The convergence of rock music, counterculture politics and avant-garde aesthetics in the late 1960s underscored the careers of the Beatles, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and the Velvet Underground.This book examines these artists' relationships to the historical avant-garde (Artaud, Brecht, Dada) and neo-avant-garde (Warhol, Pop Art, minimalism), considering their work in light of debates about modernism versus postmodernism.The author analyzes the performers' u...

Cover songs operate as a form of cultural discourse across various musical genres and different societal, historical and political conditions. Case studies include a comparative analysis of Jimi Hendrix's and Whitney Houston's versions of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as well as a mapping of the trajectory of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" from the original version by the Rolling Stones through cover versions by Otis Redding, Devo, and Britney Spears.The radical deconstruction of pop...

Thanks in large part to an exploitation film producer and distributor named K. Gordon Murray, a unique collection of horror films from Mexico began to appear on American late-night television and drive-in screens in the 1960s. Ranging from monster movies clearly owing to the heyday of Universal Studios to the lucha libre horror films featuring El Santo and the "Wrestling Women," these low-budget "Mexploitation" films offer plenty of campy fun and still inspire cult devotion, yet they also ...

Following the national and international upheaval and tragedy in 1968, Mexican "trash cinema" began to shift away from the masked wrester genre and towards darker, more explicit films, and disturbing visions of the modern world: films which can be called "avant-exploitation." This work covers six of those films: El Topo, Mansion of Madness, Alucarda, Guyana, Crime of the Century, Birds of Prey, and Santa Sangre.

The evolution of the record producer from organizer to auteur, from Phil Spector and George Martin to the rise of hip-hop and remixing.In the 1960s, rock and pop music recording questioned the convention that recordings should recreate the illusion of a concert hall setting. The Wall of Sound that Phil Spector built behind various artists and the intricate eclecticism of George Martin's recordings of the Beatles did not resemble live performances—in the Albert Hall...

Noisy, confrontational, and controversial, industrial music first emerged in the mid-1970s around bands and performance groups that combined avant-garde electronic music with the provocative attitude and abrasive style of punk rock. In Assimilate, S. Alexander Reed provides the first ever critical history of this fascinating and enigmatic genre, charting its trajectory from Throbbing Gristle's founding of the record label Industrial Music in 1976, to its peak in popularity with the success...

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, you'd do best to hone your chops and avoid clichés (like the one that begins this sentence) by learning from the prime movers. How to Write About Music offers a selection of the best writers on what is perhaps our most universally beloved art form. Selections from the critically-acclaimed 33 1/3 series appear alongside new interviews and insights from authors like Lester Bangs, Chuck Klosterman, Owen Pallet, Ann Powers and...

Neither a dry-as-dust reference volume recycling the same dull facts nor a gushy, gossipy puff piece, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982 is a bold book that examines punk as a movement that is best understood by placing it in its cultural field. It contains myriad critical-listening descriptions of the sounds of the time, but also places those sounds in the context of history. Drawing on hundreds of fanzines, magazines, and newspapers, the book is-in the spirit of punk-an ob...

The essential playlist of great writing about the music that rocked America, with fifty landmark pieces on Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Lez Zepplin, and other rock n’ roll legendsJonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar's Shake It Up invites the reader into the tumult and excitement of the rock revolution through fifty landmark pieces by a supergroup of writers on rock in all its variety, from heavy metal to disco, punk to hip-hop. Stanley Booth describes a record...

It was the season of the blockbuster. Between August 12 and November 26 1991, a whole slew of acts released albums that were supposed to sell millions of copies in the run-up to Christmas. Metallica, Michael Jackson, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Garth Brooks, MC Hammer, and U2 - all were competing for the attention of the record-buying public at the same time. But perhaps the most attention-seeking act of all was Guns N Roses. Their albums Use Your Illusion 1 and 2, released on the same da...

Few styles of popular music have generated as much controversy as progressive rock, a musical genre best remembered today for its gargantuan stage shows, its fascination with epic subject matter drawn from science fiction, mythology, and fantasy literature, and above all for its attempts to combine classical music's sense of space and monumental scope with rock's raw power and energy. Its dazzling virtuosity and spectacular live concerts made it hugely popular with fans during the 1970s, w...

By the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, the idea of a black man playing lead guitar in a rock band seemed exotic. Yet a mere ten years earlier, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley had stood among the most influential rock and roll performers. Why did rock and roll become “white”? Just around Midnight reveals the interplay of popular music and racial thought that was responsible for this shift within the music industry and in the minds of fans.Rooted in rhythm-and-blues pioneered by ...