Good books about music

Please kill me.

Oh well. Read it anyway. It's amazing. And Our Band Could Be Your Life. If you're interested in criticism, check out Psychotic Reactions and Carbeurator Dung or anything by Lester Bangs or one or two Greil Marcus books (The Basement Tapes). I'd stay away from Camden Joy, contrary to popular opinion.

I need something that doesn't take too long to get into

But you're going to college, man! Just buy Adorno's Essays on Music and accept that the next 4+ years of your life are going to be like that mwahahaha...

I also enjoyed Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and there's the ever-classic Generation Ecstasy.

I had never heard of Tate until I saw him speak not long ago. He is a BAD. ASS. Does he still write for The Voice? I feel like I never see him in there. Does he have a blog?

I'm mostly interested in reading a book of his since his prose is fairly magnificent.

If you want a cracking funny read on hip-hop, though, pick up The Rough Guide to Hip-Hop by Peter Shapiro, which has just been updated and enlarged (it was a pocket-size the first time, now it's 8 x 10). Best line goes to the Bad Boy Records writeup, when he notes that Puff Daddy, having been responsible for 40% of all 1997's number ones, moved to the Hamptons "so he could live by the sea, just like his magic dragon namesake."

Same here! (Of course there's also the Led Zep bio.)

Next week on "The O.C.": Seth and Ryan get into a fatal disagreement over "James Taylor: Marked For Death," while Summer meets a new hottie who shares her disgust of Nick Hornby.

Dino by Nick Tosches (about Dean Martin; as deep as Catch a Fire by Timothy White, as entertaining as that Motley Crue book)

Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story, by Tony Scherman (oral history/autobiography of the New Orleans drummer; had me at "Louis Armstrong was a pimp"...)

We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen (better than Please Kill Me, kind of like L.A. punk itself)

I was torturing this guy in the garage of my mom's house in this nice suburban neighborhood with my whole family inside eating Easter dinner... and I'd got this guy tied up in the rafter with a rope around his legs and I'm beating him with a two-by-four. I said, "Hang on a minute," and put the two-by-four down and walked into the house and kissed my aunt and said like, "Oh hi, how you doing?" I grabbed a deviled egg, told them I'd be back in a minute, and I went back out, grabbed the two-by-four, and kept workin' on the guy. I finally had to get out of Vicious Circle 'cause of the violence. There were constant stabbings and beatings and people cruising by my house at night, shooting up the neighborhood....

I did something pretty bad to somebody and they retaliated with guns. It was a big deal, I had to split to Alaska for a while, they cut the lines on my car, blew up my car... fuck...I don't wanna say who they were, but they weren't punks... boy, they were pissed off.

i went on holiday with the Deborah Curtis book and the Nick Drake biography once. happy times, let me tell you.

if you ever find dave rimmer's "once upon a time in the east", abt berlin east and west b4 the fall of the wall, i utterly UTTERLY recommend it: tho it's only somewhat abt music - unlike his earlier (and also good) "like punk never happened"

Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic is being reissued sometime this year.

Electronic and Experimental Music by Thom Holmes
also; Wireless Imagination (d kahn / g whitehead)
Paul Griffiths - A Concise History of Avant-Garde Music
Paul Griffiths - Modern Music And Beyond
Curtis Roads
William Duckworth : Talking Music
Cage: Silence / A Year From Monday
Cage / Feldman: Conversations
James Tenney : Meta / Hodos
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stockhausen on Music (Compiled by R Maconie)
Sound By Artists (ed. Dan Lander)
Chris Cutler - File Under Popular
Attali - Noise
Russolo - The Art of Noises (get a hold of a copy any way you can)
Trevor Wishart - On Sonic Art
Douglas Kahn - Noise Water Meat

i think the attali book is lousy at book length—it's a good short polemic idea bulked out to a contradictory nonsense schema—and wireless imagination is patchy (which is a pity, cz it's a great idea for an essay collection)

The Elvis Guralnick books - again, you don't have to care about the subject matter to enjoy them (personally, I was so-so on Elvis before readin' 'em, am now an unabashed fan), and the second one is one hell of a car wreck: the descent starts like twenty pages into it, and by the end of the book you can't even feel sorry for the guy anymore, you just wonder why he hasn't kicked the bucket already.

"Where Did Our Love Go?" by Nelson George has some nice anecdotes, and is probably the best book on Motown around, tho to be frank I didn't learn all that much from it.

