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The Frontman
By Harry Browne. 2013
Celebrity philanthropy comes in many guises, but no single figure better encapsulates its delusions, pretensions and wrongheadedness than U2's iconic…
frontman, Bono--a fact neither sunglasses nor leather pants can hide. More than a mere philanthropist--indeed, he lags behind many of his peers when it comes to parting with his own money--Bono is better described as an advocate, one who has become an unwitting symbol of a complacent wealthy Western elite.The Frontman reveals how Bono moved his investments to Amsterdam to evade Irish taxes; his paternalistic and often bullying advocacy of neoliberal solutions in Africa; his multinational business interests; and his hobnobbing with Paul Wolfowitz and shock-doctrine economist Jeffrey Sachs. Carefully dissecting the rhetoric and actions of Bono the political operator, The Frontman shows him to be an ambassador for imperial exploitation, a man who has turned his attention to a world of savage injustice, inequality and exploitation--and helped make it worse.From the Trade Paperback edition.98 Degrees...
By Kristin Sparks. 1999
Drew, Jeff, Nick and Justin. They're four fine guys who are taking the music world by storm with their winning…
combination of R&B and pop. Where did they come from? Where do they see themselves going? What inspires their fabulous songs? And what's going on in their personal lives? Find out the sizzling inside story on this scorchingly sexy band!In Blutopia Graham Lock studies the music and thought of three pioneering twentieth-century musicians: Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony…
Braxton. Providing an alternative to previous analyses of their work, Lock shows how these distinctive artists were each influenced by a common musical and spiritual heritage and participated in self-conscious efforts to create a utopian vision of the future. A century after Ellington's birth, Lock reassesses his use of music as a form of black history and compares the different approaches of Ra, a band leader who focused on the future and cosmology, and Braxton, a contemporary composer whose work creates its own elaborate mythology. Arguing that the majority of writing on black music and musicians has--even if inadvertently--incorporated racial stereotypes, he explains how each artist reacted to criticism and sought to break free of categorical confines. Drawing on social history, musicology, biography, cultural theory, and, most of all, statements by the musicians themselves, Lock writes of their influential work. Blutopia will be a welcome contribution to the literature on twentieth-century African American music and creativity. It will interest students of jazz, American music, African American studies, American culture, and cultural studies.Babes in Toyland
By Neal Karlen. 1994
Babes in Toyland is a rare peek into the glamorous and tough world of rock and roll--an exclusive backstage pass…
for anyone who has ever fantasized about starting a band, being discovered by a major label, recording an album, and touring the country to play music in front of thousands. Also, with its revealing look at the record business--an industry that makes the rest of show business seem positively tame--this book is as immediate as a new issue of Rolling Stone, as colorful as a good mystery, and as tart and explosive as a top-ten hit. Told with the gritty, up-close feel of a behind-the-scenes documentary film, this is the story of three young women who wanted to play rock and roll like the boys. It follows their coming together in the underground grunge-rock scene in Minneapolis, their early club days, and their discovery by Warner Bros. Records. It tracks their dramatic breakup (and reconfiguration), goes through the often funny, sometimes inspiring, and always emotional recording sessions for their album Fontanelle, and goes stage-side as they film their all-important video for MTV. Veteran journalist Neal Karlen was given unprecedented access to Warners marketing and strategy meetings, where he observed firsthand the star-making machinery that runs the pop music business. From punk rockers in the mosh pit to rock stars in mansions, Babes in Toyland contains revealing snapshots of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, and R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, as well as Beavis and Butt-head, today's most powerful rock critics. Center-stage in this story are the members of Babes in Toyland: Kat Bjelland, the punk-rock poetess who'd dreamed of being a star since she was five years old; Lori Barbero, the dreadlocked drummer and band mother who was best friend to everybody in the alternative music scene; and Maureen Herman, the brainy bassist who struggled to fit in with the group. There's also Tim Carr, the Warner Bros. A & R man who saw in the Babes the talent and drive to make it to the top of the grunge scene. Finally, there's Babes in Toyland's triumphant spot on the 1993 Lollapalooza, the most prestigious tour in rock and roll. In this real-life version of The Commitments, readers will also see how success can do more to damage a band of best friends than failure.Go Phish
By Dave Thompson. 1997
On Halloween night 1983, at an ROTC dance on a college campus deep in the heart of Vermont, the band…
subsequently known as Phish played their very first gig.It was a total disaster.But it was the beginning of an era. Here's the whole story.Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat
By Michael E. Veal, Tony Allen. 2013
Tony Allen is the autobiography of legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, the rhythmic engine of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat. Conversational, inviting,…
