Books in the 33 1/3 series

After his breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust and before his U.S. pop hits "Fame" and "Golden Years" David Bowie produced a dark and difficult concept album set in a post-apocalytic "Hunger City" populated by post-human "mutants." Diamond Dogs includes the great glam anthem "Rebel Rebel" as well a variety of other songs such as one of Bowie's best piano ballads, a Moog-centered tune that sounds like Emerson Lake and Palmer, and a cool funk groove. But it also contains grinding discordant guitar experimentation, a noise collage, a weird repetitive chant, and utterly unique songs that combine lush romantic piano and nearly operatic singing with scratching, grungy guitars, creepy, insidious noises, and dark, pessimistic lyrics that reflect the album's origin as a projected Broadway musical version of Orwell's 1984. In this book Glenn Hendler shows that Diamond Dogs was an experiment with the intimate connection Bowie forged with his audience. Each song on Diamond Dogs shifts the ground under you as you listen, not just by changing in musical style, but by being sung by a different "I" who directly addresses a different "you." Diamond Dogs is the product of a performer at the peak of his powers but uncomfortable with the rock star role he had constructed. All of the album's influences--Orwell, Burroughs, experimental German rock, black American music, 1930s cinema, post-human dystopias, and freak shows--looked to Bowie like ways of escaping not just the Ziggy role, but also the constraints of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. These are just some of the reasons many Bowie fans rate Diamond Dogs his richest and most important album of the 1970s.

In this remarkable and entertaining book, John Perry gets to the heart of Hendrix's unique talent, guiding the reader through each song on the album, writing about his live performances and talking to peers and contemporaries. Part of a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years.

When Odetta Holmes--classically trained as a vocalist and poised to become "the next Marian Anderson"--veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and folk tunes before mixed-race audiences in 1950s coffee houses, she was making one of the most portentous decisions in the history of both American music and Civil Rights. For many among her audience, black and white, this young woman's pride in black artistry and resolve, and her open rage and her challenge to whites to recognize who they were and who they had been, too, modeled the very honesty and courage that the movement now called for.

Two and a half decades on, Jawbreaker's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1993-94) is the rare album to have lost none of its original loyalty, affection, and reverence. If anything, today, the cult of Jawbreaker-in their own words, "the little band that could but would probably rather not"-is now many times greater than it was when they broke up in 1996. Like the best work of Fugazi, The Clash, and Operation Ivy, the album is now is a rite of passage and a beloved classic among partisans of intelligent, committed, literary punk music and poetry.Why, when a thousand other artists came and went in that confounding decade of the 90s, did Jawbreaker somehow come to seem like more than just another band? Why do they persist, today, in meaning so much to so many people? And how did it happen that, two years after releasing their masterpiece, the band that was somehow more than just a band to its fans-closer to equipment for living-was no longer?Ronen Givony's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is an extended tribute in the spirit of Nicholson Baker's U & I: a passionate, highly personal, and occasionally obsessive study of one of the great confessional rock albums of the 90s. At the same time, it offers a quizzical look back to the toxic authenticity battles of the decade, ponders what happened to the question of "selling out," and asks whether we today are enriched or impoverished by that debate becoming obsolete.

By June 1993, when Washington, D.C.'s Fugazi released their third full-length album In on the Kill Taker, the quartet was reaching a thunderous peak in popularity and influence. With two EPs (combined into the classic CD 13 songs) and two albums (1990's genre-defining Repeater and 1991's impressionistic follow-up Steady Diet of Nothing) inside of five years, Fugazi was on creative roll, astounding increasingly large audiences as they toured, blasting fist-pumping anthems and jammy noise-workouts that roared into every open underground heart. When the album debuted on the now-SoundScan-driven charts, Fugazi had never been more in the public eye. Few knew how difficult it had been to make this popular breakthrough. Disappointed with the sound of the self-produced Steady Diet, the band recorded with legendary engineer Steve Albini, only to scrap the sessions and record at home in D.C. with Ted Niceley, their brilliant, under-known producer. Inadvertently, Fugazi chose an unsure moment to make In on the Kill Taker: as Nirvana and Sonic Youth were yanking the American rock underground into the media glare, and "breaking" punk in every possible meaning of the word. Despite all of this, Kill Taker became an alt-rock classic in spite of itself, even as its defiant, muscular sound stood in stark contrast to everything represented by the mainstreaming of a culture and worldview they held dear. This book features new interviews with all four members of Fugazi and members of their creative community.

