New Books in Music

Conventional wisdom holds that the birth of the rock star came in 1956 with the ascendance of Elvis Presley. Not so, says author Michael Walker, who argues in his page-turning What You Want is in the Limo (Spiegel and Grau, 2013) that in 1973 the Elvis, Chuck Berry and Beatles styled “rock and roll stardom” of the fifties and sixties gave way to “modern rock stardom,” as embodied by the members of Led Zeppelin, the Alice Cooper Band, and the Who. This new way of living and performing came into full bloom that year as these legendary groups toured America in a manner that bore little resemblance to the everybody-jam-in-the-van cross-country rock tours of prior years. With what Walker calls “the infrastructure” of rock stardom now in place, private jets and black limousines whisked these musicians from luxury hotels to cavernous arenas where they performed in front of monstrous crowds. When it was time to wind down after the show, these stars enjoyed the benefits of a “halter-topped, lude-dropping coke-and-glitter-flecked” rock culture that fetishized depravity and provided riches previously unheard of in the music business. While Walker’s addictive and fun book provides the kind of sordid and hedonistic details that are the makings of all great rock biographies, he also offers up the morality play corrective that demonstrates the costs of this manner of living. Alice Cooper later conceded that his record-breaking 1973 tour “wrecked” his band, which broke up soon after. For Led Zeppelin, the years following 1973 saw the band enter a “creative funk that stoke[d] rumors that the band is cursed.” The Who, Walker writes, departed “the decade after a pair of desultory albums.” But before the fall, these musicians threw one hell of a yearlong party. Michael Walker is the author of the national bestseller Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,the Washington Post, andRolling Stone, among other publications. He lives in Los Angeles and can reached via Twitter @mwwwalker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

2013 has been an annus horribilis for thrash metal legends Slayer. In February, Slayer parted ways with longtime drummer Dave Lombardo for the third and likely final time. In May, guitarist Jeff Hanneman died of alcohol-related cirrhosis, after being sidelined for better than two years for a necrotic spider bite. As these events unfolded, journalist D.X. Ferris was hard at work on his latest book on the band, Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years (6623 Press, 2013). It examines Slayer’s origins and development over the past thirty years and makes a persuasive case for Slayer’s musical and cultural influence. Ferris argues, “Slayer remains the all-time quintessential heavy metal band. And metal, more than ever, is significant. The genre has established itself as a permanent part of popular culture. And Slayer are metal’s pre-eminent prophets of rage.” Drawing on a wide and deep pool of source material, including the author’s own interviews with band members, Slayer 66 2/3 is likely to become the definitive history of this seminal heavy metal band. For his part, Ferris probably knows more about the band than anyone outside of its inner circle. Take a listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Thinking about “Noise” in the history and practice of music means thinking in opposites. Noise is both a musical genre, and is not. It both produces a global circulation and emerges from it. It has depended on the live-ness of embodied performance while flourishing in the context of “dead” recordings. In Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press, 2013), David Novak offers a wonderfully engaging and subtle narrative of noise, Japan, and their confluence. A series of chapters each bring the reader into a crucial scene of the production of “Japanoise,” from the No Fun Fest to the Nihilist Spasm Band, in each case using an exploration of the history and culture of noise to think carefully about conceptual tools that potentially extend well beyond the binding of the book, including the model of “circulation” as an explanatory frame, the importance of feedback, the spaces and experiences of listening and producing, and the intimacies of human and machine. It is a fascinating story and has changed the way I think about listening, making, and sound. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Before the twentieth century, opera was a kind of cultural glue: it was both a medium of mass-communication, and a powerful shaper and reflector of the popular imagination in the way TV and film are today. In Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing 1770-1900 (Stanford University Press, 2012), Andrea S. Goldman explores the history, urban culture, and gender dynamics of opera in the Qing capital of Beijing (a locality with empire-wide influence) from about 1770 to 1900. Goldman’s book traces the ways that the state and different urban populations manipulated opera performances as a means to various ends, including pleasure, moral education, and political commentary. Along the way, Goldman offers sensitive close readings of some fascinating historical sources, including a form of hybridized connoisseurship-cum-city guidebooks (“flower registers,” or huapu) and playwrights’ desk copies of operas. In this extraordinarily rich and carefully-wrought story, we learn of the spaces and markets of operatic performance and the varied attempts (some successful, others not) at state regulation of late Qing opera. We learn of the intricate tracings of gender and class in the selective staging of scenes from literary operas on the commercial stage, as this selective performance could dramatically change the meanings that audiences gleaned form operatic performances. In this book full of brothers, adulterous women, boy actresses, and sugar daddies, Goldman has managed to make the social and cultural history of opera feel not just relevant, but deeply necessary for understanding the politics and society of the Qing. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Thomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on saturation culture. Thomas traces the history of self-released audio from its origins in mail-art networks of the 1970s to the present day practice of using antiquated media – the humble cassette tape – for the dissemination of experimental sounds. Net-labels, mp3 blogs, tape traders, and their many casts of characters are examined along the way as changing technologies impact the strategies for resilience among self-releasing audio artists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

