Good books about music

Please kill me.

Oh well. Read it anyway. It's amazing. And Our Band Could Be Your Life. If you're interested in criticism, check out Psychotic Reactions and Carbeurator Dung or anything by Lester Bangs or one or two Greil Marcus books (The Basement Tapes). I'd stay away from Camden Joy, contrary to popular opinion.

I need something that doesn't take too long to get into

But you're going to college, man! Just buy Adorno's Essays on Music and accept that the next 4+ years of your life are going to be like that mwahahaha...

I also enjoyed Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and there's the ever-classic Generation Ecstasy.

I had never heard of Tate until I saw him speak not long ago. He is a BAD. ASS. Does he still write for The Voice? I feel like I never see him in there. Does he have a blog?

I'm mostly interested in reading a book of his since his prose is fairly magnificent.

If you want a cracking funny read on hip-hop, though, pick up The Rough Guide to Hip-Hop by Peter Shapiro, which has just been updated and enlarged (it was a pocket-size the first time, now it's 8 x 10). Best line goes to the Bad Boy Records writeup, when he notes that Puff Daddy, having been responsible for 40% of all 1997's number ones, moved to the Hamptons "so he could live by the sea, just like his magic dragon namesake."

Same here! (Of course there's also the Led Zep bio.)

Next week on "The O.C.": Seth and Ryan get into a fatal disagreement over "James Taylor: Marked For Death," while Summer meets a new hottie who shares her disgust of Nick Hornby.

Dino by Nick Tosches (about Dean Martin; as deep as Catch a Fire by Timothy White, as entertaining as that Motley Crue book)

Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story, by Tony Scherman (oral history/autobiography of the New Orleans drummer; had me at "Louis Armstrong was a pimp"...)

We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen (better than Please Kill Me, kind of like L.A. punk itself)

I was torturing this guy in the garage of my mom's house in this nice suburban neighborhood with my whole family inside eating Easter dinner... and I'd got this guy tied up in the rafter with a rope around his legs and I'm beating him with a two-by-four. I said, "Hang on a minute," and put the two-by-four down and walked into the house and kissed my aunt and said like, "Oh hi, how you doing?" I grabbed a deviled egg, told them I'd be back in a minute, and I went back out, grabbed the two-by-four, and kept workin' on the guy. I finally had to get out of Vicious Circle 'cause of the violence. There were constant stabbings and beatings and people cruising by my house at night, shooting up the neighborhood....

I did something pretty bad to somebody and they retaliated with guns. It was a big deal, I had to split to Alaska for a while, they cut the lines on my car, blew up my car... fuck...I don't wanna say who they were, but they weren't punks... boy, they were pissed off.

i went on holiday with the Deborah Curtis book and the Nick Drake biography once. happy times, let me tell you.

if you ever find dave rimmer's "once upon a time in the east", abt berlin east and west b4 the fall of the wall, i utterly UTTERLY recommend it: tho it's only somewhat abt music - unlike his earlier (and also good) "like punk never happened"

Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic is being reissued sometime this year.

Electronic and Experimental Music by Thom Holmes
also; Wireless Imagination (d kahn / g whitehead)
Paul Griffiths - A Concise History of Avant-Garde Music
Paul Griffiths - Modern Music And Beyond
Curtis Roads
William Duckworth : Talking Music
Cage: Silence / A Year From Monday
Cage / Feldman: Conversations
James Tenney : Meta / Hodos
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stockhausen on Music (Compiled by R Maconie)
Sound By Artists (ed. Dan Lander)
Chris Cutler - File Under Popular
Attali - Noise
Russolo - The Art of Noises (get a hold of a copy any way you can)
Trevor Wishart - On Sonic Art
Douglas Kahn - Noise Water Meat

i think the attali book is lousy at book length—it's a good short polemic idea bulked out to a contradictory nonsense schema—and wireless imagination is patchy (which is a pity, cz it's a great idea for an essay collection)

The Elvis Guralnick books - again, you don't have to care about the subject matter to enjoy them (personally, I was so-so on Elvis before readin' 'em, am now an unabashed fan), and the second one is one hell of a car wreck: the descent starts like twenty pages into it, and by the end of the book you can't even feel sorry for the guy anymore, you just wonder why he hasn't kicked the bucket already.

"Where Did Our Love Go?" by Nelson George has some nice anecdotes, and is probably the best book on Motown around, tho to be frank I didn't learn all that much from it.