"The Heart Of Rock & Soul" seconded, and throw in the "New Book Of Rock Lists" too, if only for the sheer joy of reading the sentence "Tragedy The Intelligent Hoodlum Lists..." over and over again (not that book of rock jokes, tho, that was awful.) And also "Fortunate Son: The Best Of Dave Marsh", great stuff on Elvis, Muddy Waters, latino rock, etc.

I remember reading Maryiln Manson's "The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell" in my early teens and being surprised by how good it was (I'd always loathed the guy's music.) Dunno if it holds up.

"Sweet Soul Music", hell yeah.

I've read the entirety of Christgau's consumer guide online, and there's some great, great stuff there. So the books are recommended, too.

yay I've been wanting to read that one for a while!

adding to my prev post here leroi jones 'blues people' which I just finished this morning: most gd bks on music accept that they aren't just abt notes and chords.

You mean it's not long enough? I loved the book. Should re-read it...

I also loved the Lexicon Devil (bio on Darby Crash) though it's certainly not essential...

the ONLY thing wrong with JMC's line is that he somewhat slightly seems to accept the assumption that the social dimension—the "dance"—isn’t also always part of all music in the West (though he does this in the context of getting ppl to see/hear/look for the fuller sense of the meaning of music): taking his insights abt Africa (Ghana, to be more accurate) and applying them everywhere else is revelatory

Most of it is a charming telling of him learning African drumming in Ghana

And I hope someone someday undertakes a lengthy Sabbath bio.

A link for Chris Molanphy's column:

https://slate.com/tag/why-is-this-songno1

Yes, it looks like there could be some overlap with what Molanphy is writing about there. And the Breihan book sounds kind of adjacent as well.

I met Coley outside smoking a couple times at the 1000 Incarnations of the Rose Fahey fest in Takoma Park, couldn't have been friendlier, fun guy to talk to

The new My Bloody Valentine book is fine. There’s some good bits but there’s not a lot of meat there. It’s not a fair comparison, but after reading about Nina, MBV was short on interesting stories.

Turn My Head Into Sound? I've found that to be kind of a sub par book, to be honest. It's got a lot of recording/gear stuff that's wrong, implying Rowland S Howard made the jazzmaster famous (it was actually Jaguar in the 80s- pedantic maybe, but this is a shoegaze book), wrong year for Marquee Moon, guitar "peddles." I'd have to read it again, but the head-spinning description of "glide guitar" seems to be fundamentally misunderstood, or at least poorly conveyed. I get that literally the entire thing is sourced from 80s/90s press but it hit a point with errors on practically every page that I had to just put it down.

Well shit, I was thinking that at least it had cool gear info.

https://old.tapeop.com/tutorials/26/my-bloody-valentine-1/

https://tapeop.com/interviews/26/my-bloody-valentine-2

Buncha stuff to chew on there if you haven't ever seen those.

I've reviewed the Alice Coltrane biog at length for the next We Jazz, but I'd agree with the comments above. There's more of Coltrane's voice in there as we get into their mature work, but I think Beta finds good workarounds. I really loved reading about the Detroit she grew up in, and while he draws quite heavily on Mark Stryker's Jazz From Detroit, he adds plenty of his own research, including valuable interviews with some of Alice's peers like Bennie Maupin.
I'd echo Richard Williams' comments that Beta tends to take the spiritual stuff on face value. I think that's probably the right decision as a more sceptical/critical approach might seem disrespectful. He leaves it to reader to make of it what they will, but some might want a bit more scrutiny.
Personally, I'd have liked a bit more musical analysis, but perhaps that's another book. But he does do a good job of recognising the range of her music, including how intense and harrowing it can be, aspects a lot of current spiritual/ambient jazz artists claiming her as an influence dilute/erase.

Really enjoyed the section on her early groups in Detroit and it hipped me to her first recorded appearance from 1957. That rippling piano style is immediately recognisable. Lovely stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JhfSMUV8n4

Picked up the Alice Coltrane book last night, excited to dive in, also got the Sonny Simmons bio Better Do It Now Before You Die Later that Blank Forms published last fall

Just started the Alice bio this morning. Long awaited, excited to be digging in.

Really enjoyed the section on her early groups in Detroit and it hipped me to her first recorded appearance from 1957

Yeah i was blown away to discover she was represented in the Fortune Records catalog! Two worlds that I never wouldve thought collided

Wait, what?

yeah the first record she played on, with early group The Premiers, was on Fortune (per Stew's youtube embed)

also got the Sonny Simmons bio Better Do It Now Before You Die Later that Blank Forms published last fall

― chr1sb3singer, Wednesday, March 4, 2026 10:28 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Didn't know about this, please report back after you read it.