and packed with telling anecdotes, Allen's memoir is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the musician and scholar Michael E. Veal. It spans Allen's early years and career playing highlife music in Lagos; his fifteen years with Fela, from 1964 until 1979; his struggles to form his own bands in Nigeria; and his emigration to France.Allen embraced the drum set, rather than African handheld drums, early in his career, when drum kits were relatively rare in Africa. His story conveys a love of his craft along with the specifics of his practice. It also provides invaluable firsthand accounts of the explosive creativity in postcolonial African music, and the personal and artistic dynamics in Fela's Koola Lobitos and Africa 70, two of the greatest bands to ever play African music.Music Since 1900: Luigi Nono
By Carola Nielinger-Vakil. 2015
The anti-fascist cantata Il canto sospeso, the string quartet Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima and the 'Tragedy of Listening' Prometeo…
cemented Luigi Nono's place in music history. In this study, Carola Nielinger-Vakil examines these major works in the context of Nono's amalgamation of avant-garde composition with Communist political engagement. Part I discusses Il canto sospeso in the context of all of Nono's anti-fascist pieces, from the unfinished Fučik project (1951) to Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (1966). Nielinger-Vakil explores Nono's position at the Darmstadt Music Courses, the evolution of his compositional technique, his penchant for music theatre and his use of spatial and electronic techniques to set the composer and his works against the diverging circumstances in Italy and Germany after 1945. Part II further examines these concerns and shows how they live on in Nono's work after 1975, culminating in a thorough analysis of Prometeo.What You Wanna Know
By Samantha Stonebraker. 1999
You know him as B-Rok, a front man for the Backstreet Boys. I know him as G.B., a special nickname…
shared only between the two of us until Now. I am Brian Littrell's first love and highschool sweetheart. Brian and I were best friends for four years. I was with the Backstreet Boys from the beginning when they were just about to catch their shooting star. From signing their record deal to touring across Europe, Brian and I were inseparable. I saw the ups and downs, and want to share this amazing story with you. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to date one of the Backstreet Boys? Are there questions you've always wanted to know the truth about? After the lights go down, what are The Backstreet Boys really like? I want to share with you some personal stories about the band, and some really fun, never before seen photos of Brian and The Backstreet Boys. If it could happen to me, it could happen to you, and I want you to be prepared. I'm just a normal girl who was the first love of one of The Backstreet Boys. If you're going to be the next girlfriend or just want the hottest secrets about The Backstreet Boys, I think you'll enjoy What You Wanna Know. You'll definitely feel closer to those boys you love. Have fun with it, and enjoy! Smiles, SamanthaIt's Like That
By Joseph Simmons Run. 2000
Money, success, and widespread adulation: Run of Run-DMC, one of the first rappers to achieve nationwide recognition and top-selling albums,…
seemed to have it all in his heyday. But the dizzying effects of fame soon left Run feeling empty and dissatisfied. Stuck in a pit of despair, he went through the motions of his public life while grappling with his loss of direction and a family life that was falling apart. Here is the story of how he turned his life around, discovering a wellspring of spirituality within himself and a special connection with God. Now an ordained minister, Run talks in this extraordinary book about his profound life change and getting the message out to the community. Still a major rap performer, with an album entitled Crown Royal and frequent appearances on MTV, Run is truly a rennaissance man. A spiritual memoir unlike any other, It's Like That captures the innocence of youth, the pain of chaos, and the joy that one can only find through righteous living. This is an epic and absorbing tale from one of the most popular and complex performers of our times.The Rhino Records Story: Revenge of the Music Nerds
By Harold Bronson. 2013
In the 1970s in the backroom of a record store, Harold Bronson and Richard Foos were making history-and Rhino Records…
was born. Harold Bronson's The Rhino Records Story tells the tale of how a little record shop became a multi-million dollar corporation. Starting as an expression of Bronson and Foos' passion for rock music, absurdity, and an anti-establishment sensibility, Rhino soon outgrew its beginnings as a reissue label, taking on new artists and new mediums. Their accomplishments grew to encompass several gold record awards, the Best Label of the Year Award, the revival of careers of famous musicians, and the creation of a company to produce feature films including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This behind-the-scenes look at a company considered by many to be the industry's best, reveals the secrets to their success. Written from the perspective of cofounder Harold Bronson, The Rhino Records Story divulges a unique business approach which made Rhino what it was at the height of its success. Woven throughout this story of a rising corporation, Bronson guides us through the ascent, fall, and revival of artists Rhino touched such as the Monkees, the Turtles, the Knack, and Frankie Lymon. In a mix of hard work, passion for music, and a flair for the unconventional, the story of Rhino Records takes shape. The owners also ran their company humanely, and were awarded the Clinton administration's only Corporate Citizenship Award given to an entertainment company. Rhino Records, as it was envisioned by Bronson and Foos, had higher priorities than the bottom line. Struggling against corporate interests, rock star personalities, and a perpetual underdog reputation, Bronson provides an exclusive insight into how the industry was run and how Rhino excelled. By the fans, for the fans, Rhino Records is the story of rock history, evolving pop culture, and a unique understanding of the music that mattered.The Last Waltz: The Strauss Dynasty and Vienna
