Profiles In Popular Music

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and editor of The New Yorker gathers his writing on some of the essential musicians of our time—intimate portraits of Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and more. The greatest popular songs, whether it’s “Respect” sung by Aretha Franklin or “Blind Willie McTell” performed by Bob Dylan, have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling whenever you hear them. In Holding the Note, David Remnick writes about some of the most influential musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years. He portrays a series of musical lives—Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and more—and their unique encounters with the passing of that essential element of music: time. From Cohen’s performing debut, when his stage fright was so debilitating he couldn’t get through “Suzanne,” to Franklin’s iconic mink-drop at the Kennedy Center, Holding the Note delivers intimate portraits of some of the greatest creative minds of our era, written with a passionate lifelong attachment to their music and an acute appreciation of how it has shaped us.

Short life sketches of five American and English musicians.

Collected in one volume, Timothy White's "Music to My Ears" columns from BILLBOARD magazine provide the best available overview of popular music in the 90s, through a remarkably prophetic series of commentaries. This expanded paperback edition features twelve additional essays on groundbreaking artists such as Everything but the Girl, Skeleton Key, and Kim Richey. 85 photos.

Canadian progressive rock band Rush was the voice of the suburban middle class. In this book, Chris McDonald assesses the band's impact on popular music and its legacy for legions of fans. McDonald explores the ways in which Rush's critique of suburban life—and its strategies for escape—reflected middle-class aspirations and anxieties, while its performances manifested the dialectic in prog rock between discipline and austerity, and the desire for spectacle and excess. The band's reception reflected the internal struggles of the middle class over cultural status. Critics cavalierly dismissed, or apologetically praised, Rush's music for its middlebrow leanings. McDonald's wide-ranging musical and cultural analysis sheds light on one of the most successful and enduring rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s.

Throughout his career, Johnny Cash has been depicted—and has depicted himself—as a walking contradiction: social protestor and establishment patriot, drugged wildman and devout Christian crusader, rebel outlaw hillbilly thug and elder statesman. Leigh H. Edwards explores the allure of this paradoxical image and its cultural significance. She argues that Cash embodies irresolvable contradictions of American identity that reflect foundational issues in the American experience, such as the tensions between freedom and patriotism, individual rights and nationalism, the sacred and the profane. She illustrates how this model of ambivalence is a vital paradigm for American popular music, and for American identity in general. Making use of sources such as Cash's autobiographies, lyrics, music, liner notes, and interviews, Edwards pays equal attention to depictions of Cash by others, such as Vivian Cash's publication of his letters to her, documentaries and music journalism about him, Walk the Line, and fan club materials found in the archives at the Country Music Foundation in Nashville, to create a full portrait of Cash and his significance as a cultural icon.

Since the 1960s, British progressive rock band Jethro Tull has pushed the technical and compositional boundaries of rock music by infusing its musical output with traditions drawn from classical, folk, jazz, and world music. The release of Thick as a Brick (1972) and A Passion Play (1973) won the group legions of new followers and topped the Billboard charts in the United States, among the most unusual albums ever to do so. Tim Smolko explores the large-scale form, expansive instrumentation, and complex arrangements that characterize these two albums, each composed of one continuous song. Featuring insights from Ian Anderson and in-depth musical analysis, Smolko discusses the band's influence on popular culture and why many consider Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play to be two of the greatest concept albums in rock history.

The first book in English to explore Brazilian choro.

Provides apects of biographical information on contemporary popular musicians including date and place of birth, education, career history and the awards they have received. The musical genres covered represent the breakdown of record sales reported by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Contemporary musicians is a biographical and critical guide to performers and writers in a wide variety of musical fields, inclusing pop, rock, rap, jazz, rhythm and blues, folk, new age, country, gospel, and reggae. Each biannuaal volume covers