Welsh post-punk band Young Marble Giants released one LP in 1980 and then, like their vanishing portraits on the album's cover, disappeared. Even though Colossal Youth received positive reviews and sold surprisingly well, Young Marble Giants quickly slid into the margins of rock 'n' roll history-relegated to cult status among post-punk and indie rock fans. Their lasting appeal owes itself to the band's singular approach and response to punk rock. Instead of employing overt political ideology and abrasive sounds to rebel against the status quo, Young Marble Giants filled their songs with restraint, ambiguity, and silence. The trio opened up their music to new sounds and ideas that redefined punk's rules of rebellion.Where did their rebellious ideas and impulses come from? By tracing Colossal Youth's artistic origins from Ancient Greece to the 20th-century avant-garde, Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero uncover the intricacies of Young Marble Giants' idiosyncratic take on music in the post-punk age. Emerging from the gaps in between the notes are new ways of hearing the history of punk, the political and economic turbulence of the late 1970s, and the world that surrounds us right now.

It was 1969, and Miles Davis, prince of cool, was on the edge of being left behind by a dynamic generation of young musicians, an important handful of whom had been in his band. Rock music was flying off in every direction, just as America itself seemed about to split at its seams. Following the circumscribed grooves and ambiance of In A Silent Way; coming off a tour with a burning new quintet-called 'The Lost Band'-with Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette; he went into the studio with musicians like frighteningly talented guitarist John McLaughlin, and soulful Austrian keyboardist Joe Zawinul. Working with his essential producer, Teo Macero, Miles set a cauldron of ideas loose while the tapes rolled. At the end, there was the newly minted Prince of Darkness, a completely new way forward for jazz and rock, and the endless brilliance and depth of Bitches Brew.Bitches Brew is still one of the most astonishing albums ever made in either jazz or rock. Seeming to fuse the two, it actually does something entirely more revolutionary and open-ended: blending the most avant-garde aspects of Western music with deep grooves, the album rejects both jazz and rock for an entirely different idea of how music can be made.

Koji Kondo's Super Mario Bros. (1985) score redefined video game music. With under three minutes of music, Kondo put to rest an era of bleeps and bloops-the sterile products of a lab environment-replacing it with one in which game sounds constituted a legitimate form of artistic expression. Andrew Schartmann takes us through the various external factors (e.g., the video game crash of 1983, Nintendo's marketing tactics) that coalesced into a ripe environment in which Kondo's musical experiments could thrive. He then delves into the music itself, searching for reasons why our hearts still dance to the "primitive" 8-bit tunes of a bygone era.What musical features are responsible for Kondo's distinct "Mario sound"? How do the different themes underscore the vastness of Princess Peach's Mushroom Kingdom? And in what ways do the game's sound effects resonate with our physical experience of the world? These and other questions are explored within, through the lens of Kondo's compositional philosophy-one that would influence an entire generation of video game composers. As Kondo himself stated, "we [at Nintendo] were trying to do something that had never been done before." In this book, Schartmann shows his readers how Kondo and his team not just succeeded, but heralded in a new era of video games.

Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his "alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band" both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip.Before an artistic and commercial decline that resulted in a 20-year gap between Devo's last two studio records, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars, vindicated but ultimately betrayed by the birth of MTV. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code: dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet-proof pop sensibility. Through first-hand accounts from the band and musical analysis set against an examination of new wave's emergence, the first-ever authorized book about Devo (with a foreword by Portlandia's Fred Armisen) explores the group's peak of success, when their hermetic seal cracked open to let in mainstream attention, a legion of new Devotees, and plenty of misunderstandings. "Freedom of Choice was the end of Devo innocence-it turned out to be the high point before the s***storm of a total cultural move to the right, the advent of AIDS, and the press starting to figure Devo out and think they had our number," says Casale. "It's where everything changes."

In 1991, three producers released a record called Blue Lines under the name Massive Attack. It spliced together decades of American hip-hop and soul with the British postcolonial underground, creating, in a moment, the genre of trip-hop. As Blue Lines's iconic flame logo spun on turntables the world over, Massive Attack's spaced-out and sensual urban blues reimagined the sonic landscape of the 1990s and beyond.

The son of '60s star Tim Buckley blew the rock world away when he released this instant classic of astonishing range and depth. Its status has become all the more legendary as it was to be his last record - Buckley died tragically young.

The Jesus and Mary Chain''s swooning debut Psychocandy seared through the underground and through the pop charts, shifting the role of noise within pop music forever. Post-punk and pro-confusion, Psychocandy became the sound of a generation poised on the brink of revolution, establishing Creation Records as a tastemaking entity in the process. The Scottish band''s notorious live performances were both punishingly loud and riot-spurring, inevitably acting as socio-political commentary on tensions emergent in mid-1980s Britain. Through caustic clangs and feedback channeling the rage of the working-class who''d had enough, Psychocandy gestures toward the perverse pleasure in having your eardrums exploded and loudness as a politics within itself. Yet Psychocandy''s blackened candy heart center - calling out to phantoms Candy and Honey with an unsettling charm - makes it a pop album to the core, and not unlike the sugarcoated sounds the Ronettes became famous for in the 1960s. The Jesus and Mary Chain expertly carved out a place where depravity and sweetness entwined, emerging from the isolating underground of suburban Scotland grasping the distinct sound of a generation, apathetic and uncertain. The irresistible Psychocandy emerged as a clairvoyant account of struggle and sweetness that still causes us to grapple with pop music''s relation to ourselves.

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. This title offers an investigation of what is arguably Johnny Cash's greatest album, focusing on his enduring mythology.

It was the strange and mystical "Another Green World" (1975) that was the cosmic bridge between Old Eno and New Eno, between Rock and Ambient, between the guitar and the synthesizer, between the old world and electronic music as we know it. This book excavates the album's past, and untangles how it was a link to the future of electronic music.

The album that Brian Wilson created in an attempt to outdo the Beatles' Rubber Soul album. Worshipped by music lovers for its harmonies it is also regarded as an early demonstration of how to use the recording studio as an instrument. Brian Wilson has recently been touring the album again, playing it to thousands of devoted fans.

The author of the cult book "Techgnosis" writes about the big, big Led Zeppelin album. Featuring every heavy metal fan's favourite epic Stairway to Heaven, the huge sound of this album has set the template for rock. Also includes Black Dog and Rock 'n' Roll.

Transformer, Lou Reed's most enduringly popular album, is described with varying labels: it's often called a glam rock album, a proto-punk album, a commercial breakthrough for Lou Reed, and an album about being gay. And yet, it doesn't neatly fit into any of these descriptors. Buried underneath the radio-friendly exterior lie coded confessions of the subversive, wounded intelligence that gives this album its staying power as a work of art. Here Lou Reed managed to make a fun, accessible rock'n'roll record that is also a troubled meditation on the ambiguities-sexual, musical and otherwise-that defined his public persona and helped make him one of the most fascinating and influential figures in rock history. Through close listening and personal reflections, songwriter Ezra Furman explores Reed's and Transformer's unstable identities, and the secrets the songs challenge us to uncover.

Describes Master of Reality in the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric centre in southern California in 1985.

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. This book documents author's brave and unprecedented year-long quest to find his inner Celine Dion fan.