"The Heart Of Rock & Soul" seconded, and throw in the "New Book Of Rock Lists" too, if only for the sheer joy of reading the sentence "Tragedy The Intelligent Hoodlum Lists..." over and over again (not that book of rock jokes, tho, that was awful.) And also "Fortunate Son: The Best Of Dave Marsh", great stuff on Elvis, Muddy Waters, latino rock, etc.

I remember reading Maryiln Manson's "The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell" in my early teens and being surprised by how good it was (I'd always loathed the guy's music.) Dunno if it holds up.

"Sweet Soul Music", hell yeah.

I've read the entirety of Christgau's consumer guide online, and there's some great, great stuff there. So the books are recommended, too.

yay I've been wanting to read that one for a while!

adding to my prev post here leroi jones 'blues people' which I just finished this morning: most gd bks on music accept that they aren't just abt notes and chords.

You mean it's not long enough? I loved the book. Should re-read it...

I also loved the Lexicon Devil (bio on Darby Crash) though it's certainly not essential...

the ONLY thing wrong with JMC's line is that he somewhat slightly seems to accept the assumption that the social dimension—the "dance"—isn’t also always part of all music in the West (though he does this in the context of getting ppl to see/hear/look for the fuller sense of the meaning of music): taking his insights abt Africa (Ghana, to be more accurate) and applying them everywhere else is revelatory

Most of it is a charming telling of him learning African drumming in Ghana

And I hope someone someday undertakes a lengthy Sabbath bio.

I liked this review of my book from the classical site Sequenza21:

Philip Freeman: In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor (Wolke Verlag)

The first book-length biography of one of America’s most innovative musicians is something of a specialty read: Taylor’s life story isn’t as fascinating as Sun Ra or Miles Davis, and Freeman isn’t as gifted a raconteur as John Szwed or Quincy Troupe. But fans of Taylor’s music will find this an essential volume, tracing his career, influences, and—to an extent anyway—his personal life. Freeman downplays the oft-claimed importance of Messiaen, sympathizing with critics who consider the connection between Taylor’s playing and European atonality “superficial”. Freeman does concede that during Taylor’s time at New England Conservatory, Messiaen visited Boston for the premiere of Turangalîla and a performance of the Quartet for the End of Time that featured one of Taylor’s professors on cello. One interesting connection that Freeman does make is with Richard Twardzik, an obscure New England pianist whose playing combined Bud Powell, Erroll Garner and Schoenberg.

Freeman confirms what’s long been known in private about Taylor’s sexuality, revealing that although Taylor was rarely open about his homosexuality, he understood his attraction to men from an early age (leading to an estrangement from his father). Taylor’s use of cocaine to help fuel his hyperactive marathon solo sessions is also acknowledged. Freeman portrays his subject as socially awkward, sacrificing almost everything for his music, and William Parker is quoted about Taylor’s seeming lack of empathy. But there’s otherwise relatively little insight into what made up the personality of such a complex, driven man. I could have also used more detail about Taylor’s aesthetic philosophy, including his Afrocentric view of musical structure in relation to the human body. But the dutiful chronicling of recording and performance dates and personnel will be useful to aficionados, and there’s no denying the importance of this volume in furthering our understanding of this controversial and enigmatic musician.

I'm about to finish "3 Shades of Blue" by James Kaplan, a Christmas present. I've enjoyed it but not sure I'd call it a "good" book about music necessarily. Mostly it's comprised of information from major biographies of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans by Davis/Troupe, Lewis Porter, and Peter Pettinger, respectively, so if you've read these three, you might skip. It's not clear to me what the book is about exactly -- something about how Kind of Blue was some kind of special moment in music before free jazz and the Beatles changed American culture? Mercifully he doesn't dwell on this or try to formulate some kind of thesis, he's just sort of hinting at different things in an impressionistic way while mostly focusing on the chronology and on the details, the people, the recording engineers, girlfriends, fans, protegés, songs, compositions, and anecdotes -- all of which is great of course. Lots of fuel for listening and re-listening.

I enjoyed the sprinkling of biography into the book ("The first time I heard this I was..." type things) but didn't really care for his middlebrow rock critic taste hierarchies, which are mercifully few and far between and not too intrusive.

Ultimately it's very easy to read and has an inspired me to brush up on my Miles chronology / sidemen knowledge, and also to spin lots of records. So a thumbs up

I just got sent the David Toop book on Dr John's Gris Gris 2 Headed Doctor for my birthday. Not read beyond the intro so far but looks fantastic. Nice of my brother to connect it with my tastes cos I hadn't requested it. Looking forward to getting to read it.

