Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung .

Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award A sweeping musical history that goes from the salons of pre-war Vienna to Velvet Underground shows in the sixties.

Discusses, among other things, guitar solos and losing your virginity to a Rod Stewart song and singers whose teeth whistle and the sort of music you hear in Body Shop. The author writes about 31 songs that either have some great significance in his life - or are just songs that he loves.

Lester Bangs was for many the most intelligent and influential critic of rock and roll. This companion to Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung compiles fifty-four of Bangs' pieces. It is suitable for those interested in the history of rock and roll.

John Coltrane, who died aged 40 in 1967, is one of half a dozen truly fundamental contributors to the history of jazz. No young saxophonist of the past forty years has been able to escape his influence, and few musicians have had their work so obsessively documented on record. This work presents a narrative of Coltrane's life.

The story of post-punk indie rock in America and the bands whose do-it-yourself ethic paved the way for the grunge phenomenon of the 1990s. Beginning with the pioneering and notorious punk band, Black Flag, the story continues with Husker Du, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and others.

Consists of three parts: Things That Are True; Things That Might Be True; and, Things That Are Not True At All .

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the principal figures associate with the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively on culture, modernity, aesthetics, literature, and - more than any other subject - music. This collection of 27 of his essays represents the full range of his music writing.

Covers the period from the late '50s, when albums began to be considered as an oeuvre, to the early twenty-first century. This book contains insights into why each album is significant, the key tracks, the circumstances of its creation, the critical reception in its day, and why it stands the test of time.

33 1/3 is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an artist's entire output, the books cut to the heart of the music on each album. Joy Division only released two albums but they led the way out of punk rock and towards Madchester.

David Bowie is holed up in his Bel-Air mansion, drifting into paranoia and confusion. Bowie has long been haunted by the emotional work of the Die Brucke movement and the Expressionists. Berlin is their spiritual home, and Bowie adopts this city as his new sanctuary. Immediately he sets to work on Low , his own expressionist mood-piece.

While the Beethoven string quartets are to chamber music what the plays of Shakespeare are to drama, even seasoned concertgoers can welcome guidance with these personal and sometimes enigmatic works. This collection offers Beethoven lovers notes on the listening experience of each quartet and a range of general perspectives.

They demonstrate the way these musics constantly cross-pollinate each other, transgressing generic boundaries, and how contemporary composers, producers, and musicians now work within complex networks of association and influence: New York art rockers Sonic Youth release a CD of works by John Cage and other avant-garde.

This is a tribute to one of the most popular jazz albums of all time Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. It contains amomgst other things transcriptions of the unedited session tapes; in-depth interviews with musicians; Columbia Records files; and a foreword by the last surviving member of the band.

Manchester, a predominantly working-class city, has been at the margins of English culture for centuries. Yet the explosion of music and creativity in Manchester can be traced back from Victorian music hall and the jazz age, through to Oasis. That is what this book does.

Sardonic, bitter, threatening, compassionate, gleeful, and most of all loud, Like a Rolling Stone is much more than a song. Six minutes and six seconds in length, it was released by Dylan despite the received wisdom of the day as to what constituted a single. Published on the 40th anniversary of its release and recording, Greil Marcus's extraordinary book reconstructs the context in which the ...

This title is one of a series of books which focus on epic albums of our time. Here, Andrew Hultkrans looks at Love's album Forever Changes .

Gould's writing on music was often as provocative as his performances as a brilliant pianist. This selection of essays includes pieces on major composers which challenge virtually every tenet of accepted taste and opinion. Other subjects include concert-giving, recording, and Barbra Streisand.

'Who Needs Classical Music?' considers the value of classical music in contemporary society, arguing that it remains distinctive because it works in different ways to the other music that surrounds us. Challenging assumptions about the relativism of cultural judgements, the book aims to restore some types of music to the status of aesthetic text.