By John Suchet. 2015
Captured in a beautiful package, including more than fifty color photographs, The Last Waltz tells the intriguing story of of…
the Viennese Strauss family known for producing some of the best known, best loved music of the nineteenth century. Johann and Josef Strauss, the Waltz Kings, composed hundreds of instantly recognizable and enduringmelodies, including The Blue Danube Waltz, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Voices of Spring and The Radetzky March. Their iconic music has been featured on the scores of nearly a thousand films.Yet despite their success, this was a family riven with tension, feuds and jealousy, living in a country that was undergoing seismic upheaval. Through the personal and political chaos, the Strauss family continued to compose music to which the Viennese - anxious to forget their troubles - could dance and drank champagne, even as their country hurtled towards oblivion at the hands of the First World War. Classical music expert and radio host John Suchet skillfully portrays this gripping story, capturing the family dramas, the tensions, triumphs and disasters against the turbulent backdrop of Austria in the nineteenth century, from revolution to regicide.Porcelain: A Memoir
By Moby. 2016
From one of the most interesting and iconic musicians of our time, a piercingly tender, funny, and harrowing account of…
the path from suburban poverty and alienation to a life of beauty, squalor, and unlikely success out of the NYC club scene of the late '80s and '90s.There were many reasons Moby was never going to make it as a DJ and musician in the New York club scene. This was the New York of Palladium; of Mars, Limelight, and Twilo; of unchecked, drug-fueled hedonism in pumping clubs where dance music was still largely underground, popular chiefly among working-class African Americans and Latinos. And then there was Moby--not just a poor, skinny white kid from Connecticut, but a devout Christian, a vegan, and a teetotaler. He would learn what it was to be spat on, to live on almost nothing. But it was perhaps the last good time for an artist to live on nothing in New York City: the age of AIDS and crack but also of a defiantly festive cultural underworld. Not without drama, he found his way. But success was not uncomplicated; it led to wretched, if in hindsight sometimes hilarious, excess and proved all too fleeting. And so by the end of the decade, Moby contemplated an end in his career and elsewhere in his life, and put that emotion into what he assumed would be his swan song, his good-bye to all that, the album that would in fact be the beginning of an astonishing new phase: the multimillion-selling Play. At once bighearted and remorseless in its excavation of a lost world, Porcelain is both a chronicle of a city and a time and a deeply intimate exploration of finding one's place during the most gloriously anxious period in life, when you're on your own, betting on yourself, but have no idea how the story ends, and so you live with the honest dread that you're one false step from being thrown out on your face. Moby's voice resonates with honesty, wit, and, above all, an unshakable passion for his music that steered him through some very rough seas. Porcelain is about making it, losing it, loving it, and hating it. It's about finding your people, your place, thinking you've lost them both, and then, somehow, when you think it's over, from a place of well-earned despair, creating a masterpiece. As a portrait of the young artist, Porcelain is a masterpiece in its own right, fit for the short shelf of musicians' memoirs that capture not just a scene but an age, and something timeless about the human condition. Push play.The Multi-Talented Mr.Erskine
By Katherine Elise Chaddock. 2012
This first biography of John Erskine views him in the larger contexts of the mass culture and expanded commercialism that…
helped propel his fame. It also relates a life narrative that demonstrates perils of academic celebrity along a conceptual path from public intellectual to pop icon.Adele: The Biography
By Chas Newkey-Burden. 2011
Adele's soulful voice, catchy hits, and vulnerable personality have won her critical acclaim and widespread popularity. She has topped the…
charts in 18 countries and swept the top awards at the 2012 Grammys—but who is she? How has her tempestuous life that influenced her heartbreaking tracks? How did she overcome the challenges that threatened to derail her career? In Adele, veteran celebrity biographer Chas Newkey-Burden traces her story from her childhood in London, where she began singing at the age of four. During her teenage years she wrote her own music and attended the BRIT school, alongside the likes of Leona Lewis. After posting demos on her MySpace webpage, she earned a record deal and quickly captured hearts. Adele remains an unlikely icon. Her looks are unusual in a formulaic world of celebrity image, she suffers badly with pre-stage nerves, and she once canceled a crucial promotional trip to the U.S. because she felt too down to travel. This is a full, unflinching portrait of a genuine talent and inspiring, uncompromising woman—the curvy girl next door who conquered the world.New Music at Darmstadt
By Martin Iddon. 2013
New Music at Darmstadt explores the rise and fall of the so-called 'Darmstadt School', through a wealth of primary sources…
