Classic rockers, soul powerhouses, jazz icons, folk troubadours, pop icons, country phenoms, hip-hop icons, European punks and more; they’re just some of the artists being paged next week. Read all about ’em:
Long Train Runnin’: Our Story of The Doobie Brothers
By Pat Simmons, Tom Johnston & Chris Epting
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Only a very few rock bands have had the longevity, success, and drama of The Doobie Brothers. Born out of late 1960s NorCal, and led by Pat Simmons and Tom Johnston, they stood alongside their contemporaries The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers, and many others as an iconic American rock band. The train was rolling along, hits were flowing like wine, and arenas were packed with fans who wanted to see them live … then Johnston, the band’s frontman and lead guitarist, became ill and had to leave. The Doobies’ train came to a screeching halt. All of a sudden the band started contemplating the end of the road only seven years into their career, just as things were taking off. But Simmons made sure they were far from the end and began the process of keeping the band together through most of the next decade. A soul-steeped backup singer for Steely Dan named Michael McDonald took a shot at singing some of the Doobies’ songs on tour, and all of a sudden a new chapter in The Doobie Brothers’ story began. The band expanded their sound and had even more hits with their new front addition. Tom recovered from his health issues, but the band had moved on. When it came time for a reunion concert in the ’80s, Tom got the call and was back in the mix. Led once again by Pat and Tom, The Doobie Brothers have been touring ever since and maintain a massive fan base the world over. Never before have Pat and Tom shared their story, in their own words. In Long Train Runnin’ they’ll change that.”
Black Moses: The Hot-Buttered Life and Soul of Isaac Hayes
By Mark Ribowsky
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Within the stoned soul picnic of Black music icons in the ’60s and ’70s, only one could bill himself without a blush as Moses, demanding liberation for Black men with his notions of life and self — Isaac Lee Hayes Jr., the beautifully sheen, shaded, and chain-spangled acolyte of cool, whose high-toned “lounge music” and proto-rap was soul’s highest order — heard on 22 albums and selling millions of records. Hayes’s stunning self-portraits, his obsessive pleas about love, sex, and guilt bathed in lush orchestral flights and soul-stirring bass lines, drove other soul men like Barry White to libidinous license. But Hayes, who called himself a “renegade,” was a man of many parts. While he thrived on soulful remakes of pop standards, his biggest coup was writing and producing the epic soundtrack to Shaft, memorializing the “black private dick” as a “complicated man,” as coolly mean and amoral as any white private eye. This new musical and cultural coda delivered Hayes the first Oscar ever won by a Black musician, as well as the Grammy for Best Song. Yet few know Hayes’s remarkable achievements. In this compelling buffet of sight and sound, acclaimed music biographer Mark Ribowsky — who has authored illuminating portraits of such luminaries as Stevie Wonder, Little Richard and Otis Redding — gallops through the many stages of Hayes’s daring and daunting life, including his work at Memphis’s legendary soul factory Stax Records (where he created crossover smashes for Sam & Dave), his subsequent career as a solo artist (which featured out-of-the-box ideas and studio methods), his time as a Scientologist, his comeback as the voice of Chef on South Park and his tnrey into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. His influence will last for as long as there is music to be heard. We can dig it.”
Bob Dylan in the Big Apple: Troubadour Tales of New York
By K.G Miles
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Here we follow Bob Dylan during his time in New York. Looking at the locations, including the less trodden Dylan trails, the characters he befriended as well as stories that formed the backdrop to his life and work. We follow in his early footsteps into the Cafe Wha? as well as, more recently, the Beacon Theatre. Along the way we take in fighting on Elizabeth Street, the ‘crummy’ hotel, the tavern ‘on the corner of Armageddon Street’ and the Tuscarora Indian Reservation and more. We also take the Rolling Tyre Walk as well as the Talkin’ Washington Park Square picnic.”
Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label
By Dan Hassler-Forest
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Singer. Dancer. Movie star. Activist. Queer icon. Afrofuturist. Working class heroine. Time traveler. Prophet. Feminist. Android. Dirty Computer. Janelle Monáe is all these things and more, making her one of the most fascinating artists to emerge in the 21st century. This provocative new study explores how Monáe’s work has connected different media platforms to strengthen and enhance new movements in art, theory, and politics. It considers not only Monáe’s groundbreaking albums The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady, and Dirty Computer, but also Monáe’s work as an actress in such films as Hidden Figures and Antebellum, as well as her soundtrack appearances in socially engaged projects ranging from I May Destroy You to Us. Examining Monáe as a cultural icon whose work is profoundly intersectional, this book maps how she is actively reshaping discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. Tracing Monáe’s performances of joy, desire, pain, and hope across a wide range of media forms, it shows how she imagines Afrofuturist, posthumanist, and postcapitalist utopias, while remaining grounded in the realities of being a Black woman in a white-dominated industry. This is an exciting introduction to an audacious innovator whose work offers us fresh ways to talk about identity, desire, and power.”
Artie Shaw: A Musical Biography and Discography
By Vladimir Simosk
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Artie Shaw, the world-famous clarinet-playing bandleader who became popular during the Swing Era, was immersed in the music business as a performer for 30 years, from the summer of 1924, when he began to study saxophone, until the summer of 1954, when he stopped performing. This period of activity is the focus of this musical biography and discography, a detailed account of Shaw’s musical career and recorded output. The book begins with a summary of Shaw’s career in the contexts of jazz history and social setting, then moves into more detail. The chronologically arranged sections, mirroring each phase of his career, incorporate contemporary reviews and interview quotes to create an insightful narrative. The discography lists all known recordings and is separate from the text to facilitate easy reference. Includes appendixes and index.”
Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be
By Marissa R. Moss
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “It was only two decades ago, but, for the women of country music, 1999 seems like an entirely different universe. With Shania Twain, country’s biggest award winner and star, and The Chicks topping every chart, country music was a woman’s world: specifically, country radio and Nashville’s Music Row. Cut to 2021, when women are only played on country radio 16% of the time, on a good day, and when only men have won Entertainer of the Year at the CMA Awards for a decade. To a world where artists like Kacey Musgraves sell out arenas but barely score a single second of airplay. But also to a world where these women are infinitely bigger live draws than most male counterparts, having massive pop crossover hits like Maren Morris’s The Middle, pushing the industry to confront its deeply embedded racial biases with Mickey Guyton’s Black Like Me, winning heaps of Grammy nominations, banding up in supergroups like The Highwomen and taking complete control of their own careers, on their own terms. When the rules stopped working for the women of country music, they threw them out and made their own: and changed the genre forever, and for better. Her Country is veteran Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss’s story of how in the past two decades, country’s women fought back against systems designed to keep them down, armed with their art and never willing to just shut up and sing: how women have reinvented the rules to find their place in an industry stacked against them, how they’ve ruled the century when it comes to artistic output ― and about how women can and do belong in the mainstream of country music, even if their voices aren’t being heard as loudly.”
The N-Word in Music: An American History
By Todd M Mealy
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The minstrelsy play, song, and dance Jump, Jim Crow did more than enable blackface performers to spread racist stereotypes about Black Americans. This widespread antebellum-era cultural phenomenon was instrumental in normalizing the N-word across several aspects of American life. Material culture, sporting culture, consumer products, house-pets, carnival games and even geographic landmarks obtained the racial slur as a formal and informal appellation. Music, it is argued, was the catalyst for normalizing and disseminating those two ugly syllables throughout society, well beyond the environs of plantation and urban slavery. This weighty and engaging look at the English language’s most explosive slur, described by scholars as the atomic bomb of bigoted words, traces the N-word’s journey through various music genres and across generations. The author uses private letters, newspaper accounts, exclusive interviews and, most importantly, music lyrics from artists in the fields of minstrelsy, folk, country, ragtime, blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and hip hop. The result is a reflective account of how the music industry has channeled linguistic and cultural movements across eras, resulting in changes to the slur’s meaning and spelling.”
