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Through original essays and engaging conversations with dozens of indie musicians representing several subgenres, scenes, and eras, food takes center stage in stories about being on tour and eating on tour and how this basic human necessity can create a sense of community and interconnectedness in one of the most mobile industries in the world. Based broadly on the subject of eating on tour, these entries each spin off into their own focused and exciting behind-the-scenes story, but all confirm what Pyenson and Bleeker suspected all along--food looms large in the lives of touring musicians, and it can be used as a gateway into understanding what going on tour is really like.
Featured contributors include:
A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.
When Wilco's 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as dad rock, Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad's glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock's emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward.
In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe's allusions to queer longing, Radiohead's embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen's very trans desire to change my clothes my hair my face--and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis's own who embody the tenderness at the genre's heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul.
With an additional 30,000 words of compelling stories, research, and analysis, music journalist and In Defense of Ska podcast creator/host Aaron Carnes presents the case that ska never died, by jumping headfirst into ska's lost years, i.e., the period after the '90s third-wave ska boom.
New topics covered include LA's ongoing vibrant traditional ska scene and how young Latinos are keeping the ska torch aflame, how the devastation of Hurricane Katrina inadvertently kicked off a thriving scene focused on keeping community alive in New Orleans, a deep review of Christian ska group Five Iron Frenzy, who broke a Kickstarter record in the '10s while making progressive activists out of their fan base, a close inspection of a hipster rocksteady scene in Brooklyn that grew so popular it nearly kicked off a nationwide revival, and more secret ska past revelations with none other than Fall Out Boy lead singer Patrick Stump-who has a story that, up until recently, was carefully guarded.
Plus, the book re-explores several bands featured in the first edition, revealing new layers and more details about all the bands fans love, like Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Operation Ivy, the Slackers, Hepcat, Mephiskapheles, and Reel Big Fish. With 30,000 additional words, this is the complete ska package.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Ozzi's reporting is strong, balanced and well told...a worthy successor to its obvious inspiration, Michael Azerrad's 2001 examination of the '80s indie underground, Our Band Could Be Your Life.--New York Times Book Review
A raucous history of punk, emo, and hardcore's growing pains during the commercial boom of the early 90s and mid-aughts, following eleven bands as they sell out and find mainstream fame, or break beneath the weight of it all.
Punk rock found itself at a crossroads in the mid-90's. After indie favorite Nirvana catapulted into the mainstream with its unexpected phenomenon, Nevermind, rebellion was suddenly en vogue. Looking to replicate the band's success, major record labels set their sights on the underground, and began courting punk's rising stars. But the DIY punk scene, which had long prided itself on its trademark authenticity and anti-establishment ethos, wasn't quite ready to let their homegrown acts go without a fight. The result was a schism: those who accepted the cash flow of the majors, and those who defiantly clung to their indie cred.
In Sellout, seasoned music writer Dan Ozzi chronicles this embattled era in punk. Focusing on eleven prominent bands who made the jump from indie to major, Sellout charts the twists and turns of the last gold rush of the music industry, where some groups sold out and rose to surprise super stardom, while others buckled under mounting pressures. Sellout is both a gripping history of the music industry's evolution, and a punk rock lover's guide to the chaotic darlings of the post-grunge era, featuring original interviews and personal stories from members of modern punk's most (in)famous bands:
When all else fails, when our compass is broken, there is one thing some of us have come to rely on: music really can give us a sense of something like home. With It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, legendary music critic Ian Penman reaches for a vanished moment in musical history when cultures collided and a certain kind of cross-generational and 'cross-colour' awareness was born. His cast of characters includes the Mods, James Brown, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, John Fahey, Steely Dan and Prince - black artists who were innovators, and white musicians who copied them for the mainstream. In prose that glides and shimmies and pivots on risky metaphors, low puns and highbrow reference points (Brian Dillon, frieze), Ian Penman's first book in twenty years is cause for celebration.
The Big Time is a coming-of-age story of a young entertainer whose musical family lived on homemade paddle wheel showboats as they roamed the world performing on the streets. Ingrid danced in two traveling Mexican circuses, sang in the grandest locations around the world, and was a bandleader in New York City, all by the age of 20. Based in New Orleans, she spent her life training to be a contender in traditional jazz on an international platform. But, midway through her adulthood, she developed a drinking problem that led to the downfall of her marriage and career, and threatened her very existence. Journey with her through it all as she comes out on the other side into sobriety.
