Based on Martin Strong's The Great Rock Discography, this is a compact version featuring 500 of the most influential figures in the history of popular music. It expands on the format of the previous title, in which full track listings for all albums, b-sides for all singles, labels, UK and US chart positions, band members, recommended listening, style analysis, band histories - from original line-ups to dissolution, solo projects, potted biographies, a pricing guide for rare albums and release dates are given.
Understanding Popular Music is a comprehensive introduction to the history and meaning of popular music. It begins with a critical assessment of the different ways in which popular music has been studied and the difficulties and debates which surround the analysis of popular culture and popular music. Drawing on the recent work of music scholars and the popular music press, Shuker explores key subjects which shape our experience of music, including music production, the music industry, music policy, fans, audiences and subcultures, the musician as 'star', music journalism, and the reception and consumption of popular music. This fully revised and updated second edition includes: *case studies and lyrics of artists such as Shania Twain, S Club 7, The Spice Girls and Fat Boy Slim * the impact of technologies including on-line delivery and the debates over MP3 and Napster * the rise of DJ culture and the changing idea of the 'musician' * a critique of gender and sexual politics and the discrimination which exists in the music industry * moral panics over popular music including the controversies surrounding artists such as Marilyn Manson and Ice-T * a comprehensive discography, guide to further reading and directory of websites.
With 'Key Concepts in Popular Music', Roy Shuker presents a comprehensive A-Z glossary of the main terms and concepts used in the study of popular music.
Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) is one of the most beloved albums of all time. A sonically stunning exploration into dark themes of madness, death, anxiety, and alienation, it has sold a staggering 30 million copies worldwide, and continues to sell 250,000 copies a year. Besides being perhaps the most fully realized and elegant concept album ever recorded, The Dark Side of the Moon was also one of the most technically advanced LPs of its day. It has aged remarkably well and still sounds as contemporary and cutting edge as it did on the day it was released. A perfect blend of studio wizardry and fearless innovation, The Dark Side of the Moon is illuminated by John Harris's exploration of the band's fractured history, his narrative skill, and his deft exploration of the album's legacy, such as its massive influence on bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. Drawing on original, new interviews with every member of the band-bassist and chief songwriter Roger Waters, guitarist Dave Gilmour, keyboardist Rick Wright, and drummer Nick Mason- The Dark Side of the Moon is a must-have for the millions of devoted fans who desire to know more about one of the most timeless, compelling, commercially successful, and mysterious albums ever made.
Martin Strong's best-selling and highly acclaimed monster reference book is now in its fourth edition. Encyclopaedic in scope, the book contains incomparable details on all the great figures in the development of the rock genre.
Until recently, glam rock has been a mere footnote in popular music history: a style-over-substance lark in an otherwise serious industry. Glam Rock: Music in Sound and Vision reveals the true story of how glam carved out a place as a diverse musical style and how it related to the artistic, political, economic, emotional, sexual, and commercial scenes of the late twentieth century. Committed to spectacle but also to musical ingenuity, glam delivered an exhilarating burst of color that offered a joyful reboot for pop culture—“a total blam blam!” Glam swept through Britain to North America in the early 1970s with the foundational stardom of T Rex and David Bowie, offering an alternative to the established rock and pop styles that had started to bore a segment of young listeners. As Alice Cooper and KISS filled concert arenas, British acts as diverse as the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Queen consciously adopted glam’s flair for drama. Refreshing and reinvigorating, glam influenced later musical movements and moments from glitterfunk to punk, from new wave to new romanticism, and from hair metal to the synth-pop of self-conscious changelings like Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga. In Simon Philo’s engaging history, glam finally gets the spotlight it deserves. As an essential force in the history of popular music, glam offers a prism through which to explore ’70s pop culture in all its glitter and charm.
Here is the complete, no-holds-barred biography of the late, great self-made Essex lad himself!The abrasive Dury always met life head on, in his relationships and in his music, and this acclaimed biography does not shrink from chronicling some of his darker moments as well as his triumphs. Author Richard Bells talked to over 50 of Dury's friends as well as Dury himself shortly before his death.Dury's extraordinary life was always a battle. As a rocker, lyricist, artist and actor he was unsentimental and uncompromising. As a man he was harder to fathom - until now. In this classic rock biography, the self-styled 'diamond geezer' stands revealed as a real diamond after all.This edition is updated to cover the release of the biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock 'N' Roll, and includes original interviews with Oscar-winning actor Andy Serkis who portrayed Dury in the film.
The new edition of Popular Music: The Key Concepts presents a comprehensive A-Z glossary of the main terms and concepts used in the study of popular music.
Updated and expanded second edition of this Award Nominated book (nominated for the 2014 ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research). Strictly limited edition of 50 copies in green jacket design. B&C started life as a distribution company, which was set up as a sister company to Island. Island's early success led B&C's owner, Lee Gopthal, to start releasing records in his own right. However, B&C's main strategy was based on licensing records rather than signing artists in its own right and many of B&C's labels concentrated on singles and budget compilation albums - strategies that set the seeds of the company's own destruction. The end, when it came in 1975 was probably inevitable. Still, whilst B&C was about, some very good music got released, almost despite itself on occasion. This book includes comprehensive discographies covering the Action, Stable, B&C, Charisma, Pegasus, Peg, People, Mooncrest, Dragon, Sussex and Seven Sun labels.
Before The Beatles landed on American shores in February 1964 only two British acts had topped the Billboard singles chart. In the first quarter of 1964, however, the Beatles alone accounted for sixty percent of all recorded music sold in the United States; in 1964 and 1965 British acts occupied the number one position for 52 of the 104 weeks; and from 1964 through to 1970, the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, the Kinks, the Hollies, the Yardbirds and the Who placed more than one hundred and thirty songs on the American Top Forty. In The British Invasion: The Crosscurrents of Musical Influence, Simon Philo illustrates how this remarkable event in cultural history disrupted and even reversed pop culture’s flow of influence, goods, and ideas—orchestrating a dramatic turn-around in the commercial fortunes of British pop in North America that turned the 1960s into “The Sixties.” Focusing on key works and performers, The British Invasion tracks the journey of this musical phenomenon from peripheral irrelevance through exotic novelty into the heart of mainstream rock. Throughout, Philo explores how and why British music from the period came to achieve such unprecedented heights of commercial, artistic, and cultural dominance. The British Invasion: The Crosscurrents of Musical Influence will appeal to fans, students and scholars of popular music history—indeed anyone interested in understanding the fascinating relationship between popular music and culture.
