Kategoria BISAC: Music >> History & Criticism - General

For much of his career, Johnny Cash opened his shows with the tagline, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." This introduction seemed unnecessary, since everyone in the audience knew who he was -- the famous musical artist whose career spanned almost five decades, whose troubled life on and off the stage received wide publicity, and whose cragged face seemed to express a depth and intensity not found in any other artist, living or dead.

For Cash, as for many celebrities, renown was the product of both hard work and luck. Often a visionary and always a tireless performer, he was subject to a...

Was there a sudden break in the world of art, literature, and music when modernism gave way to postmodernism?

Philip Nel attacks the notion of tremendous and sudden change in artistic understanding and literary practice. Instead, in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks he proposes that a series of small but far-reaching changes drew understanding from modernism to postmodernism.

What bonds these two periods together? The constant agent of change, Nel argues, was the avant-garde. Tracking its influence on novelists, popular culture figures, and...

Investigating the stories behind the songs, and detailing every British TV and radio session, he also offers a unique analysis of each track's concert life. Granted unprecedented access to The Smiths' studio archives and to the...

The Dolls, peddling trans-gender posturing and incendiary rock 'n' roll, were dumped by the record business after making just two albums. But their influence lived on when Malcolm McLaren injected the last of The Dolls' life blood into the Sex Pistols and changed pop forever. From punk to grunge, practically every new sensation in contemporary rock has been a delayed reaction to The New York Dolls.

Too Much Too Soon celebrates all the glorious sleaze and excess of the Dolls' brief auto-destruct career through interviews with the survivors, including band members, managers,...