History & Criticism

After more than two decades of research and travels, Christophe Lebold, who befriended the poet and spent time with him in Los Angeles, delivers a stimulating analysis of Cohen’s life and art.

Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A....

One-time manager of the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, Japan, Ultravox, Asia, Wham!, and many others, Simon Napier-Bell recollects the 1960s in all its excess and flamboyance....

The definitive history of the rise and heyday of the revolutionary Greenwich Village music scene, based on new research and first-hand interviews with many of its legendary performers.

A frank and intimate exploration of Miles Davis' eccentric working life, drug habits, paranoia, depression....

This book provides a comprehensive overview of techno music from its inception in the 1980s to the present day. It discussed the various styles and genres that have emerged within techno, and the key artists and tracks that have helped shape the genre....

A monumental, revealing narrative history about the legendary group of artists at the forefront of West Coast hip-hop: Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur....

In this, the first book to take a big-picture view of the entire post punk period, acclaimed author and music journalist Simon Reynolds recreates a time of tremendous urgency and idealism in pop music.

Joel Selvin tells the definitive story of the Rolling Stones' infamous Altamont concert in San Francisco, the disastrous historic event that marked the end of the idealistic 1960s....

Not for You is the first full-length treatment of Pearl Jam's odyssey and importance in the culture, from the '90s to the present....

When Miranda Sawyer interviewed Liam Gallagher in 1994, his gag wishing Damon Albarn would die of AIDS became front-page news all over the world. This fascinating pop history, exploring the moment British music suddenly meant everything, explains why.

The 1971 Allman Brothers Band album At Fillmore East was a musical manifesto years in the making. Bob Beatty dives deep into the motivations of band founder Duane Allman to tell the story of what made this album one of the most important live rock albums in history....

Grunge Is Dead weaves together the definitive story of the Seattle music scene through a series of interviews with the people who were there....

This is the story of an important period in rock music, but also of the harsher results of the sixties....

A down-and-dirty chronicle of the birth and evolution of the Seattle grunge scene—from backyard skateboard ramps and underground hardcore clubs to worldwide phenomenon—as told by one of its founding fathers and lead guitarist of legendary alternative rock band, Mudhoney....

For millennia, the sacred drummers of pre-Christian Mediterranean and western Asia were women. In this inspiring book, Layne Redmond, herself a renowned drummer, tells their history.

More is at stake in the music we listen to or perform than most people are aware....

From the beloved host and creator of NPR's All Songs Considered and Tiny Desk Concerts comes an essential oral history of modern music, told in the voices of iconic and up-and-coming musicians....

Ted Gioia's History of Jazz has been universally hailed as a classic - acclaimed by jazz critics and fans around the world....

The epic, rollicking, up-and-down life of Muddy Waters—who went from Mississippi farmhand to musical legend, invented electric blues, and created the template for the rock-and-roll band and its wild lifestyle—is chronicled with rare vividness in Robert Gordon’s widely praised biography....

When blues master Robert Johnson's recordings were rereleased to great fanfare in the 1960s, little was known about his life. Biography of a Phantom is musicologist Mack McCormick's search, from the late 1960s until McCormick's death in 2015, to uncover Johnson's life story....

Born into poverty in Mississippi at the close of the 19th century, Charley Patton and Jimmie Rodgers established themselves among the most influential musicians of their era....

This is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan '80s - when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives reenergized American rock....

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung contains the wild and brilliant writings of Lester Bangs—the most outrageous and popular rock critic of the 1970s—edited and with an introduction by the reigning dean of rock critics, Greil Marcus....

England's Dreaming is the ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and the moment they defined for music fans in England and the United States....

When Miranda Sawyer interviewed Liam Gallagher in 1994, his gag wishing Damon Albarn would die of AIDS became front-page news all over the world. This fascinating pop history, exploring the moment British music suddenly meant everything, explains why. Picking out twenty key songs, delving into the surprising stories behind them and their unlikely creators, UNCOMMON PEOPLE takes us back to when Jarvis Cocker became a national hero, films like Trainspotting were international hits, rave became what everybody did - and it felt like the revolution was happening.

In Live Dead, musicologist John Brackett examines how live recordings—from the group's official releases to fan-produced tapes, bootlegs to "Betty Boards," and Dick's Picks to From the Vault—have shaped the general history and popular mythology of the Grateful Dead for more than fifty years.

By turns fascinating, funny, and bizarre, this book offers insight into the peculiar choices and idiosyncratic psychologies of hundreds of top musicians from the 1960s to the present. Originally published more than two decades ago to great success, it's been out of print for years and has now been completely updated and expanded to feature dozens of exclusive interviews, including conversations with groups like The Black Keys, The Killers, Twenty One Pilots, Coldplay, Cage the Elephant, and Vampire Weekend.

Few bands in rock history have proven to be as enduring and influential as Led Zeppelin. And during the '80s, there was an overabundance of "Zeppelin disciples," or, as guitar great Gary Moore once put it, Led Clones.

1972 installierte Elliot Mintz ein rotes Licht in seinem Schlafzimmer im kalifornischen Laurel Canyon. Wenn es zu blinken begann, wusste er: John Lennon oder Yoko Ono rufen an. Über einen Zeitraum von fast zehn Jahren telefonierten sie täglich miteinander, oft stundenlang. Elliot Mintz wurde zum engsten Vertrauten eines der öffentlichsten Paare der Welt. Er begleitete Yoko und John durch gute und schwierige Zeiten. Und er war in den Stunden, Tagen und Wochen nach Johns Ermordung an Yokos Seite.