He also sent me the MC5 oral history which I did ask for. I think I may have read part of it elsewhere cos I think there is an element of anthologising pre published material but good to have a nice thick history with a few photos I don't remember seeing before. Would still love an actual photo book showing off the clothing that wives and girlfriends were making for them.

For Xmas I got a personal copy of Joe Boyd's & The Roots Of Rhythm Remain. I have read half of the book as a library loan but there's a long queue for copies and only a handful in the system.
Fantastic look into various ethnic musics he has had some personal contact with. Pretty long at 800+ pages. So wondering if anybody is getting through the thing before not being able to renew it, though I guess most people aren't reading several things at the same time. Particularly since it is a pretty fascinating read.
He looks into tracks which organically grow into biographies and possibly histories. So there's a level of amorphousness involved. I'm really enjoying it anyway.

A second Zoomcast with Chuck Eddy for my music-video book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2KU1BDQKh0

I’m slowly reading that Joe Boyd book. It’s going to take me a while! Almost at the end of the Cuba section and it’s super impressive but tbh my eyes are kinda glazing over each time he mentions a new NYC or Cuban bandleader. It’s just sooo much information, I’m having trouble keeping up. Looking forward to wrapping up this section and getting to Jamaica, India, Brazil in particular.

I saw there was at least one Spotify playlist up for it.
Boyd seems to have avoided pinning things to a discography which seemed a shame.
I got through half of the book then had to return it to library. Now own a copy so need to pick it up again.

I still need to get the Boyd book

Slightly related to Joe, I'm greatly enjoying Rose Simpson's book about her time in The Incredible String band, she has a very intricate way of describing what it must have been like living in that era.

Boyd’s book White Bicycles is terrific as well, if yall haven’t read it.

^this

I have a great set in my digital library of a thing Boyd did w/ Robyn Hitchock, where Boyd reads from White Bicycles and then Hitchcock covers Dylan, The Move, Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and Pink Floyd.

I saw them do that live, great fun!

ha I did not dig the White Bicycles book, he's a bit of a name dropper

Some people just know and have worked with a lot of famous people. I think he’s earned the privilege.

yeah totally but i thought it messed up the writing and got the stories off track. and it came off as brag a licious

recently i've read the Steve Wynn, the Elijah Wald/Dave Von Ronk and the Wald Dylan books, and Mark E. Smith's Renegade. All were really excellent, the Walds were my favs.

Wynn kinda name drops too but he's a great writer and the stories are interesting.

Trying to think. If namedropping bugs you would you like the latest one. Seems to be him following personal ties to some degree. So might put you off.
I think I've thought both were good but I read White Bicycles back a lot closer to release and I'm not sure if I have since.

I think I enjoy him greatly anyway.
Would like more. Has the new one been an Ongoing project for most of the interval between. That and remastering various things or organising that at least.

I really liked Rose Simpson's book. Would recommend it if you just want an inside look at what that life was like (communal living while being in ISB, the not-very-swingin' aspects of the Sixties et.al).

oooooh

got three new music books for Christmas, not sure which to read first:

Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos - Gary Stewart
To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse - Howard Fishman
Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock - Christoph Dallach

got neu klang too!

The Dallach book is interesting if you're a long-standing krautrock fan, but it's definitely not a good entry point for newcomers.

I wrote about it back in September in my newsletter:

I bought Christoph Dallach’s Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock despite not being a particularly obsessive fan of the music filed under that heading. I love Tangerine Dream’s early ’70s albums, especially 1972’s Zeit, and Can’s albums with vocalist Damo Suzuki (Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days), and Klaus Schulze’s 1970s work. I like Kraftwerk. I like the first Neu! album. I know I’ve heard Amon Düül II’s Yeti, and have listened to a surprising number of Faust albums, though the only ones I really like are Outside the Dream Syndicate, their collaboration with violinist Tony Conrad, and 1994’s Rien, which some say was as much a Jim O’Rourke creation as a Faust album. (I saw Faust live sometime in the late ’90s. I don’t remember anything about the music, only that one of the members set off a road flare, filling the entire club with smoke as thick as dryer lint.) But I wouldn’t call myself well versed in Krautrock. (Do Kraftwerk even count, honestly?)

Still, the book proved to be very interesting. And that’s at least in part because it seemed to align with something I think too many music writers ignore, namely the connections between seemingly discrete events and actors in a particular cultural environment at a given time. A “scene” typically exists not just in conversation with itself, but with all the other “scenes” bubbling up at the same time. One of the best books to really grapple with this is Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, which explores the music being made in NYC between 1973 and 1977 in as much detail as possible, from salsa and hip-hop uptown to punk rock, minimalist composition, and loft jazz downtown. It’s panoramic and kaleidoscopic at once, and it’ll upend almost any preconception you might have had about that decade and that artistic milieu.

