Music Books

The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations. What di...

This book celebrates Madvillainy as a representation of two genius musical minds melding to form one revered supervillain. A product of circumstanc...

33 1/3 Book As immediately believable as they were cartoonish, as much an inner city cipher as a suburban boys gang, the foursome that made up th...

The recording sessions for Let It Be were actually begun as rehearsals for a proposed return to live stage work for the Beatles, to be inaugurated ...

Breaking the global record for streams in a single day, nearly 10 million people around the world tuned in to hear Kendrick Lamar's sophomore album...

Pinkard's account... brings to light the ambition and artistry, the stress and frustration, and ultimately the joy of making this very special albu...

When LCD Soundsystem broke up in 2011, they left behind a small but remarkable catalog of music. On top of the genius singles and a longform compos...

The Jesus and Mary Chain's swooning debut Psychocandy seared through the underground and through the pop charts, shifting the role of noise within ...

Loveless remains an enigma, 15 years after its release - an album so influential and groundbreaking that its chief creator, Kevin Shields, has been...

This title explores a key hip hop album marking the cross over point where the streets and the charts collided. Contradiction the simultaneous exis...

By pulling Kid A from its canonical status and grounding the album in various contexts, Marvin Lin explains not only why Radiohead suddenly adopted...

Extravagantly opaque, willfully vaporous Aphex Twin s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released by the estimable British label Warp Records in 199...

Teen pop is a sub-genre of popular music marketed to tweens and teens. Its melodic yearning and veneer of sincerity appeal to an emerging romantic ...

Beginning in the late 1970s as an offshoot of disco and punk, dance-punk is difficult to define. Also sometimes referred to as disco-punk and funk-...

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Kanye West created the most compelling body of pop music by an American artist during the period. ...

From a Los Angeles hospital bed, equipped with little more than a laptop and a stack of records, James "J Dilla" Yancey crafted a set of tracks tha...

It's the summer of 1979. A fifteen-year-old boy listens to WNEW on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (it's the singer's) annou...

""Music From Big Pink is a moving book that succeeds not just in vividly evoking its time and place but in distilling one young man's cliched and m...

33 1/3 is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an a...

Through a series of interviews with a wide range of people connected to Pink Floyd in their earliest days, John Cavanagh paints a vivid picture of ...

This title is one of many in a series of books which focus on epic albums of our time. Here, Joe Pernice looks at The Smith's album "Meat is Murder".

"One day I blew my nose and half my brains came out." Los Angeles, 1976. David Bowie is holed up in his Bel-Air mansion, drifting into drug-induced...

Though "Nevermind" was Nirvana's most commercially successful album, and the record that broke them - and the grunge phenomenon - internationally, ...

33 1/3 is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an a...