and analytical commentary. Martin Iddon's book examines the creation of the Darmstadt New Music Courses and the slow development and subsequent collapse of the idea of the Darmstadt School, showing how participants in the West German new music scene, including Herbert Eimert and a range of journalistic commentators, created an image of a coherent entity, despite the very diverse range of compositional practices on display at the courses. The book also explores the collapse of the seeming collegiality of the Darmstadt composers, which crystallised around the arrival there in 1958 of the most famous, and notorious, of all post-war composers, John Cage, an event Carl Dahlhaus opined 'swept across the European avant-garde like a natural disaster'.African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston
By Randy Weston. 1967
The pianist, composer, and bandleader Randy Weston is one of the world's most influential jazz musicians and a remarkable storyteller…
whose career has spanned five continents and more than six decades. Packed with fascinating anecdotes, African Rhythms is Weston's life story, as told by him to the music journalist Willard Jenkins. It encompasses Weston's childhood in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood--where his parents and other members of their generation imbued him with pride in his African heritage--and his introduction to jazz and early years as a musician in the artistic ferment of mid-twentieth-century New York. His music has taken him around the world: he has performed in eighteen African countries, in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, in the Canterbury Cathedral, and at the grand opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina: The New Library of Alexandria. Africa is at the core of Weston's music and spirituality. He has traversed the continent on a continuous quest to learn about its musical traditions, produced its first major jazz festival, and lived for years in Morocco, where he opened a popular jazz club, the African Rhythms Club, in Tangier. Weston's narrative is replete with tales of the people he has met and befriended, and with whom he has worked. He describes his unique partnerships with Langston Hughes, the musician and arranger Melba Liston, and the jazz scholar Marshall Stearns, as well as his friendships and collaborations with Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, the novelist Paul Bowles, the Cuban percussionist Candido Camero, the Ghanaian jazz artist Kofi Ghanaba, the Gnawa musicians of Morocco, and many others. With African Rhythms, an international jazz virtuoso continues to create cultural history.Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora
By Brigid Cohen. 2012
The German-Jewish emigre composer Stefan Wolpe was a vital figure in the history of modernism, with affiliations ranging from the…
Bauhaus, Berlin agitprop and the kibbutz movement to bebop, Abstract Expressionism and Black Mountain College. This is the first full-length study of this often overlooked composer, launched from the standpoint of the mass migrations that have defined recent times. Drawing on over 2000 pages of unpublished documents, Cohen explores how avant-garde communities across three continents adapted to situations of extreme cultural and physical dislocation. A conjurer of unexpected cultural connections, Wolpe serves as an entry-point to the utopian art worlds of Weimar-era Germany, pacifist movements in 1930s Palestine and vibrant art and music scenes in early Cold War America. The book takes advantage of Wolpe's role as a mediator, bringing together perspectives from music scholarship, art history, comparative literature, postcolonial studies and recent theories of cosmopolitanism and diaspora.The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams
By Alain Frogley, Aidan J. Thomson. 2013
An icon of British national identity and one of the most widely performed twentieth-century composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams has been…
misunderstood as much as he had been revered; his international impact and enduring influence on areas as diverse as church music, film scores and popular music has been insufficiently appreciated. This volume brings together a team of leading scholars, examining all areas of the composer's output from new perspectives, and re-evaluating the cultural politics of his lifelong advocacy for the music-making of ordinary people. Surveys of major genres are complemented by chapters exploring such topics as the composer's relationship with the BBC and his studies with Ravel; uniquely, the book also includes specially commissioned interviews with major living composers Peter Maxwell Davies, Piers Hellawell, Nicola Lefanu and Anthony Payne. The Companion is a vital resource for all those interested in this pivotal figure of modern music.With Billie: A New Look at the Unforgettable Lady Day
By Julia Blackburn. 2005
From Julia Blackburn, an author whose ability to conjure lives from other times and places is so vivid that one…
suspects she sees ghosts, here is a portrait of a woman whose voice continues to haunt anyone who hears it.Billie Holiday’s life is inseparable from an account of her troubles, her addictions, her arrests, and the scandals that would repeatedly put her name in the tabloid headlines of the 1940s and 1950s. Those who knew her learned never to be surprised by what she might do. Her moods and faces were so various that she could seem to be a different woman from one moment to the next. Volatile, unpredictable, Billie Holiday remained, even to her friends, an elusive and perplexing figure.In With Billie, we hear the voices of those people–piano players and dancers, pimps and junkies, lovers and narcs, producers and critics, each recalling intimate stories of the Billie they knew. What emerges is a portrait of a complex, contradictory, enthralling woman, a woman who knew what really mattered to her. Reading With Billie, one is convinced that she has only just left the room but will return shortly.After Mahler
By Stephen Downes. 2013
The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures…
and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.