might have mistaken it for a gossipy compendium of backstage tales. The book’s subtitle is Confessions of a Groupie, but the main draw is the way that Des Barres, sometimes drawing from old diary entries, charts her evolution from a curious consumer of rock ’n’ roll records to an important participant in the scene that helped create the myth of the rock star. Her writing is precise and perceptive, affectionate but unsentimental. In one memorable passage, she remembers listening to Led Zeppelin II while hanging out in Jimmy Page’s hotel room. “I had to comment on every solo,” she writes, “and even though I believed the drum solo in Moby Dick went on endlessly, I held my tongue and went on pressing his velvet trousers and sewing buttons on to his satin jacket.” Leaving R&B behind? … Michael Jackson in 1993. Photograph: Rusty Kennedy/AP Advertisement 5. The Death of Rhythm and Blues by Nelson George For much of the 1980s, George was a music editor at Billboard magazine, which gave him extraordinary insight not only into the genre of R&B but the industry that nurtured it. This classic study is both a history and a manifesto – and also, more than 30 years later, a time capsule. George writes tenderly about the Black business owners who supported R&B, and sceptically about the way that 80s R&B singers (including Michael Jackson and Prince) found pop success, sometimes seeming to leave the genre behind. Was that really progress? 6. Black Noise by Tricia Rose This book, published in 1994, was one of the first academic investigations of hip-hop, although, like many of the books that came afterward, it was not entirely celebratory. Rose was devoted to hip-hop, but she was also devoted to the idea of hip-hop as a vehicle for resistance and emancipation, which means she can’t help but notice the ways in which it often failed to live up to these ideals. In describing (and sometimes decrying) the genre’s tendency to focus on “male predatory sexual behaviour”, and its existence within a network of white-owned, multinational businesses, she anticipated the way hip-hop would continue to delight and frustrate its biggest fans for decades to come. Not entirely organic … clubbers dancing at the Hacienda club in Manchester in 1988. Photograph: Peter J Walsh/Pymca/Shutterstock 7. Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds An enthusiastic and often contagious history of dance music, with a focus on pleasure: Reynolds conjures up not only how house and techno (and their many offshoots) evolved, but what it really feels like to love them. This feeling has not always been entirely organic: Reynolds pays close attention to the relationship between dance music and drugs, explaining how often, when the high changes, the beat changes, too. Advertisement 8. Lords of Chaos by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind An intense, scary book about an intense, scary scene: black metal, which in the 1990s took heavy metal’s obsession with darkness and evil to its logical conclusion. Moynihan and Soderlind chronicle a world of murder, hatred and madness; even if you don’t have any interest in the bands (or in the 2018 Jonas Åkerlund film based on this book), you may come away with a new appreciation for what it means for music to be truly extreme. 9. Love Saves the Day by Tim Lawrence How do you capture a party? Often, you don’t: the revellers go home, the DJ packs up, people move on. But in this careful work of excavation, Lawrence shows how, in 1970s New York, casual get-togethers spawned glamorous nightclubs, and eventually an entire musical subculture, reconstructing the prehistory of disco, and gesturing toward all the sounds and scenes that came afterward. Bob Stanley's 10 best music histories Read more 10. Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus Riot grrrl was at least two things at once: a musical movement, which bloomed briefly in the 1990s, and a literary movement, sparked by fanzines, which jammed together punk rock and feminism, challenging and changing the identities of both of them. This book is an indispensable cultural history that emphasises both the strangeness and the sensibleness of riot grrrl, an unlikely movement that seems, in retrospect, inevitable. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...usical-subcultures-major-labels-kelefa-sanneh
