Temperature's Rising: Galaxie 500 offers both an oral history of a celebrated band and a lush tour of their personal archives. It weaves together interviews with the band members (Naomi Yang, Dean Wareham, Damon Krukowski) and their music scene peers and many collaborators, accompanied by a stunning array of rare and never-before-seen photographs, artwork and ephemera.
Every one of these 500 songs, from “Anarchy in the UK” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” helped reshape popular music and culture. Illuminating essays pay tribute to their undeniable power. “Spaces pithy commentaries with sleeve and label art. With its in-your-face attitude and strong opinions, this is a good one.”—Booklist
THE MAKING AND MEANING OF RADIOHEAD'S GROUNDBREAKING, CONTROVERSIAL, EPOCHDEFINING ALBUM, KID A. In 1999, as the end of an old century loomed, five musicians entered a recording studio in Paris without a deadline. Their band was widely recognized as the best and most forward-thinking in rock, a rarefied status granting them the time, money, and space to make a masterpiece. But Radiohead didn't want to make another rock record. Instead, they set out to create the future. For more than a year, they battled writer's block, intra-band disagreements, and crippling self-doubt. In the end, however, they produced an album that was not only a complete departure from their prior guitar-based rock sound, it was the sound of a new era-and it embodied widespread changes catalyzed by emerging technologies just beginning to take hold of the culture. What they created was Kid A. Upon its release in 2000, Radiohead's fourth album divided critics. Some called it an instant classic; others, such as the UK music magazine Melody Maker, deemed it "tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory... whiny old rubbish." But two decades later, Kid A sounds like nothing less than an overture for the chaos and confusion of the twenty-first century. Acclaimed rock critic Steven Hyden digs deep into the songs, history, legacy, and mystique of Kid A, outlining the album's pervasive influence and impact on culture in time for its twentieth anniversary in 2020. Deploying a mix of criticism, journalism, and personal memoir, Hyden skillfully revisits this enigmatic, alluring LP and investigates the many ways in which Kid A shaped and foreshadowed our world.
This volume discusses the history of alternative rock and the ethos of alt-rockers as rebels who value independence, experimentation, and truth-telling. Rather than making music for broad commercial appeal, these musicians drew from a variety of styles that were considered unfriendly for consumers. Over the years, alternative rock has spawned mash-ups of garage rock, punk, new wave, rap, thrash, and hardcore. This group of indie rockers not only created a new sound but also put forth a different attitude, as they outwardly rejected the musical standards and sales practices set by major record companies.
Experiencing Nirvana is a photo journal, grunge rock micro-history and an inside look into a crucial eight-day period in the touring life of Nirvana. In this brief period, the young band goes from breaking up in Rome to winning over the influential British music press at Sub Pop's LameFest U.K. showcase in London, setting the stage for their imminent popularity. Opening for Tad and Mudhoney at the Astoria Theatre in 1989, Nirvana's heart-pounding performance won over the crowd and changed the band's fate.
In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme—a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics—employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.
A definitive celebration packed with previously unseen material of the original punk band—the group that defined a movement, energized a generation, and brought punk music and the safety-pin aesthetic to the mainstream. The Sex Pistols have defined the look, sound, and feel of the punk movement since they formed in London in 1975. Together for less than three years—a short run that included just four singles and one studio album before they broke up in 1978—their impact on the musical and cultural landscape of the last forty years is nothing short of remarkable. The Sex Pistols—Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock (later to be replaced by Sid Vicious)—were brought together by the cultural impresario Malcolm McLaren. Between the cultivated attitude of the players themselves, the aggressive management of McLaren, and the tremendous success of their era-defining album Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols, the band embodied the punk spirit and colored the worlds of music, fashion, youth culture, and design forever. Published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the band’s formation, Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage draw on an unprecedented wealth of material—from McLaren’s handwritten letters to never-before-seen photographs of the band, Jamie Reid’s iconic album artwork, and a range of ephemera from concert tickets to fanzines—to produce the most comprehensive visual history of the band ever produced and a bible of popular culture for years to come.
A writer-musician examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. Our voices carry farther than ever before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? In this book, Damon Krukowski examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. In Ways of Hearing—modeled on Ways of Seeing, John Berger's influential 1972 book on visual culture—Krukowski offers readers a set of tools for critical listening in the digital age. Just as Ways of Seeing began as a BBC television series, Ways of Hearing is based on a six-part podcast produced for the groundbreaking public radio podcast network Radiotopia. Inventive uses of text and design help bring the message beyond the range of earbuds. Each chapter of Ways of Hearing explores a different aspect of listening in the digital age: time, space, love, money, and power. Digital time, for example, is designed for machines. When we trade broadcast for podcast, or analog for digital in the recording studio, we give up the opportunity to perceive time together through our media. On the street, we experience public space privately, as our headphones allow us to avoid “ear contact” with the city. Heard on a cell phone, our loved ones' voices are compressed, stripped of context by digital technology. Music has been dematerialized, no longer an object to be bought and sold. With recommendation algorithms and playlists, digital corporations have created a media universe that adapts to us, eliminating the pleasures of brick-and-mortar browsing. Krukowski lays out a choice: do we want a world enriched by the messiness of noise, or one that strives toward the purity of signal only?
An NPR Best Book of 2017 "This is not a book about why vinyl sounds better; it's way more interesting than that . . . it] is full of things I didn't know, like why people yell into cellphones . . . Ultimately, it's about how we consume sound as a society - which is, increasingly, on an individual basis." --NPR "If you're a devoted music fan who's dubious about both rosy nostalgia and futuristic utopianism, Damon Krukowski's The New Analog is for you." --The New York Times Book Review "A pointedly passionate look at what's been lost in the digital era." --Los Angeles Times What John Berger did to ways of seeing, well-known indie musician Damon Krukowski does to ways of listening in this lively guide to the transition from analog to digital culture Having made his name in the late 1980s as a member of the indie band Galaxie 500, Damon Krukowski has watched cultural life lurch from analog to digital. And as an artist who has weathered the transition, he has challenging, urgent questions for both creators and consumers about what we have thrown away in the process: Are our devices leaving us lost in our own headspace even as they pinpoint our location? Does the long reach of digital communication come at the sacrifice of our ability to gauge social distance? Do streaming media discourage us from listening closely? Are we hearing each other fully in this new environment? Rather than simply rejecting the digital disruption of cultural life, Krukowski uses the sound engineer's distinction of signal and noise to reexamine what we have lost as a technological culture, looking carefully at what was valuable in the analog realm so we can hold on to it. Taking a set of experiences from the production and consumption of music that have changed since the analog era--the disorientation of headphones, flattening of the voice, silence of media, loudness of mastering, and manipulation of time--as a basis for a broader exploration of contemporary culture, Krukowski gives us a brilliant meditation and guide to keeping our heads amid the digital flux. Think of it as plugging in without tuning out.