A slim yet powerful book in which Marc Ribot blends bits of memoir with strange little fictions, many of which are based on his own life and career. --Wall Street Journal
Throughout his genre-defying career as one of the most innovative musicians of our time, iconoclastic guitar player Marc Ribot has consistently defied expectation at every turn. Here, in the expanded paperback edition of Ribot's first collection of writing, we see that same uncompromising sensibility at work as he playfully interrogates our assumptions about music, life, and death. Through essays--including some new material not included in the hardcover--short stories, and the occasional unfilmable film mistreatment that showcase the sheer range of his voice, Unstrung captures an artist whose versatility on the page rivals his dexterity onstage.
In the first section of the book, Lies and Distortion, Ribot turns his attention to his instrument--my relation to the guitar is one of struggle; I'm constantly forcing it to be something else--and reflects on his influences (and friends) like Robert Quine (the Voidoids) and producer Hal Willner (Saturday Night Live), while delivering an impassioned plea on behalf of artists' rights. Elsewhere, we glimpse fragments of Ribot's life as a traveling musician--he captures both the monotony of touring as well as small moments of beauty and despair on the road. In the heart of the collection, Sorry, We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties, Ribot offers wickedly humorous short stories that synthesize the best elements of the Russian absurdist tradition with the imaginative heft of George Saunders. Taken together, these stories and essays cement Ribot's position as one of the most dynamic and creative voices of our time.
Doucet takes a refreshingly genre-free approach, careening from heady dub reggae to pastoral folk-rock, from unreal disco workouts to mind-bending electronica. His enthusiasm is such that you'll be stopping on every page to track down the songs being discussed. -- Aquarium Drunkard
Let go of your musical biases and dive into the deep cuts that are what music is really about with You've Never Heard Your Favorite Song. From underground musicians to passed-over classics, your favorite song is out there waiting for you, you just need to go find it. Relearn what makes a song great and set those played out pop tunes on the back burner once and for all. The latest edition in the Curio series, this pocket-sized book is perfect for referencing on the go. So get reading to find out why you might not even know your favorite song yet, and why you should keep your musical mind open.
You've Never Heard Your Favorite Song holds an immeasurable amount of unfettered love, passion and knowledge about what I've long considered to be one of the world's only truly universal languages: music. -- Portland Press Herald
Edited by iconic musician Kim Gordon and esteemed writer Sinéad Gleeson, this powerful collection of award-winning female creators shares their writing about the female artists that matter most to them.
This book is for and about the women who kicked in doors, as pioneers of their craft or making politics central to their sound: those who offer a new way of thinking about the vast spectrum of women in music. This Woman's Work: Essays on Music is edited by iconic musician Kim Gordon and esteemed writer Sinéad Gleeson and features an array of talented contributors, including: Anne Enright, Fatima Bhutto, Jenn Pelly, Rachel Kushner, Juliana Huxtable, Leslie Jamison, Liz Pelly, Maggie Nelson, Margo Jefferson, Megan Jasper, Ottessa Moshfegh, Simone White, Yiyun Li, and Zakia Sewell. In this radical departure from the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men, This Woman's Work challenges the male dominance and sexism that have been hard-coded in the canons of music, literature, and film and has forced women to fight pigeon-holing or being side-lined by carving out their own space. Women have to speak up, to shout louder to tell their story--like the auteurs and ground-breakers featured in this collection, including: Anne Enright on Laurie Anderson; Megan Jasper on her ground-breaking work with Sub Pop; Margo Jefferson on Bud Powell and Ella Fitzgerald; and Fatima Bhutto on music and dictatorship. This Woman's Work also features writing on the experimentalists, women who blended music and activism, the genre-breakers, the vocal auteurs; stories of lost homelands and friends; of propaganda and dictatorships, the women of folk and country, the racialized tropes of jazz, the music of Trap and Carriacou; of mixtapes and violin lessons.
The penultimate Blank Forms anthology presents new interviews with musicians Theo Parrish, Amelia Cuni, Akio Suzuki and more
At the centerpiece of this anthology is a career-spanning 20-hour conversation conducted over four days between producer, DJ and Detroit house music legend Theo Parrish and veteran music journalist Mike Rubin. They go deep on Parrish's childhood in Chicago's South Side, sculptural training and collaborations with Moody Mann, Rick Wilhite and Omar S, and explore how the social movements of 2020 have reshaped his practice and dance music at large. This volume also includes an illustrated discussion between Dhrupad singer Amelia Cuni and sound artist/tuning theorist Marcus Pal, covering Cuni's years studying voice and dance in India, her interpretations of John Cage, and collaborations with the likes of La Monte Young and Catherine Christer Hennix--accompanied by deeply researched essays from Cuni on Hindustani classical music. Finally, the collection features reminiscences from composer and performer Akio Suzuki on Fluxus pioneer and Taj Mahal Travelers founder Takehisa Kosugi, with newly translated writing from Kosugi.