Kategoria BISAC: Music >> Genres & Styles - Rock

Nas was playing a role on Illmatic, even if it was himself. By constructing this persona, Nas not only laid out his own career for the next decade plus, but the careers of dozens of other rappers who were able to use their considerable skills to develop similar personas. His brazen ambition has become a road map for every rapper who hopes to reach an artistic peak. It seems right that Nas would make Illmatic at the age when maturity begins to turn boys into men. This was, in many regards, the first album of the rest of hip hop's life.

A decade and a half ago,...

"In the absence of love, there is loneliness, sorrow and desperation. And that's where I come in." --Greg Dulli, introducing "When We Two Parted" onstage in San Francisco

Like no record before or since, Gentlemen is fraught with the psychological warfare, bedroom drama, Catholic guilt, reprehensible deception and uncleansable shame that coincide with relationships gone seriously wrong. This story explores what happens when intellectual sophistication is star-crossed with outspoken braggadocio, a charismatic mixture that managed to alienate the mainstream horde and arms-folded indie...

Christopher R. Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing - even occasionally stomping on vinyl that sounded too clean. Using production techniques that have never been duplicated, the Bomb Squad plundered and reconfigured their own compositions to make frenetic splatter collages; they played samples by hand together in a room like a rock band to create a "not quite right" tension; they hand-picked their samples from only the ugliest squawks and...

To absorb Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash is to be taken on a wild voyage with a cast of downtrodden revolutionaries. Despite this notion, the epic themes of the Pogues' second full length record have been overlooked by both critics and biographers in favor of two things: the band's penchant for combining Celtic folk with punk rhythms ("the sound") and the excesses of Shane MacGowan ("the creator"). Instead of reiterating these aspects, this book discusses, in the form of a sea-faring narrative, the record's articulation of what it is found to be magnificently trodden. Through epic...

Posing more riddles than the average sphinx, with its decipherable answers pointing somewhere dark, Song Cycle was anything but passive. I had already witnessed hippie bands playing with their backs to the hall, so the thought of late '60s musicians being interested in their audience struck me as a concept bordering on revolutionary.

The debut album from songwriter and pianist Van Dyke Parks, Song Cycle first appeared in 1968 on Warner Brothers Records. Its twelve songs led listeners through Joycean wordplay and sound collages to reveal messages of dissent and personal...

* She was in the studio when the Beatles recorded The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be, and she sang in the "Hey Jude" chorus.

* She lived with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd and unwittingly got involved in Pattie's famous love story with Eric Clapton.

* She's the subject of Leon Russell's "Pisces Apple Lady."

* She worked for the Rolling Stones on their infamous 1972 tour and did a drug run for Keith Richards.

* She's "the woman...

A superb new study of Jerry Lee Lewis that's as intense and fast paced as the life of "The Killer" himself, from the height of fame to the bumpy road that followed

"The category in which Jerry Lee Lewis truly belongs is 'Jerry Lee Lewis.' The Killer is as big as Mount Rushmore, and he's also as American, as revered, as cliched, as misunderstood, as corny, and as taken for granted as that monument. The curse of iconoclastic American success. Elvis felt it, so does Dylan. So will others who haven't been born yet."

The story of Louisiana hellcat Jerry Lee Lewis and his 1958...

Of all the seminal albums to come out in 1991--the year of Nevermind, Loveless, Ten, and Out of Time, among others--none were quieter, both in volume and influence, than Spiderland, and no band more mysterious than Slint. Few single albums can lay claim to sparking an entire genre, but Spiderland--all six songs of it--laid the foundation for post rock in the 1990s. Yet for so much obvious influence, both the band and the album remain something of a puzzle.

This thoroughly researched book is the first substantive attempt to break through some of the...

A brilliant new biography of the extraordinary, outrageous performer who helped open the floodgates of Rock'n'Roll
In June, 2007, Little Richard's 1955 Specialty Records single, "Tutti Frutti," topped Mojo magazine's list of "100 Records That Changed the World." But back in the early 1950s, nobody gave Little Richard a second glance. It was a time in America where the black and white worlds had co-existed separately for nearly two centuries. After "Tutti Frutti," Little Richard began garnering fans from both sides of the civil rights divide. He brought black and white youngsters...