Keen to read the Simmons too. Point of Departure published an extract: https://www.pointofdeparture.org/PoD93/PoD93Simmons.html

Anyone in NY read Ronen Givony's Us v. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (2004-2014)?

Craig Robertson's Chris Knox bio Not Given Lightly is remarkable, though 'd be curious how the surrounding cultural context reads to non-NZers. Growing up in 50s/60s Invercargill, brrrr.

I wrote about Paul Elie's The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s, which isn't entirely about music (he also talks about Andy Warhol, Salman Rushdie, The Last Temptation of Christ and Czeslaw Milosz) but is mostly about how pop stars (Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, U2, Sinéad O'Connor) grappled with religion and social issues in the '80s.

I reviewed two new books about Prestige Records, one focused on the music and the other on the album art.

I'd never read Eisenberg's The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, but so far, boy is it good.

Loved that book, haven't looked at it in ages.

For folks disappointed with the MBV book, McGonigal's 33 1/3 on Loveless is really good and worth yr time

Any good books on 21st century music? By which I don't mean big histories of the entire thing (if that was even possible), just books about music made this century. Books on scenes and movements prefered over stuff on individual artists.

I enjoyed Paul Rees' "Raised On Radio" which is about the US AOR melodic rock era between '76 and '86. Foreigner, Journey, Toto, Styx and a bunch of other bands from the golden era of FM rock. Rock music that was critically derided but massively popular at the time. It's not music I am particularly big into tbh (apart from the odd hit), but it's an era of rock history that isn't looked into that much and that does interest me. The book is not so much analysis on the music so much as testimonies of the musicians involved in it. Theres similar VH1 Behind The Music trajectories - scrapping on the margins, getting hits geared for FM radio and then on to the 80s with the doctored megahits followed by fame, wild cocaine excess and then ego driven implosion.

I would have liked a bit more music criticism but it was an enjoyable read all the same.

Any good books on 21st century music? By which I don't mean big histories of the entire thing (if that was even possible), just books about music made this century. Books on scenes and movements prefered over stuff on individual artists.

I wrote this, which may be of interest.

Adele Bertei has a book out this month, 'A Memoir of No Wave And The Women Who Shaped The Scene'

I enjoyed Paul Rees' "Raised On Radio" which is about the US AOR melodic rock era between '76 and '86. Foreigner, Journey, Toto, Styx and a bunch of other bands from the golden era of FM rock. Rock music that was critically derided but massively popular at the time. It's not music I am particularly big into tbh (apart from the odd hit), but it's an era of rock history that isn't looked into that much and that does interest me. The book is not so much analysis on the music so much as testimonies of the musicians involved in it. Theres similar VH1 Behind The Music trajectories - scrapping on the margins, getting hits geared for FM radio and then on to the 80s with the doctored megahits followed by fame, wild cocaine excess and then ego driven implosion.

I would have liked a bit more music criticism but it was an enjoyable read all the same.

― Saxophone Of Futility (Michael B),

Finished that book yesterday. An entertaining read but Dennis DeYoung isn't half a moaning faced cunt.

Hilariously so at times

The section on the cocaine abuse and a couple of folk denying they indulged was hilarious.

Anyone in NY read Ronen Givony's Us v. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (2004-2014)?

or anyone not in NY? curious about this book too, especially since I found out there's a chapter about Oneida in it.

Any good books on 21st century music? By which I don't mean big histories of the entire thing (if that was even possible), just books about music made this century. Books on scenes and movements prefered over stuff on individual artists

Really enjoyed the MBV book. Still working through the Creation doorstop tome but am excited to piece it together with all the other memories of the time I've ingested. Working on Don Letts and Wobble books. Mike Campbell book very enjoying. Rumours book by Alan Light bit thin but entertaining stories -- same applies to his Frampton book. Evan Dando and JAMC books to round it out. Final plug for Drumz of the South by Georgina Cook - seminal photos of epochal dubstep moments in Croydon, Mass, London at the most fertile moments of the early dark dubstep sound.

Forthcoming Talk Talk Book:

In Another World
The Four Seasons of Talk Talk
By Graeme Thomson
https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/In-Another-World/Graeme-Thomson/9781917923613

May 29th 2026

The definitive biography of one of the most critically acclaimed and enigmatic groups of all time.