Neu Klang does something similar, perhaps even larger, by placing Krautrock (a term created by a Virgin Records marketing executive and quickly picked up by journalists) into the context of postwar German society. The majority of the musicians interviewed were children in the 1950s, and they talk about growing up in a country that…well, as Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit (born in 1938) puts it, “Most of the teachers in my schooldays had a Nazi past…By 1968 the war was only twenty years ago, and plenty of Third Reich mud had stuck. What we did then with Can had a lot to do with clearing away that past.”

Beyond the issue of de-Nazification, which seems to have been half-hearted at best, the overwhelming sense the reader gets is of extreme poverty. Peter Baumann, an early member of Tangerine Dream, recalls, “My first memories of Berlin start around ten years after the war. What’s stuck with me is that there wasn’t any fruit. When things were going well, my parents would get us an orange once a week, which we shared between the four of us.”

When the discussion moves to music, Dallach’s approach shows that “Krautrock” was in fact part of a broad movement in late ’60s German culture that encompassed all the arts, as well as left-wing politics, sexual experimentation, and more. He doesn’t just interview the members of notable bands like Can, Faust, Amon Düül II and others; he also talks to free jazz players Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Peter Brötzmann, who knew the rock artists and collaborated with them (Jaki Liebezeit was a free jazz player before joining Can) and were also part of the larger scene. Musicians talk about attending demonstrations, and — more chillingly — encounters with members of early ’70s radical terrorist group the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Gang.

The book isn’t perfect by any means. It’s an oral history, so the only people quoted are those who were still alive when it was being written and those who would talk to the author (Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk are notably absent), and it presupposes a lot of knowledge on the reader’s part — the “Biographical Notes” section, in which everyone’s identity is explained and key recordings are listed, is at the very back of the book, rather than up front, which would have been much more helpful to me, anyway. Still, it’s very interesting, and I would recommend reading it alongside Rob Young’s All Gates Open: The Story of Can and Edgar Froese’s Tangerine Dream Force Majeure: The Autobiography, and maybe even Harald Kisiedu’s European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany 1950-1975.

Has anyone here read Jan Reetze's 'Times & Sounds'?

Have Eberhard Weber's autobio and the Arthur Russell "Travels Over Feeling" books but dunno which to begin first. Have read Tim Lawrence's excellent AR bio so could easily do Weber first but the photos in the AR are drawin' me iiiin!!

The Weber book is worthwhile, at least depending on your tolerance for German complaining about everything from food to transportation. That aside, it's a good read.

Did not enjoy Neu Klang as much as I'd hoped

Hahaha! Now I'm really looking forward to reading it!

I read a few pages of Graham Lock's Anthony Braxton book, Forces in Motion, last year, and put it aside for a future time. The future is now — about halfway through and really enjoying it, and listening to Braxton (and Roscoe Mitchell and Ruth Crawford Seeger etc etc) to accompany.

That's such an amazing book. Three of the concerts described in it are available on Bandcamp now:

https://anthonybraxtonleo.bandcamp.com/album/quartet-london-1985

https://anthonybraxtonleo.bandcamp.com/album/quartet-coventry-1985

https://anthonybraxtonleo.bandcamp.com/album/quartet-birmingham-1985

Yeah, I listened to Birmingham after reading Lock's brief description of the show. Kind of sore that it's the only one of the three not on Tidal.

Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos - Gary Stewart

this sounds great, you should read it and tell us about it

xxxp to Maresn3st - that is my husband!

Anyone read any of the books in this series / from this publisher? They just announced a new one about Fountains of Wayne:

https://jcardpress.com/shop/p/fountains-of-wayne

I read the Braniac one and enjoyed it though I'm not necessarily a fan of their music. It takes a mostly journalistic approach to piecing their story together.

I wrote the J-card book on De La Soul and would be excited for more people to read it, I spent a year or two researching and writing it and feel generally good about how it turned out.

does anyone know when the 33 1/3 people start to accept proposals? i read it was usually at the beginning of the year but i wondered if anyone had more info that than. i am working on a proposal!

oops i meant than that

please read my book lol

Good luck. I have some useful counsel for you left over from my rejected proposal for Black Vinyl Shoes 19 years ago (opening paragraph):

Are you sure you want this to be a book that sells? There's a lot of pressure and a lot of time commitments that go along with a best-selling book--have you given any thought to that?

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

I am currently re-reading Carl Wilson’s 331/3 book on Celine Dion, which is even more fascinating and thought provoking than I had remembered.

