It’s the most larcenous time of the year: Thanks to the scourge of AI, it’s hard to miss the scores of fake-ass music bios being hawked online this year. The giveaways: They’re mainly available only as downloads, they’re impossibly up to date, and the covers are usually amateurish and ugly. And oh yeah; they’re a complete waste of time and money. If you really need a new book and can’t find anything good on the racks, try these new releases:
On The Records: Notes From The Vinyl Revival
By Graham Sharpe
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Far from being yesterday’s fading, forgotten format, vinyl records have survived and flourished as the music medium of choice for not only baby boomers, but all ages. Every record a collector acquires comes with a story of its own, and the recent pandemic lockdowns prompted many vinylholics, including Graham Sharpe, to look more closely at their reasons for collecting, take stock of existing collections and rediscover old favourites. On The Records: Notes From The Vinyl Revival includes interviews and contributions from voices across the record industry — shop owners, record company insiders, online/postal sellers, auction organisers, market traders of vinyl, amateur collectors — who share their stories with candour, warmth and humour. A mesmerising blend of memoir, travel, music and social history that will appeal to anyone who vividly recalls the first LP they bought and any music fan who derives pleasure from the capacity that records have for transporting you back in time.”
33 1/3 | Dil Chahta Hai Soundtrack
By Jayson Beaster-Jones
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The 2001 buddy film Dil Chahta Hai (direced by Farhan Akhtar), arguably boasted the first rock soundtrack in Bollywood. The award-winning soundtrack is an entry point into the relationship between Bollywood film songs, Hindi language music, and the Indi-pop movement of the ’80s and ’90s. Jayson Beaster-Jones draws from reviews by music critics and fans, industry interviews, and his own close analysis of the music and the film to trace the role of the Dil Chahta Hai soundtrack in transforming both the sound and production practices of Bollywood cinema in the new millennium. These songs emerged from the rock band and live performance aesthetic of writing trio Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy (Shankar Mahadevan, Ehsaan Noorani, Loy Mendonsa), with lyrics penned by the inimitable Javed Akhtar. Their collaborative compositional approach for this soundtracks and later soundtracks reveals the changing tastes of India’s urban youth audiences and how that taste fueled the rise of the rock-star narrative in Hindi films. The songs from this soundtrack paved the way for the rock and EDM-oriented compositions of Hindi-language cinema that came to dominate the first decades of the 21st century, making Dil Chahta Hai among the most influential soundtracks in Indian cinematic history.”
Music And Dance As Everyday South Asia
By Zoe C. Sherinian & Sarah L. Morelli
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Music And Dance As Everyday South Asia offers an inclusive lens through which to study the music, dance, and allied arts of South Asia, its diasporas, and the people who produce and use these cultural expressions. The authors in this collection — ethnomusicologists, dance scholars, anthropologists, and practitioners — understand music and dance as everyday lived experience. “The everyday” comprises practices of South Asians in multiple countries, whose identities include numerous castes, classes, tribes, genders, sexualities, religions, nationalities, more than 20 languages, and other affiliations. With the goal to de-emphasize an approach that fetishizes analysis of classical form and its technical virtuosity, this book instead contextualizes the understanding of aesthetic meaning within six themes: place and community; style, genre, and function; intersectional identities of caste, class, and tribe; gender and sexuality; technology, media, and transmission; and diaspora and globalization. The thirty chapters in this collection demonstrate how the arts are meaningful expressions of human identities and relationships for ordinary people as well as virtuosic performers. Each author ties their thesis to hands-on, participatory exercises that provide multiple entryways to understand and engage with cultural meaning. In so doing, they empower classroom dialogue that treats embodied experience as a vital mode of enquiry, supplementing critical textual analysis to cultivate attentive, responsive, and ethical dispositions toward the music and dance practices of other humans and their life experiences.”