Oh and this too. I really want the Paul McCartney "Lyrics" one Best music books of 2021 Spoiler Sinéad O’Connor’s extraordinary memoir, the untold story of 90s Dancehall and a portrait in song from Paul McCartney are among the releases hitting the high notes The best music books of 2021. Illustration: Maïté Franchi/The Guardian Alexis Petridis Wed 8 Dec 2021 04.00 EST Rememberings Sinéad O’Connor (Sandycove) The singer-songwriter has a genuinely incredible story to tell – by the time she found fame, she had already experienced harrowing abuse at the hands of her mother, visitations from Jesus, a spell in a home for girls with behavioural problems, the failure of her ambition to become a priest and life as a strippergram. But what’s really striking about Rememberings is how she tells it: O’Connor is a great prose writer, even if she insists she isn’t (the piano in her grandmother’s house sounds “like the ghost bells of a sunken ship”). What could entirely understandably have been a book filled with bitterness and regret turns out to be suffused with humour and forgiveness. Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres Kelefa Sanneh (Canongate) “I’m always a bit puzzled when a musician is praised for transcending genre,” states New Yorker writer Sanneh in the introduction to Major Labels. “What’s so great about that?” The line sums up his exploration of musical tribalism: intriguing, controversial, personal. You don’t have to agree with his view about the importance of genres – rock, r’n’b, country and hip-hop among them – to find the book fascinating: his opinions are provocative. He posits that the Dixie Chicks got worse, not better, when they stopped caring about the conservative country establishment. And the story of his own progress through the US punk scene might have made a book in itself. Whether you view it as a rallying call or a eulogy in a world where everyone seems to like “a bit of everything”, it’s a unique and absorbing read. Nina Simone’s Gum Warren Ellis (Faber) Most music biographies follow a well-worn pattern: that of Warren Ellis – Nick Cave’s luxuriantly bearded foil in the Bad Seeds – does not. Ostensibly about Ellis stealing some gum that Nina Simone spat out during a performance at the Cave-curated Meltdown festival in 1999, and his subsequent treatment of it as a kind of holy relic, it winds a gloriously idiosyncratic path through his life and passions, from the mechanics of busking, to his love of Emily Dickinson and the Greek éntekhno singer Arleta. Ellis marshals his scattershot approach with intelligence and charm: you feel as if you’ve spent time in the company of a particularly perceptive raconteur. Run the Riddim: The Untold Story of 90s Dancehall Marvin Sparks (No Long Stories) Sparks – a self-styled “lifelong dancehall student” – spent 10 years researching and writing his history of Jamaica’s most successful and influential musical export since reggae’s commercial heyday. The Jamaican music industry is always fertile ground for writers – it massively punches above its weight in terms of importance and doesn’t adhere to the usual rules. This account is as insightful and revelatory as its title suggests, shining light on a wildly creative, volatile and occasionally hugely controversial genre and the culture that surrounds it. You’re left wondering why no one has written this book before, and why Sparks had to publish it himself. Advertisement Lyrics: 1956 to the Present Paul McCartney (Allen Lane) The first line in the former Beatle’s introduction to his two-volume collected lyrics posits the book as a kind of alternative autobiography. It’s a canny move, enabling McCartney to talk, often illuminatingly, about his life – he’s particularly good on his childhood in Liverpool – while skirting over anything he doesn’t want to discuss, not least his second marriage to the vilified Heather Mills. So the holes in the story gape, and the sense that we’re never going to get a full picture of McCartney the man lingers, but once you immerse yourself in the books themselves, with their plethora of beautiful photographs and collected ephemera, it scarcely matters.
I’ve actually bought several books on metal that I’ve started reading. They include: A History of Heavy Metal by Andrew O’Neill Blood, Fire, Death: The Swedish Metal Story by Ika Johannesson and Jon Jefferson Klingberg Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult by Dayal Patterson Lords of Chaos by Didrik Soderlind and Michael Moynihan I’ve already read the first one and really enjoyed it. I know quite a bit about the other three scenes so it’ll be interesting to see what the books say and how much detail they go into. I’ve heard some conflicting opinions on the last one and I’m unsure if it’s from the fans who try to downplay the bands’ actions or if it’s actually just not that good. I’ve also heard the author sides a little too much with the bands which is, uh, not great. It’s definitely the most well known book on the subject matter. After I finish these I’d like to read some on punk as well.