This book chronicles the Kyoto/Kansai 1980s hardcore punk scene through the album Don't Be Swindle by S.O.B., with a focus on Kyoto's main venues and the networks they created.Apart from being the center of Japan's cultural heritage, Kyoto is home to one of Japan's leading avant-garde art and music scenes. The Kyoto University-affiliated venue Seibu Kodo has historically been the focus of this scene, creating an ethos and organizational core which hosted m...

With the outbreak of war in 1914, an estimated 30,000 German civilians in African and Asian colonies were violently uprooted and imprisoned. Britain's First World War internment of German settlers seriously challenged the structures that underpinned nineteenth-century imperialism. Through its analysis of this internment, this book highlights the impact that the First World War had on the notion of a common European 'civilising mission' and the image of empire in the early twentieth century...

Which role did East Asia play in the First World War? How did East Asian commentators see and interpret the total(izing) war in Europe and elsewhere? Which lessons did they draw from this experience for their own societies? How did economic networks shift? Which influence did the war have on East Asian visions of world order? This volume aims to introduce new scholarship, in many cases by hitherto untranslated East Asian authors. It is part of a larger movement in current historiography to...

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted?Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have ind...

“A monumental new volume. . . . Revelatory, even revolutionary. . . . Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable.” — Boston GlobeOne of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History)Historian Christopher Clark’s riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I.Drawing on new schol...

A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: "Superb" ( The New York Times Book Review).In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very surviv...

Created in the late 1960s, fashionable in the early 1970s and hated in the 1980s Progressive Rock has a colourful and eventful story. Many of the genres main protagonists, including Genesis, Yes, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, remain as popular as ever, while lesser-known names like Camel, Caravan, Renaissance, Van der Graaf Generator and Gentle Giant retain cult status.Prog expert Stephen Lambe guides the reader through the early years as the music developed out of the B...

A portrayal of how and why Japan waged war from 1931-1945 and what life was like for the Japanese people in a society engaged in total war.

Ecstasy did for house music what LSD did for psychedelic rock. Now, in Energy Flash, journalist Simon Reynolds offers a revved-up and passionate inside chronicle of how MDMA (ecstasy”) and MIDI (the basis for electronica) together spawned the unique rave culture of the 1990s.England, Germany, and Holland began tinkering with imported Detroit techno and Chicago house music in the late 1980s, and when ecstasy was added to the mix in British clubs, a new music subculture was...

King of Prussia, German Emperor, war leader and defeated exile, Kaiser Wilhelm II was one of the most important - and most controversial - figures in the history of twentieth-century Europe. But how much power did he really have?The acclaimed historian Christopher Clark follows Kaiser Wilhelm's political career from his youth at the Hohenzollern court through the turbulent decades of the Wilhelmine era into global war and the collapse of Germany in 1918, to his last days. He asks: ...

As the twenty-first century dawns, China stands at a crossroads. The largest and most populous country on earth and currently the world's second biggest economy, China has recently reclaimed its historic place at the center of global affairs after decades of internal chaos and disastrous foreign relations. But even as China tentatively reengages with the outside world, the contradictions of its development risks pushing it back into an era of insularity and instability -- a regression that...

**AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe definitive history of twenty-first-century indie rock—from Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie to Phoebe Bridgers and St. Vincent—and how the genre shifted the musical landscape and shaped a generation**Maybe you caught a few exhilarating seconds of “Teen Age Riot” on a nearby college radio station while scanning the FM dial in your parents’ car. Maybe your friend invited you to a shabby local rock club and you ended up having a religious...