New Books in Music

In Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico (U California Press, 2020), based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magaña considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, young people remake urban space and construct new identities in ways that directly challenge elite visions of their city and essentialist notions of what it means to be indigenous in the contemporary era. Cartographies of Youth Resistance is essential reading for students and scholars interested in youth politics and culture in Mexico, social movements, urban studies, and migration.Dr. Magaña is sociocultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Mexican American studies at the university of Arizona.Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

A deep dive into one of the most overlooked -- and fascinating -- sides of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature winner: Bob Dylan, the filmmaker. While his music and lyrics have been studied endlessly, his work behind (and in front of) the camera remains largely unexplored. No other book has taken this angle, and with Dylan's legend still growing, the audience is more than ready for a bold new take. Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think (McNidder and Grace, 2026), the first book of its kind, opens up exciting new ways to think about the artistry of Bob Dylan. It offers a captivating exploration into movies that, according to Michael, showcase Bob Dylan not just as a subject, but as the primary author. These include Eat the Document--a short, experimental television film shot in 1966 and released in 1972; the sprawling, genre-blurring epic Renaldo and Clara (1978), both directed by Dylan himself; and the darkly surreal Masked and Anonymous (2003), directed by Larry Charles but co-written by and starring Dylan. Bob Dylan as Filmmaker explores what these movies reveal about "how it feels" to be Bob Dylan during three defining eras of his career: the revolutionary 1960s, the introspective 1970s, and the enigmatic early 2000s. Just as crucially, they illuminate Dylan's remarkable instinct for using film not merely as a medium, but as a deeply personal mode of expression. The book also provides an essential survey of Dylan's most recent movie projects, including those by other directors, in which Dylan's influence is less overt but no less powerful. Here, Michael argues that Dylan operates as a kind of "invisible co-author" in Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), where Dylan appears as a slippery, self-mythologizing interviewee; Alma Har'el's haunting Shadow Kingdom (2021), a stylized livestream performance; and James Mangold's A Complete Unknown (2024), the Timothée Chalamet-led biopic shaped in part by Dylan's behind-the-scenes "script approval." Michael Glover Smith is a Chicago-based filmmaker, author and teacher. Michael's most recent movie, Hekla, starring Elizabeth Stam, will have it’s festival premiere in early 2026. Michael is also the director of four award-winning feature films, the most recent of which, Relative, stars Wendy Robie (Twin Peaks) and is distributed by Music Box Films. His previous book, Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry (co-written with Adam Selzer), was published by Columbia University Press to acclaim in 2015. He has seen Bob Dylan 100 times in concert. Michael on Twitter and Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

What happened to freedom singing after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination? Stephen Stacks considers this question in The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song After 1968 (U Illinois Press, 2025). He argues that the cultural myths around the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968, which are partially supported by the appeal of Freedom Songs, have hindered and inspired later activists as they grappled with the shadow of a simplistic and sanitized memory of what it takes to create political change. Stacks’s analysis shifts the focus of attention from genre—freedom song—to process and practice—freedom singing. In a wide-ranging book, he contemplates the role of nostalgia in political advocacy, investigates the work of one of the movement’s great singers, Bernice Johnson Reagon after 1968, and explains how the media and crucial musical figures shaped and sometimes complicated the collective memory of the Civil Rights movement and its music. The Resounding Revolution examines sixty years of Black music to challenge and reshape the entrenched story of the Civil Rights Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities.High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (UNC Press, 2023) charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers. Scorned by the record industry for "killing music," the cassette tape rippled through scenes corporations couldn't control. For so many, tapes meant freedom--to create, to invent, to connect.Marc Masters introduces readers to the tape artists who thrive underground; concert tapers who trade bootlegs; mixtape makers who send messages with cassettes; tape hunters who rescue forgotten sounds; and today's labels, which reject streaming and sell music on cassette. Their stories celebrate the cassette tape as dangerous, vital, and radical.Marc Masters is a music journalist whose work has appeared on NPR and in the Washington Post, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Bandcamp Daily. He is also the author of No Wave. Marc Masters on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Paul Rees' Raised on Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine and Payola - the AOR Glory Years 1976-1986 (De Capo, 2026) is a massively entertaining oral biography of the golden era of critically derided yet monumentally popular radio rock, when Journey, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Toto, and more ruled the airwaves Paul Rees' Raised on Radio is, remarkably, the first biography of the (at the time) critically derided and yet massively popular AOR (album-oriented rock) bands whose heyday was 1976-1986, when groups like Journey, Boston, Foreigner, Toto, and REO Speedwagon sold many millions of albums, toured stadiums, and whose songs continue to stream in record numbers. Many of them still tour. And sure, they were punching bags for the elitist rock critics more interested in covering punk and new wave, terminally uncool, and never fashionably cutting edge, but their music was, and is, the soundtrack to so many people's lives. Who among music fans (of a certain age) didn't pump their fist to "Don't Stop Believin'" (long before The Sopranos), play air guitar to "More Than a Feeling," bellow along with Toto's "Africa," or have their heart broken to the strains of "Can't Fight This Feeling"? Even better: their tour stories and the tales of making the music are as entertaining and eye-opening as any of the antics from the annals of rock and roll history. Cocaine use was rampant, intra-band fighting was par for the course, and for better or worse, the groups' members lived life to excess. In so many ways, it was these artists' music (they are responsible for the power ballad) and lifestyles that led directly to the soon-to-follow hair metal scene. And in spite of what the critical establishment wrote, it turns out the music has aged . . . rather well! Raised on Radio is a stadium-sized, massively entertaining oral history in the bestselling tradition of Meet Me in the Bathroom, Nothin' But A Good Time, and Please Kill Me, capturing a time and a place that was as big and booming and as unabashed as the music that provided its soundtrack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