Graham Lock's Anthony Braxton book, Forces in Motion

I read this a couple of months ago and it really is an eye-opening book. It's a perfect mix of theoretical discussion and storytelling/anecdotes, and it makes the challenge of Braxton's work less forbidding; not only in terms of his own explanations and approach, but the author's open bewilderment at some of the tangents of the composer's thought. It made me realize it's OK to appreciate this music on whatever level of sophistication and understanding you're able to bring to it.
It's also a great portrait of this group of artists on tour trying to make something of their art in sometimes inhospitable locations, and the connections to students or audiences they're able to make in spite of this difficulty.

How is the Rob Sheffield Taylor Swift book?

I enjoyed it a lot - a good mix of analyzing her music and the fandom/cultural impact. Smart observations on how her songs work on listeners. Goes deep in places and keeps a broad view of Swift's career and her place in music. For my taste it could have been a bit less starry-eyed in places, I'd love to read a Taylor Swift book willing to get more critical or risk upsetting the fans even

I am currently re-reading Carl Wilson’s 331/3 book on Celine Dion, which is even more fascinating and thought provoking than I had remembered.

― mike t-diva, Saturday, January 18, 2025 7:59 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

that's cool. i hope Celine Dion returns the favor by writing a book about the Beach Boys

Lol

hah

Recently read — or listened to, more accurately — “Major Labels” by Kelefa Sanneh. Enjoyed it a great deal more than I thought I would. He was nicely inclusive and open-minded, but not so much that the wind blows through. I gather he’s not rated ‘round these parts.

― an incomprehensible borefest full of elves (hardcore dilettante), Wednesday, November 2, 2022 6:05 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I thought this was really well done for how ambitious it is. Sometimes enormous artists are summarized in a paragraph or two, and you can't help but feel like, "that's it?" But more often he is able to tell bigger narrative arcs about genres and microgenres by piecing together how those artists fit together and played off one another. And the way he weaves in his personal experiences as a punk rock kid and child of immigrants really elevates it. Some may be turned off by how he's seemingly able to find something to like (or at least excuse) in nearly every corner of popular music but suspect that will resonate with others around here as it did for me.

For my taste it could have been a bit less starry-eyed in places, I'd love to read a Taylor Swift book willing to get more critical or risk upsetting the fans even

I may be about halfway through, and ... yeah, for a book whose subtitle is "How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music," in so far as the book even engages with its/a/the thesis the conclusion seems to be "by being really popular and really good and really nice and really pretty and omg now I'm crying squuuuuuuuuuuueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ... " Sheffield's enthusiasm is as usual mostly endearing, and he's the rare music writer who can get away with mentioning Slint in a Taylor Swift book, but ... jeez, man, layoff the gas a little. It's best reading it as just a collection of short essays about Taylor Swift.

In other news, I read the Steve Turner Mudhoney book and thought it was ultimately pretty lamestain. By the end I felt like I was in a stranger's living room watching a slideshow of family vacations.

Finished the Sheffield. Swift herself finally broke down my barriers with the "Miss Americana" doc. I can't call myself a fan, not really, but the movie earned my respect. This book, it makes a good further case for her intelligence, both musical and strategic, and also as a worthy subject of intelligent writing. Even if ultimately it's too fanny, if ever an artist deserved a fan's-perspective hagiography as breathless and smart (and thankfully short) as this, it's Taylor. Who, after all, is pretty critic proof by this point; the book does a good job capturing what all the critics miss or get wrong, even when they're right.

This is very much an indiepop-nerd anecdote, but there's a typo in that book where Sheffield writes Tender Trap when he means Temper Trap, which almost gave me a heart attack for a second thinking Taylor Swift was a Tender Trap fan...

I agree with the book making a case for her intelligence, that's a good way to put it

thank god there's a dude out there prepared to make a case

Of possible interest to other Canadians, especially older ones: there's a Peter Goddard collection coming out in March.

https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/one-foot-on-the-platform-a-rock-n-roll-journey/9781487010430.html

Before I'd ever heard of Marcus or Christgau or anybody (except maybe Lillian Roxon), I knew Goddard from The Toronto Star. He was a relic by the time I started writing in the mid-'80s (and moving from music to movies and other things, I recall), so I have no idea how well his stuff will hold up; thinking just about the writing I did early on, not very well would be my guess. But I'll buy the book anyway. In the early '80s he published a list of the greatest and worst singles ever, and I sent him a whiny letter. He actually responded in a funny, sarcastic way. (Goddard died in 2022.)