Based on original interviews, 1970s Rock details the decade's huge range of popular music, evocatively chronicling the artists, trends, and songs of this vibrant period. The scope of sub-genres covered includeds Glam rock, Southern rock, country rock, progressive rock, art rock, folk rock, heavy metal, punk rock, disco, jazz-rock fusion, New Wave, and singer-songwriter oriented material. Artists that get particularly trenchant coverage include Neil Young, The Sex Pistols, Paul Simon, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Bruce Springsteen.
NPR Great Read of 2016 From the acclaimed author of Rip It Upand Start Again and Retromania—“the foremost popular music critic of this era (Times Literary Supplement)—comes the definitive cultural history of glam and glitter rock, celebrating its outlandish fashion and outrageous stars, including David Bowie and Alice Cooper, and tracking its vibrant legacy in contemporary pop. Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late Sixties, glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds takes you on a wild cultural tour through the early Seventies, a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up, thrilling music and larger-than-life personas. Shock and Awe offers a fresh, in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon, placing it the wider Seventies context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genre’s major themes—stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse—Reynolds tracks glam’s legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from Eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to twenty-first century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga. Shock and Awe shows how the original glam artists’ obsessions with fame, extreme fashion, and theatrical excess continue to reverberate through contemporary pop culture.
Featuring interviews with and articles on each of the biggest artists of the decade, Uncut History of Rock: The 1970s takes the reader on a journey through the decade, not only covering the music and how it was made, but the people behind it - and what made them. With hundreds of incredible photographs as well as iconic album covers and posters, this book allows you to re-live the greatest decade of music the world has ever seen in all its glory.
The Seventies is must reading for anyone who wants to revisit that glam decade and the contributions it made to our culture. The contributors take you on a fascinating journey that looks at the Black Panthers, Jonestown, glam rock, black action films and gay male subcultures as well as including queer rereadings of cultural phenomena, examinations of clothing and seventies bodies, and an essay on the meaning of sound in the seventies.
‘It’s amazing that this style came to be. Can you imagine being a struggling musician back then? It must take an incredible amount of restraint to play that gently.’ —Actor/comedian Fred Armisen, from his foreword to this book Just what is ‘yacht rock,’ you ask? Perhaps the easiest description is music that would not sound out of place being played while carousing aboard a yacht back in the good old days. But these songs were also some of the top pop gems of the 1970s and '80s. And while some associate yacht rock’s biggest songs with one-hit wonder artists, several of rock’s most renowned artists fall under this category, too - including Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, The Doobie Brothers, Toto, and more. Yacht rock seemed to have become extinct by the early twenty-first century … until a comedic video series, simply titled Yacht Rock, went viral and introduced captain’s hats and blazers to a whole new generation - as well as the emergence of a popular cover band, the Yacht Rock Revue, and of course, Jimmy Fallon’s on-air admiration of all things yacht rock. Now, yacht rock is one of the most celebrated ‘yesteryear’ styles of pop music, and has resonated with a new generation of musicians (including the Fred Armisen/Bill Hader-led Blue Jean Committee and soul/funk/electronica crossover act Thundercat). But despite all the hoopla, there has never been a book that told the entire story of the genre. Until now. Featuring interviews with many of the heavy hitters of the genre, including John Oates, Kenny Loggins, and Don Felder, The Yacht Rock Book leaves no sail unturned. This is the definitive story of the yacht rock’s creation, rise, chart-smashing success, fall, and stunning rebirth.
The first time on the open road with Dad's beat-up clunker and a brand-new driver's lecense. That first kiss. Practicing Steve Tyler moves in the garage. Lazy summer days with nothing to do but hang out with a group of friends and the radio. Classic Rock. In Classic Rock Stories, classic rockers reveal the sometimes painful, sometimes accidental, and often hilarious process of creating the songs that you can still sing aloud. In their own words, rockers like Pete Townshend, John Lennon, Stevie Nicks, Elton John, and Keith Richards tell about the drugs, the pain, the love gone bad, and the accidents that resulted in the hits.
This volume gathers together twenty articles from among the best scholarly writing on rock music published in academic journals over the past two decades. These diverse essays reflect the wide range of approaches that scholars in various disciplines have applied to the study of rock, from those that address mainly the historical, sociological, cultural and technological factors that gave rise to this music, to those that focus primarily on analysis of the music itself. This collection of articles, some of which are now out of print or otherwise difficult to access, provides an overview of the current state of research in the field of rock music, and includes an introduction which contributes to the ongoing debate over the distinction (or lack thereof) betweenrock andpop.