When Mark Hollis died suddenly in 2019 aged 64, he left behind a slim but perfectly formed collection of Talk Talk albums, one solo album in twenty-three years and an ever-burgeoning mystique which only continues to grow with each passing year.

The band’s reputation is formed on the imperious run of three albums released between 1986 and 1991, yet Hollis and the band remain a carefully shrouded mystery.

For the first time, Graeme Thomson seeks to unpick this knottiest of musical locks and understand the other world of Talk Talk.

I swear, me and Talk Talk are like oil and water. I know tons of people love them but every three years or so I put 'em on and just recoil.

https://4columns.org/dayal-geeta/no-new-york

Interesting Geeta Dayal take on the Adele Bertai No New York No wave book

Melvin Gibbs' book How Black Music Took Over The World is excellent. I reviewed it in today's newsletter.

The Butthole Surfers book Let’s Go To Hell is not very good and not recommended. Written by a true fan that could have used an editor.

new-ish Poison Girls history is excellent:

https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1829

new gary stewart bio is terrific, though occasionally it's a harrowing read. things get pretty dark!

I'm also enjoying "The Story Of Crass", also published by PM Press

Can't vouch yet, but I like Erin and her writing:

Hear “American Girl” or “Born in the U.S.A.” and, like it or not, chances are you begin to hum along. The soundtrack of grocery stores, pool halls, bowling alleys, flea markets, chain restaurants, drug stores, and political rallies—heartland rock, while beloved by some and derided by others, is inescapable even today. As rollicking as the music it describes, acclaimed music critic Erin Osmon’s Won’t Back Down tells the story of the origins, chart-topping development, and tangled legacy of heartland rock, the music that ruled the airwaves of the 1980s and remains instantly recognizable to millions.

Spinning an entertaining and eye-opening account, Osmon delves into the complicated afterlife of heartland rock’s classic albums and songs, including Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind,” John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” and Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” She demonstrates the centrality of often-overlooked women like Melissa Etheridge, Bonnie Raitt, and Lucinda Williams—explaining how some of the most popular music of the time was made beyond its white-male stereotypes. She traces the genre’s connections to country and Americana, and reveals how legendary figures like Prince were inspired by and expanded heartland rock. And she shows how its success revitalized the careers of figures like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Through it all, she explores the ’80s cultural developments that fostered the genre—such as the rise of MTV and the switch to CDs—and argues that the music played a vital role in opposition to ’80s conservatism and in support of LGBTQ rights, labor issues, and the environmental movement.

A fair-minded critic with an ear for a great behind-the-scenes story, Osmon makes clear that at its best, heartland rock connected with millions of overlooked people longing to be heard.

Can anybody recommend a good book about the Doors?

I read No One Here Gets Out Alive in 6th grade. Wondering if there's any more recent and more interesting books on the Doors as a whole and their context(s) and not just all the stories about the lizard king and all that.

new gary stewart bio is terrific, though occasionally it's a harrowing read. things get pretty dark!

(xpost) Of all people, Greil Marcus wrote a Doors book:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/greil-marcus/the-doors/9781610392365/?lens=publicaffairs

I remember being confounded when I'd heard it was coming out--seemed like such a mismatch. I read it, but don't really remember anything.

It's been a very long time since I read it, but I thought John Densmore's book was pretty great.

Greil’s book on The Doors is good! More straightforward writing-wise than his usual, full of personal anecdotes about seeing the band live.

thanks all.

More straightforward writing-wise than his usual

Agree, because Marcus isn't quite a huge Doors fan, he can be more casual than when he's trying to tie everything in to "America" or some other larger abstraction. He talks a lot about the revelations of their bootleg concert recordings - there's a funny description of a bewildered version of "The End" where the audience is yelling the lyrics back at them before they've been delivered.

I'm reading a book about post-rock called Fearless just because I spotted it on the library shelf. Sort of anecdotal rather than theoretical, but it seems to do a good job bringing together acts that I know and ones I've barely heard of, and probably the most expansive writing you'll find on a group like Codeine (at least on paper).

I've had to turn off every John Densmore interview I've ever tried to listen to, just can't take him talking about what a cool jazz cat he is for some reason.

lol

The advance hit my bank account this morning, so I might as well announce this here: I'll be putting out a 25th anniversary Revised & Expanded Edition of my first book, New York Is Now!: The New Wave Of Free Jazz, with Zer0 Books this fall. I'm working on the edits and new material now.