The story of The Cure: a tall tale of a truly unique British band. The Cure's story is a fantastical pop fable, but their trajectory has not been one of unbroken success. Along the way, their uneven, uneasy pop odyssey has taken in fierce intra-band tensions and fall-outs, numerous line-up changes and even a bitter court case that saw original group members feuding over payments and ownership of the band's name. There has been alcoholism, substance abuse and countless long, dark nights of the soul, many of which have been translated into luscious dark-rock symphonies. From gawky teenage art-punks in Crawley to gnomic, venerable rock royalty with 30 million record sales to their name, their journey has been a scarcely believable, vivid pop hallucination. The Cure: A Perfect Dream (Gemini Books, 2025) is the tall tale of a truly unique British band. It's the story of The Cure. This fully updated edition includes a deep dive into the band's long-awaited 14th studio album released in 2024: Songs of a Lost World. Ian Gittins has interviewed and reviewed The Cure during a 30-year career as a music writer on titles such as Melody Maker, Time Out, Q and the Guardian. He is the co-author with Motley Crew's Nikki Sixx of the 2007 New York Times best-seller The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star. He lives in London. Ian Gittin’s website. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today (U Michigan Press, 2026) insists that K-pop fan practices and activities constitute a central productive force, shaping not only K-pop’s explosive global popularity, but also K-pop’s cultural impacts, politics, and horizons of possibility. Over the past three decades, the K-pop fandom and its activities have expanded, intensified, and diversified along myriad dimensions, assuming novel social, technological, and economic forms, some of which are unique to K-pop, and some of which reflect broader cultural and industrial logics of globalized mass entertainment culture. Areum Jeong argues that K-pop fans, in performing deokhu—a Korean term connoting an “avid fan”—perform a materialization of affective labor that also seeks to produce good relationships between asymmetrically positioned actors in the K-pop ecosystem. Through an autoethnography of becoming a K-pop deokhu, Jeong connects their experiences to generations of K-pop fans, showing simultaneously how fandom practices have shifted over time and the intricacies of fan labor participation. This personal connection paved the way for participant-observation and co-performer witnessing methodologies in the study, which crucially allowed for collaborating with fans whose communal pursuits have been stigmatized by dominant discourses that denigrate their activities as solely addictive, uncritical, and wasteful. Jeong’s genre-spanning corpus of fan activities and analyzing its contexts and contents represents an important contribution to the making of a fan archive that is also an archive of affective labor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men and women at the worst moment of their lives. Those who survived never forgot the experience. And the war transformed Cohen. He had announced that he was abandoning his music career, but he instead returned to Hydra and to his family, had a second child, and released one of the best albums of his career.In Who by Fire, journalist Matti Friedman gives us a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai, drawing on Cohen’s previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, formative moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a crossroads.Matti Friedman is an award-winning journalist and author. Born in Toronto and based in Jerusalem, his work has appeared regularly in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, and elsewhere. Friedman's last book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for history. Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War was chosen in 2016 as a New York Times Notable Book and one of Amazon's 10 best books of the year. His first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the ALA's Sophie Brody Medal.Matti Friedman on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

As long as there has been music, the form has been used as a vehicle for storytelling. Artists who have something to say often find that putting it into music is the ideal means of communicating thoughts and feelings to others. And the concept-album form is a logical extension of that storytelling impulse, often writ large. It allows the writer to tackle bigger themes, more involved story lines, more finely textured characters and ideas. In the pages of What’s the Big Idea? (Hozac, 2025), author Bill Kopp explores 30 remarkable concept albums, drawing on new, firsthand interviews with the artists behind their creation. Author of the critically acclaimed Disturbing the Peace, Kopp turns us down the darkest road of musical blind-spots yet, the concept album, a previously shunned genre, now worthy of your curiosity. And then you hear something like Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and The Turtles Present Battle of the Bands, or S.F. Sorrow, and you’re really second-guessing yourself now, right? As it turns out, there’s something genuinely interesting about this “concept” in itself, and it lends us a look into a world when musical creativity really had been unleashed in its full glory. Yes, those extravagances produced much audio garbage, but very few people even get that chance anymore, despite the ease of home recording. Even Captain Sensible and The Church committed this ‘big ideas’ into noteworthy efforts, along with Hawkwind, William Shatner, Ghostface Killa, and of course, Pete Townshend, who graciously offers an exclusive interview here. Bill Kopp is a freelance journalist and the author of Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to the Dark Side of the Moon and Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the Rise of New Wave. Bill Kopp’s website. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In the early twentieth century, American ragtime and the Parisian tango fuelled a dancing craze in Britain. Public ballrooms were built throughout the country, providing a glamorous setting for dancing. The new English style, defined in the 1920s and followed by the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the 1930s, ensured that ballroom dancing continued to be the most popular British pastime until the 1960s, rivalled only by cinema.Ballroom: A People's History of Dancing (Reaktion, 2022) by Dr. Hilary French explores the vibrant history of ballroom and Latin dancing: the dances, lavish venues, competitions and influential instructors. It also traces the decline of couple dancing and its resurgence in recent years with the hugely popular TV shows Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with the Stars.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music