Books in the Tempo: A Rowman & Littlefield Music Series on Rock, Pop, and Culture series

Phil Rose delves into Radiohead's work and its cultural context, drawing out how the music addresses political, environmental, and social crises. This book reveals the true depth and musical genius that has solidified Radiohead's place in rock history and pop culture.

George Plasketes provides a comprehensive chronicle of Warren Zevon's 40-year, 20-record career and his enduring cultural significance. Throughout, Plasketes explores the musical, cinematic, and literary influences that shaped Zevon's distinctive style and songwriting themes.

In The British Invasion, Simon Philo illustrates how this remarkable event in cultural history disrupted and even reversed pop culture's default flow of influence, goods, and ideas-orchestrating a dramatic turn-around in the commercial fortunes of British pop in North America that turned the 1960s into "The Sixties."

In 1986, when Bon Jovi's third studio album, Slippery When Wet, was released, America had found its next superband. In Bon Jovi: America's Ultimate Band, Margaret Olson chronicles the history and music of the band from its inception to present day. She closely examines Bon Jovi's musical and social relevance to listeners past and present, exploring the remarkable ways the band has emerged as the expression and product of deep cultural needs and how, within a few years of commercial success, it has made a lasting impact on Generation X, the music business, and American culture. Through opportunities offered by cable television (particularly MTV), Hollywood, and corporate brands, Bon Jovi has been able to influence not only the music, film, and television industries but also the worlds of fashion, musical theater, art, philanthropy, and politics.Like any megaband, its members have struggled with addiction, the demands of fame, and a lack of critical respect. They have persevered, however, to become one of the United States' world's best-selling touring bands. Bon Jovi is a testament to the way modern culture and entertainment can become intertwined, and its success underscores the length of the band's career, the professionalism of its management, the recognition of what audiences want, and the unique way the musicmore than anything elseboth reflects and shapes the social and musical American landscape it inhabits.Titles in the Tempo series are ideal introductions to major pop and rock artists, the music they produce, and their cultural and musical impact on society. Bon Jovi: America's Ultimate Band should interest fans, students, and scholars alike.

Like other major music genres, ska reflects, reveals, and reacts to the genesis and migration from its Afro-Caribbean roots and colonial origins to the shores of England and back across the Atlantic to the United States. Without ska music, there would be no reggae or Bob Marley, no British punk and pop blends, no American soundtrack to its various subcultures. In Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation, Heather Augustyn examines how ska music first emerged in Jamaica as a fusion of popular, traditional, and even classical musical forms. As a genre, it was a connection to Africa, a means of expression and protest, and a respite from the struggles of colonization and grinding poverty. Ska would later travel with West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom, where British youth embraced the music, blending it with punk and pop and working its origins as a music of protest and escape into their present lives. The fervor of the music matched the energy of the streets as racism, poverty, and violence ran rampant. But ska called for brotherhood and unity. As series editor and pop music scholar Scott Calhoun notes: ';Like a cultural barometer, the rise of ska indicates when and where social, political, and economic institutions disappoint their people and push them to re-invent the process for making meaning out of life. When a people or group embark on this process, it becomes even more necessary to embrace expressive, liberating forms of art for help during the struggle. In its history as a music of freedom, ska has itself flowed freely to wherever people are celebrating the rhythms and sounds of hope.'Ska: The Rhythm Liberation should appeal to fans and scholars alikeindeed, any enthusiast of popular music and Caribbean, American, and British history seeking to understand the fascinating relationship between indigenous popular music and cultural and political history. Devotees of reggae, jazz, pop, Latin music, hip hop, rock, techno, dance, and world beat will find their appreciation of this remarkable genre deepened by this survey of the origins and spread of ska.

Joshua Duchan looks at the career and music of this remarkable singer-songwriter, exploring the unique ways Joel transforms the cultural life of a changing America over four decades. Original interviews with Joel blend with Duchan's engaging analysis to provide readers of all backgrounds and ages a new look at Joel's most beloved songs.

MacLeod explores Phil Spector's rise and fall as a musician, songwriter, and producer whose musical ability and visionary foresight radically influenced popular music and culture of the 20th century. Spector's legendary wall of sound became a hallmark of 1960's pop music and contributed to the success of bands like the Beach Boys and the Beatles.

In Sting and The Police: Walking in Their Footsteps, Aaron J. West explores the cultural and musical impact of Stewart Copeland, Andy Summers, and Sting. West details the distinctive hybrid character of The Police's musical output, which would also characterize Sting's post-Police development as a musician.

The Sex Pistols blew away all that had come before them, setting an entirely new bar for rock acts that followed in their wake. Peter Smith explores the impact the band had on the punk movement as well as its embodiment of disenfranchised youth and in the tense political climate of the 1970s.

The American Songbook explores key aspects of individual song's popularizations, addressing how and why the tradition of standards was eventually usurped by rock and roll in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as how it has continued to hold historic, nostalgic, and contemporary value for listeners.

With a career in music and film that has spanned over forty years, Kristofferson began as a singer-songwriter. In this book, Mary G. Hurd surveys the life and works of this highly respected American songwriter, exploring the uncommon depth and lyricism of his work.

In Patti Smith: America's Punk Rock Rhapsodist, musician and historian Eric Wendell delves into the volatile mix of religious upbringing and musical and literary influences that gave shape to Smith's lyrics, music, and artistic output. Wendell explores how Smith's androgynous stage presence pulled the various societal triggers, adding a new layer of meaning to popular music performance. Songwriter and singer, performance artist and poet, Smith created work that drew together biography, history, and music into a powerful collage of an artist who shaped a generation of musicians.

Carey Fleiner examines English rock group the Kinks and their social and cultural influences both on and by the group from the early ''60s to present day. In and around the biographical survey of the band''s career, The Kinks looks at the several contexts in which the KinksΓÇöand more recently, band founders and brother Ray and Dave Davies as solo actsΓÇöcreated and performed their work. Fleiner explores through the band''s remarkably rich output their use of lyrical and musical devices to produce everything from social satire to teary-eyed nostalgia to offer commentary on contemporary politics, family life and relations, and the Kinks'' own image as exemplarsΓÇöironically and in earnestΓÇöof a distinctly English national identity.

Bruce Springsteen: American Poet and Prophet by literary critic Donald L. Deardorff II classifies and explains Springsteen's remarkable reception as it evolved from small beginnings in the Jersey shore bars of the 1970s to worldwide fame today. This book thoughtfully considers the trenchant commentary Springsteen's albums make on the mythology of the American Dream, working-class concerns, the changing character of American masculinity, the relationship between Americans and their government, the importance of social justice, and the evocation of an American spirit.

In The Clash: The Only Band That Matters, respected music critic Sean Egan examines The Clash's career and art through the prism of the uniquely interesting and fractious UK politics of the Seventies and Eighties, without which they simply would not have existed. Tackling subjects such as The Clash's self-conscious tussles with their record label, the accusations of sell-out that dogged their footsteps, their rivalry with the similarly leaning but less purist Jam, the paradoxical quality of their achieving multi-platinum success and even whether their denunciations of Thatcherism were proven wrong, Egan has come up with new insights into a much discussed group.