"Rock and roll was birthed in basements and garages, radio stations and dance halls, in cities where unexpected gatherings of artists and audience changed and charged the way music is heard and celebrated, capturing lightning in a bottle. Musician and writer Lenny Kaye explores ten crossroads of time and place that define rock and roll, its unforgettable flashpoints, characters and visionaries, how each generation came to be, how it was discovered...

Believing that every great song has a fascinating backstory, Myers brings to life five decades of music through oral histories of forty-five transformative songs woven from interviews with the artists who created them.From Lawdy Miss Clawdy by Lloyd Price to Losing my religion by R.E.M., leading artists reveal the emotions, inspirations, and techniques behind their influential works. The result is a love letter to the songs that have defined generations....

Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multi-layered orchestration can seem bewilderingly complex. In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation-harmony, notation, sung theater, the orchestra, dance music, recording-strikes...

Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the transformation of the New York music scene in the first decade of the 2000s, the bands behind it--including The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and Vampire Weekend-- and the cultural forces that shaped it, from the Internet to a booming real estate market that forced artists out of the Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Drawing on 200 original interviews with James Murphy, Julian Casablancas,...

"A brilliant examination of literary invention through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, showing how writers created technical breakthroughs as sophisticated and significant as any in science, and in the process, engineered enhancements to the human heart and mind"--

"From celebrated music writer Dan Ozzi comes a comprehensive chronicle of the punk music scene's evolution from the early nineties to the mid-aughts, following eleven bands as they dissolved, "sold out," and rose to surprise stardom"-- "From celebrated music writer Dan Ozzi comes a comprehensive chronicle of the punk music scene's evolution from the early nineties to the mid-aughts, following eleven bands as they dissolved, "sold out," and rose to...

Focusing on the years 1971 to the present, the DJ, producer, and Sundance award-winning director chooses one essential track from each year, revealing the pivotal role that American music plays around issues of race, gender, politics, and identity.

Why is it that men, and not women, have always had power, wealth, and fame? Woolf cites the two keys to freedom: fixed income and one's own room. Foreword by Mary Gordon.

"The entire history of popular music over the past fifty years refracted through the big genres that have defined and dominated it-including rock, country, punk, R&B, dance and hip-hop-woven together into a cosmic reckoning with music's evolution as a popular art form, as a huge cultural and economic force, and as an essential component to our identities, from Black Sabbath to Black Flag to Beyoncé, and beyond"--