"Marking the 50th anniversary of the album's release, John Prine offers a chronicle of the singer-songwriter's roots in Middle America, a soulful framework filled with rich imagery and unique perspectives. John Prine's time in Chicago is often regarded as a footnote in his larger biography, which discounts its deep and lasting influence. Through a series of original interviews, exhaustive research and personal insight, author Erin Osmon, for the first...

This book is a riveting investigation of what it means to love music and what it means to hate music, both of good and bad taste. Non-fans regard Celine Dion as ersatz and plastic, yet to those who love her, no one could be more real, with her impoverished childhood, her manager-husband's struggle with cancer, her knack for howling out raw emotion. There's nothing cool about Celine Dion, and nothing clever. That's part of her appeal as an object of...

"How did a unique collaborative process between a director and composer result in a perfectly post-modern soundtrack that ran the gamut of musical styles from jazz to dreamy pop to synthesizer doom and beyond? And how did Badalamenti's musical cues work with Twin Peaks' visuals, constantly evolving and playing off viewers' expectations and associations? Under the guidance of Angelo Badalamenti's beautifully dark sonic palette, Clare Nina Norelli delves...

When Johnny Cash signed to Rick Rubin's record label in 1993, he was a country music legend who, like his fellow Highwaymen Willie, Waylon and Kris, remained a fondly regarded yet completely marginalized Nashville figure, unheard on the radio and unseen on the charts. Cash's odyssey from oldies act to folk hero pivots on his first American Recordings album, a document of almost unbearable solitude and directness. It is a singular record, an instance...

"While hip-hop was already calcifying its tropes of steely machismo and aspirational fantasy, Bizarre Ride was a pure distillation of the average hip-hop listener's actual lifestyle-the joys and sorrows of four guys who were young, broke, sexually frustrated, and way too clever for their own good. A touchstone for Kanye West, Drake, Lil B and a whole generation of off-center MCs, Bizarre Ride sketched out a whole strata of emotions that other rappers...

"Provides a window into a moment when both phantasmatic and real relationships between straightness and queerness, between blackness and whiteness, and between utopia and dystopia, were in flux; Bowie in the mid-1970s both exemplified and had a hand in creating the complex and contradictory opening of possibilities now seen as the hallmark of that decade"--

"This book dives into the sounds, images, and lyrics of To Pimp a Butterfly to suggest that Kendrick appeals to the psyche of a nation in crisis and embraces the development of a radical political conscience. Kendrick breathes life into the black musical protest tradition and cultivates a platform for loving resistance. Combining funk, jazz, and spoken word, the expansive sonic and lyrical geography brings a level of innovation to a field dominated...

"A discussion of Tapestry as a watershed in musical and cultural history, challenging the male dominance of the music and entertainment industries"-- "Carole King's Tapestry is both an anthemic embodiment of second-wave feminism and an apotheosis of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter sound and scene. And these two elements of the album's historic significance are closely related insofar as the professional autonomy of the singer-songwriter is an...