A is for Adam And The Ants. B is for Beatles, Bowie and Beauvoir. C is for Cage and country. D is for dada. And E is for every other music book you’ll be checking out next week. Read all about ’em:
Bet My Soul on Rock ‘n’ Roll: Diary of a Black Punk Icon
By Jean Beauvoir & John Ostrosky
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Jean Beauvoir joined The Plasmatics in 1979, playing bass and keyboards for the most notorious band to emerge out of the New York City punk scene. By 1982, he was a member of Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul, a retro-rock revival act headed by Steven Van Zandt. The Disciples of Soul videos played on MTV during the network’s earliest years, making Beauvoir one of the first Black recording artists to cross the start-up music channel’s “color line.” Beauvoir went on to become a multi-platinum artist, producer, and songwriter. Bet My Soul on Rock ‘n’ Roll follows his ride through the American music industry, detailing his encounters with rock stars such as Bruce Springsteen, Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Lita Ford, as well as the actor Sylvester Stallone, the billionaire executive Richard Branson, and even Donald Trump. Beauvoir also considers the manner in which his Haitian heritage has shaped his public image, his music, and his role as an activist for the dispossessed and the poor.”
Antmusic: An Unofficial Baiography of Adam And The Ants
By Mark N Redmayne
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Adam And The Ants were formed in London by Hornsey Art College student Stuart Goddard in 1976 following an early Sex Pistols gig. The band’s devastating combination of punk sensibility, heroic imagery and tribal rhythms saw them become one of the most iconic acts of the 1980s. Pioneers of the music video, the band achieved three top 20 albums which spawned nine top 40 singles including Cartrouble, Kings of the Wild Frontier, Antmusic, Dog Eat Dog, Antrap and the No. 1 smash hits Stand and Deliver! and Prince Charming. Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Adam Ant’s first solo No. 1 single Goody two Shoes, Mark N. Redmayne’s unofficial biography draws upon painstaking research and interviews with ex-Ants and key personnel to document how Adam rose from the ashes of punk to become the first pop star of the 1980s. In 2022, Adam Ant continues to play to devoted Antpeople of all ages around the world — this is both his and our story.”
The Beatles and Sixties Britain
By Marcus Collins
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Though The Beatles are nowadays considered national treasures, this book shows how and why they inspired phobia as well as mania in 1960s Britain. As symbols of modernity in the early ’60s, they functioned as a stress test for British institutions and identities, at once displaying the possibilities and establishing the limits of change. Later in the decade, they developed forms of living, loving, thinking, looking, creating, worshipping and campaigning which became subjects of intense controversy. The ambivalent attitudes contemporaries displayed towards The Beatles are not captured in hackneyed ideas of the ‘swinging ’60s’, the ‘permissive society’ and the all-conquering ‘Fab Four‘. Drawing upon a wealth of contemporary sources, The Beatles and Sixties Britain offers a new understanding of the band as existing in creative tension with postwar British society: their disruptive presence inciting a wholesale re-examination of social, political and cultural norms.”
John Cage and Peter Yates: Correspondence on Music Criticism and Aesthetics
By Martin Iddon
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The correspondence between composer John Cage and Peter Yates represents the third and final part of Cage’s most significant exchanges of letters, following those with Pierre Boulez and with David Tudor. Martin Iddon’s book is the first volume to collect the complete extant correspondence with his critical friend, thus completing the ‘trilogy’ of Cage correspondence published by Cambridge. By bringing together more than 100 letters, beginning in 1940 and continuing until 1971, Iddon reveals the dialogue within which many of Cage’s ideas were first forged and informed, with particular focus on his developing attitudes to music criticism and aesthetics. The correspondence with Yates represents precisely, in alignment with Cage’s fastidious neatness, the part of his letter writing in which he engages most directly with the last part of his famous tricolon, ‘composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third’.”
David Bowie The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars: In-depth
By Laura Shenton
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The album that made a huge star out of David Bowie in 1972 and introduced his Ziggy Stardust persona, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars is iconic for many reasons. Featuring the much-loved Starman, Moonage Daydream and Five Years, the story of Bowie’s fifth studio album is one that needs to be told in detail. In this book, author Laura Shenton offers an in-depth perspective on The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars from a range of angles including how the album came to be, how it was presented and received at the time (live as well as on record), and what it means in terms of Bowie’s legacy today.”
We Heart Harry: 50 Reasons Your Dream Boyfriend Harry Styles Is Perfection
By Billie Oliver
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The world may have had to say goodbye to One Direction, but that hasn’t stopped Harry Styles from stealing our hearts. From the swoop of his boy band bangs to his sheer Gucci look on the runway, the singer, actor, and all-around dreamboat is a tour de force of a cultural icon, but our love is deeper than his great choices in fashion and his dulcet tones. Did you know that Shania Twain is one of his idols? That he’s BFFs with Stevie Nicks? And that he’s generous with his money, donating to a long list of charities? This book is packed with 50 titbits of Harry Styles trivia and some very serious collages. Billie can only pray that he one day sees it and graces her with an Instagram DM. (A girl can hope.)”
Queer Country
By Shana Goldin-Perschbacher
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Though frequently ignored by the music mainstream, queer and transgender country and Americana artists have made essential contributions as musicians, performers, songwriters, and producers. Queer Country blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of these artists and their work. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher delves into the careers of well-known lesbian artists like k.d. lang and Amy Ray and examines the unlikely success of singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, who found fame 40 years after releasing the first out gay country album. She also focuses on later figures like nonbinary transgender musician Rae Spoon and renowned drag queen country artist Trixie Mattel; and on recent breakthrough artists like Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah and chart-topping Grammy-winning phenomenon Lil Nas X. Many of these musicians place gender and sexuality front and center even as it complicates their careers. But their ongoing efforts have widened the circle of country/Americana by cultivating new audiences eager to connect with the artists’ expansive music and personal identities. Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre’s history.”
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
By John Melillo
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “By reinterpreting 20th-century poetry as a listening to and writing through noise, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk constructs a literary history of noise through poetic sound and performance. This book traces how poets figure noise in the disfiguration of poetic voice. Materializing in the threshold between the heard and the unheard, noise emerges in the differentiation and otherness of sound. It arises in the folding of an “outside” into the “inside” of poetic performance both on and off the page. Through a series of case studies ranging from verse by ear-witnesses to the First World War, Dadaist provocations, jazz modernist song and poetry, early New York City punk rock, contemporary sound poetry, and noise music, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk describes productive failures of communication that theorize listening against the grain of sound’s sense.”
Popular Music Culture: The Key Concepts
By Roy Shuker
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Fully revised with extended coverage of the music industries, sociological concepts and additional references to reading, listening and viewing throughout, the new edition expands on the foundations of popular music culture, tracing the impact of digital technology and changes in the way in which music is created, manufactured, marketed and consumed. The concept of metagenres remains a central part of the book: these are historically, socially, and geographically situated umbrella musical categories, each embracing a wide range of associated genres and subgenres.”