Thug Life: The True Story of Hip-Hop and Organized Crime
By Seth Ferranti
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “From the penitentiary to the streets, it’s on and popping. Thug life is more than spitting rhymes or hustling on the corner. Thugs live and die on the streets or end up in the “belly of the beast.” Rappers name-drop guns by model number and call out drug dealers by name. Gangsta rap is crack-era nostalgia taken to the extreme. It’s a world where rappers emulate their favorite hood stars in videos, celebrate their names in verse, and make ghetto heroes out of gangsters. But what happens when hip-hop and organized crime collide? From the blocks in Queens where Supreme and Murder Inc. held court to the neighborhoods of Los Angeles where Harry-O and Death Row made their names to Rap-A-Lot Records and J Prince in Houston, whenever rap moguls rose the street legends weren’t far behind. From Bad Boy Records and Anthony “Wolf” Jones in New York to Gucci Mane and the Black Mafia Family in Atlanta to Too Short and Daryl Reed in the Bay Area, thug life wasn’t glamorous. The shit on the street was real. In the game there was a common struggle to get out of the gutter. Cats were trying to get their piece of the American dream by any means necessary. Drug game equals rap game equals hip-hop hustler. In Thug Life, Seth Ferranti takes you on a journey to a world where gangsterism mixes with hip-hop, a journey of pimps, stick-up kids, numbers men, drug dealers, thugs, players, gangstas, hustlers, and of course the rappers who live dual lives in entertainment and crime. The common denominator? Money, power, and respect.”
Hip-Hop en Français: An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World
By Alain-Philippe Durand
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Hip-Hop en Français charts the emergence and development of hip-hop culture in France, French Caribbean, Québec, and Senegal from its origins until today. With essays by renowned hip-hop scholars and a foreword by Marcyliena Morgan, executive director of the Harvard University Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, this edited volume addresses topics such as the history of rap music; hip-hop dance; the art of graffiti; hip-hop artists and their interactions with media arts, social media, literature, race, political and ideological landscapes; and hip-hop based education. The contributors approach topics from a variety of different disciplines including African and African-American studies, anthropology, Caribbean studies, cultural studies, dance studies, education, ethnology, French and Francophone studies, history, linguistics, media studies, music and ethnomusicology, and sociology. As one of the most comprehensive books dedicated to hip-hop culture in France and the Francophone World written in the English language, this book is an essential resource for scholars and students of African, Caribbean, French, and French-Canadian popular culture as well as anthropology and ethnomusicology.”
Coming To Berlin: Global Journeys Into An Electronic Music & Club Culture Capital
By Paul Hanford
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Coming To Berlin reflects, through the lives and music of migrants, settlers and newcomers, how a constantly in flux city with a tumultuous history has evolved into the de facto cultural capital of Europe. And how at the heart of this, electronic music and club culture play a unique role. A plea for multiculturalism and a love letter to the borderless potential of music, the book breaks the tradition of Berlin’s perception as techno ground zero and shows the true diversity and richness that make up this city. Told through Paul Hanford’s novelistic narration, Coming To Berlin mixes imagination and interview, psychogeography and narrative, humour and horror. Each chapter follows encounters with people who have made the city their own, including club legends Mark Reeder, Danelle DePicciotto and Monika Kruse. We catch glimpses of the 1980s punk and art movement, the Genialle Dillentanten, and how it led towards the birth of modern club culture in the city. We follow the Turkish hip-hop scene on the streets of Kreuzberg. And under threat from gentrification, into the post-pandemic world where clubs, a 30-year long pulse stopped, we hang out with artists reshaping electronic music into new genres and even new genders.”
Deindustrialisation and Popular Music: Punk and ‘Post-Punk’ in Manchester, Düsseldorf, Torino and Tampere
By Giacomo Bottà
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The book is a comparative study of popular music cultures in 1980s Torino, Tampere, Manchester and Düsseldorf and their relation to the industrial city as imaginary, as heritage and as everyday reality. Popular music genres, such as hardcore punk, house, industrial, post-punk and heavy metal, share a common origin in 1980s decaying industrial cities. All these genres have been canonized and understood as “scores” for grey, gloomy, decaying urban industrial environments or for their evocation, but is there an organic relationship between de-industrialization and this kind of music production?”
Tribute: Donna Summer
By Michael Frizell
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “LaDonna Adrian Gaines knew she had a gift. Her voice filled her hometown church, her power to belt evident to all within earshot. After auditioning and landing a role in the touring company for the musical Hair, her star rose fast. Crowned “the Queen of Disco” due to hits like Love to Love you Baby and Bad Girls that filled discotheques, Donna Summer became a household name. The life of the self-proclaimed “ordinary girl” who did “extraordinary things” is explored in the latest tribute comic from TidalWave.”
