The influence and importance of The Pixies cannot be overestimated. Their style of broken, furious yet melodic and exceptionally catchy punk rock blazed a trail for such vital bands as Mudhoney and Nirvana, the grunge movement and the 90s British indie-rock sound. Bossanova and Surfer Rosa have become familiar members of the canon of great rock albums, although the group's initial career was cut short by the dismissive actions of singer-songwriter Black Francis/Frank Black. John Mendelssohn's biography details the turbulent career of The Pixies and Frank Black, including personal struggles with other band members and Black's unusual and uncompromising solo work. Culminating with the group's 2004 reformation, this is the definitive story of The Pixies.
This book seeks to trace the rise of popular music, identify its key figures and track the origins and development of its multiple genres and styles, all the while seeking to establish historical context. It is, fundamentally, a ready reference guide to the broad field of popular music over the past two centuries. It has become a truism that popular music, so pervasive in the modern world, constitutes a soundtrack to our lives – a constant though changing presence as we cross thresholds and grow from children to teenagers to adults. But it has become more than a soundtrack; it has become a narrative. Not just an accompaniment to our daily lives but incorporating our lives, our sense of identity, our lived experiences, into it. We have become part of the music just as the music has become part of us. The Historical Dictionary of Popular Music contains a chronology, an introduction, an appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on major figures across genres, definitions of genres, technical innovations and surveys of countries and regions. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about popular music.
The emergence of indie rock as a genre has helped categorize artists who belong to independent record labels. These musicians, due to their refusal to appeal to the mainstream, have boycotted the corporate rock scene to maintain more creative control. Readers learn about the debate behind whether indie bands later picked up by major labels should still be considered "indie" and why some see them as "sell outs." Detailed sidebars, an essential albums list, and annotated quotes from artists and critics are also included to expose readers to the musicians responsible for the inception and continuance of indie rock.
Newly available in paperback, this book looks at how rap and metal have been highly engaged with America’s role in the world, supercapitalism and their own role within it. This has especially been the case when genres – hitherto clearly identified as indelibly ‘black’ or ‘white’ forms of music – have crossed over as an effect of cross-racial forms of identification and desire, marketing strategy, political engagement, opportunism and experimentation. It is how examples of these forms have negotiated, contested, raged against, survived, exploited, simulated and performed 'Satan’s rage' that is the subject of this book. The book offers a highly original approach in relating rap/metal to critical theories of economy and culture, introducing a new method of cultural analysis based on theories of negativity and expenditure that will be of great interest to students in media and cultural studies, American studies, critical and cultural theory, advertising and marketing, and sociology and politics.
It's the 1980s and the rock landscape is littered with massive hair, synthesizers, and monster riffs, but there is an alternative being born in the sleepy East of America-we just don't know it yet. Before the Internet, MTV, and iPods provided far-off music fans with information and communities-and before Nirvana-kids across the world grew up in relative isolation, dependent on mix tapes and self-created art to slowly spread scenes and trends. It was under these conditions that four young musicians found one another in Boston, Massachusetts, and started a band called Pixies. During their initial seven-year career, Pixies would play some of Europe's most gigantic festivals, keep the press guessing, and cultivate a fervid international fan base hungry for more and more of their unique surf punk. The band worked fast, cranking out four albums at a breakneck pace, but ultimately pressures and personality clashes took their toll: Pixies broke up just as bands were singing their praises as the rock'n'roll innovators. For twelve years, a Pixies reunion seemed impossible, but a sudden announcement in 2004 proclaimed the unthinkable-Pixies were getting back together. Their extremely successful reunion tour finally gave the group something they'd always lacked in their homeland: proof that their bone-rattling music had left an indelible impact. Fool the World tells Pixies' story in the words of those who lived it, from the band members to studio owners, from A&R executives, producers, and visual artists who worked with them to admirers of their music, such as Bono, PJ Harvey, Beck, and Perry Farrell. With new cartoons by Trompe Le Monde illustrator Steven Appleby, Fool the World is a complete journey through the life, death, and rebirth of one of the most influential bands of all time.
Containing 27,000 entries and over 6,000 new entries, the online edition of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music includes 50% more material than the Third Edition. Featuring a broad musical scope covering popular music of all genres and periods from 1900 to the present day, including jazz, country, folk, rap, reggae, techno, musicals, and world music, the Encyclopedia also offers thousands of additional entries covering popular music genres, trends, styles, record labels, venues, and music festivals. Key dates, biographies, and further reading are provided for artists covered, along with complete discographies that include record labels, release dates, and a 5-star album rating system.
One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity—the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism—never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?
“We are all walking around this city with our hearts sadly swimming in our chests, like dying fish on the surface of a still pond. It’s enough to make you give up entirely.” —from Instant Love But we don’t give up. We keep trying. We’re either too stupid to learn from our mistakes or we honestly believe that the next time will be different; it’s hard to say which. Driven by the mad hopefulness that is part of the human condition, we are constantly falling in and out of love with a slightly different version of the person who came before. Jami Attenberg chronicles those exact moments with heartbreaking realism in her powerful debut, Instant Love. Told through the eyes of three young women and their friends and lovers, Instant Love explores what it means to be in love, what it means to be lonely, and what it means to be both at the same time. Holly turns to computer dating to find love even as she thinks wistfully of a former boyfriend who loved her well and fed her ice cream. Maggie recounts the story of her one crazy summer to her disbelieving husband and feels the distance between them grow wider than the void across their king-sized bed. And Sarah Lee remembers the one who got away and the one she ran away from, all the while moving toward the one she can actually love. As Holly, Maggie, and Sarah Lee move through the rituals of modern love, they have to decide who is worth taking a chance on in a world where things don’t fall into place easily, people are often difficult, and disappointment is the rule. Through their stories, Attenberg presents a rare, honest look at love. Also available as an eBook.