What is noise? In his new book Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Greg Hainge, Reader in French at University of Queensland, Australia, explores this question. The book is written within the tradition of critical theory and is at once playful and punning, as well as suffused with challenging and perceptive analysis. The core position of the book is that we need to move beyond the dichotomous understanding of noise that sees it as either something to be removed or rejected, an unnecessary distraction from a core signal, or something that should be celebrated, but in celebration co-opted into being something that isn’t noise. For Hainge we need a new understanding of noise, an understanding that seeks to celebrate noise through a range of engagements with cultural and theoretical phenomena. Noise is not just about sound, but figures in all forms of communication. The book takes on the accepted readings of work in music, such as John Cage’s 4’33”, literature, such as Sartre’s Nausea, as well as photography and film. These new approaches, mediated by the concern with noise, will be of interest to a range of readers from across the humanities, as well as for specialists in film and music theory and aesthetics. The project of founding on ontology of noise is also a contribution to the growing field of noise studies, which is the kind of interdisciplinary academic area that is emerging within the noisy world of the contemporary academy.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012) is a fascinating study of the MP3 as a historical, cultural, conceptual, and social phenomenon. In the course of an account of the MP3 that has surprising connections to telephony and the economics of perception, Jonathan Sterne usefully shifts our attention from media-in-general to a more specific focus on material formats, “the stuff beneath, beyond, and behind the boxes our media come in.” MP3 explores the process by which AT&T learned how to make money from the gaps in human hearing. By the 1980s, Sterne shows, engineers had developed methods for using what cannot be heard within the audible spectrum as the basis for a system of data compression for digital sound transmission. The same decade saw a subgroup of the International Organization for Standardization, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), devise a standard for digital video and audio with the help of a series of tests that gauged listeners’ levels of sonic annoyance. Sterne shows how the MP3 format emerged out of these overlapping material and social contexts of perception, technics, and experimentation. There are cat pianos and cat telephones (not what you think!) here, as well as accounts of cybernetics and information theory, histories of the domestication of noise, considerations of the challenge of archiving digital mashups, and vignettes about Suzanne Vega and Tom’s Diner. It’s a wonderful book about an important part of our daily media landscape, and it was great fun to talk about it! A review of MP3: The Meaning of Format can be found in Public Books here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

New Jersey. Home to Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Yo La Tango. . .and the Misfits, a hardcore metal horror rock band from Lodi. In This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of the Misfits (Scarecrow Press, 2013), James Greene Jr. let’s us in on the career of the band and of the various people who have claimed membership within it. The focus, of course, is on the “classic” Walk Among Us version of the band consisting of Jerry Only (the member with the longest tenure in the band), his brother Doyle, Arthur Googy and, arguably the most famous member, Glenn Danzig. Greene’s story highlights the ongoing personal conflicts within the Misfits, conflicts that broke-up some versions of the band only to create new ones. Along the way, Danzig becomes a certified rock star with his eponymously-named band, Danzig, Jerry and Doyle continue on with the Misfits until a rift sends Doyle out of the band, with Jerry continuing on to this day with the Misfits band, music, and (significantly) iconography. James Greene Jr. is a freelance writer who has contribure to Crawdaddy!, Splitsider, and Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, among others. He is a graduate of the University of Central Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Between 1969 and 1973, the Who hit their commercial and creative peak. The legendary English quartet produced three Billboard Top Ten albums, including two double LP “rock operas,” Tommy (1969) and Quadrophenia (1973). Sandwiched between them was the triumphant Who’s Next (1971),an album universally proclaimed as one of the greatest in pop music history. But as Richie Unterberger shows in his engrossing Won’t Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia(Jawbone, 2011), this period in the band’s history was equally rife with turmoil and conflict. Guitarist Pete Townsend confronted failure in the form of the band’s aborted multimedia rock opera Lifehouse, which collapsed in a very public fashion in 1971. Two years later, the band broke ties with its longtime creative partner, producer and former manager Kit Lambert over missing publishing royalties. Finally, shows on the Who’s 1973 Quadrophenia tour were rife with jarring technical difficulties as the band attempted to replicate the album’s dense soundscapes in a live setting. Thanks to his exhaustive research efforts and sparking prose, Unterberger gives the reader a first-hand look into the inner workings of this greatest of rock bands. This is the definitive book on the Who’s most important era and one of the best books ever written on these rock legends. I give it my highest recommendation. Richie Unterberger is an acclaimed author and music historian, renowned for his meticulous research. A regular contributor to the All Music website, Mojo, Record Collector and many other publications, he has also written dozens of liner notes for CD reissues of classic 60s and 70s albums. His previous books include Unknown Legends of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Eight Miles High and Turn! Turn! Turn! He can be contacted through his website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

After the huge success of Elvis Presley there was a moment when it looked as if rock ‘n’ roll might, indeed, be nothing more than a fad. Its successor in the world of popular music would be folk music, and its undisputed leader was the Kingston Trio. In Greenback Dollar: The Incredible Rise of the Kingston Trio (The Scarecrow Press, 2013) William J. Bush details the history of this landscape altering band. In it, Bush details the biographies of, first, the original three members of the band – Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, and Dave Guard – and their meteoric rise to fame from 1958 through 1961. He then tells of the falling out and eventual replacement of Guard with John Stewart and the continued artistic and commercial success of the band through the sixties. Along the way, Bush (a friend of all the members of these two incarnations of the band) describes the important places and events that led to the massive popularity that followed the Trio. So rock music never did fade away, but the influence of folk, thanks in large part to the Kingston Trio, became an integral part of popular music for decades to come. William J. Bush is a music journalist whose articles have appeared in a number of music magazines including Acoustic Guitar, Frets, Pennsylvania Heritage, The Guitar Player Handbook, and Artists of American Folk Music. Additionally, he has written for EMI/Capital Records, Folk Era Records, Bear Family Records, and Shout! Factory. He also appears in the 2006 documentary “The Kington Trio: Wherever We May Go.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music