I'm overwhelmed with ILX music writing search results, help me narrow them down pls

It took about 30 seconds to find those in the ILM search. Try searching for terms in the thread title.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802136885/102-1638364-4788135?v=glance&n=283155

http://ilx.p3r.net/category.php?catid=55

And Makrugaik thanks too, as that's one I've been meaning to check out, but keep forgetting.

tracer, i'm afraid you've got my intentions all wrong. i was looking for some recommended titles from the regular ILX'er people who largely seem to know about and celebrate music crit, an area where i'm admittedly not well-versed.

honestly, i'm just bored and work and wanted to kind of talk about great books that i might not know about. no need to knock me down.

Give it a shot.

Reggae
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140237631/qid=1149179707/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/202-4601463-5509403

Soul
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1841952400/qid=1149179812/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/202-4601463-5509403

Dance
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0330350560/qid=1149179875/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3_3/202-4601463-5509403

A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philly Soul

anyone else also read both "Love Saves The Day" and "Turn The Beat Around"? found both fascinating, but especially because of reading LSD first and then TTBA afterwards. The contrasting views and takes on what is largely the same subjects, players and era really fascinated me.

imho, Tim Lawrence took a more straightforward, chronological look at the music, history, culture and gently drew his own conclusions, all the while being largely more idealistic and remaining mostly postive about the music. He focused mostly on the rise and fall of disco, and documented the DJ - generally coming back to Mancuso as a bit of a hero figure, the touchstone for all other situations. The social and cultural climate was mentioned more as setting and olitics largely stayed out of it, aside from a few mentions of police, zoning and tax authorities. He largely stayed positive, mentioning the music he did love and felt formative, but steering mostly clear of negative appraisals of anything he didn't feel was worth including. Overall he felt more like the third-person narrator, speaking his opinons larelgy through others' words and how he cose to sequence them to tell his story.

Peter Shapiro seemed to be far more critical, drawing some potentially precarious conclusions in an effort to really pull together cause-effect-cause situations between politics, music, society and how each fed back on each other to aggravate/propel/perpetuate situations. His organization for the book read much like he had written many many overlapping subarticles and then compiled them all into book form. And while the 'follow each theme to its logical conclusion' was a very interesting take on each subject, it wound up feeling very repetitious and convoluted in parts. It certainly did make me think a bit more about certain situations than the Lawrence book did, but I think that was laregly due to having read the Lawrence book first and then seeing a contrasting take on a familiar situation. He did tend to enjoy "calling things out" as inane, etc or generally criticizing and putting down particular music, nearly with the same energy as what he did like. Sometimes I had a hard time telling the difference between the two, and sometimes I almost felt like he was contradicting himself on certain opinions.

Overall both books left me in a sad state, ending my vacation trip by scouring crates of old soul and disco vinyl at Other Music on Divisadero for a few hours, and spending the rest of my day tooling through Rooky Ricardo's in Lower Haight. I spent more than I should have, but I wouldn't trade a moment of any of it.