Released when ELP and Elton John were plodding from one packed stadium to the next, Radio City was a radical album influenced by records that were already deemed oldies and yet sounding like a lean electrical jolt from the future.
After Rumours became the best-selling single album of all-time, Fleetwood Mac asked Warner Brothers Records to buy them a studio (the label refused, costing both Warner Brothers and the band significant cash in the long run) and then handed the reins to their guitarist and resident perfectionist Lindsey Buckingham.
For his 2007 critically acclaimed 33 1/3 series title, Let's Talk About Love, Carl Wilson went on a quest to find his inner Celine Dion fan and explore how we define ourselves by what we call good and bad, what we love and what we hate.
Issued on America's premier rap label at the peak of the thrash metal movement, Slayer's controversial Reign in Blood remains the gold standard for extreme heavy metal, a seamless 29-minute procession of ten blindingly fast, apocalyptic songs.
An ear-opening reassessment of sonic art from World War II to the present Marcel Duchamp famously championed a "e;non-retinal"e; visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty.
Sinister Resonance begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory.
Ween now seems like a permanent fixture on the pop-cultural landscape, but when the band first hit MTV in the early '90s, their longevity wasn't so secure.
Non-fans regard Celine Dion as ersatz and plastic, yet to those who love her, no one could be more real, with her impoverished childhood, her (creepy) manager-husband's struggle with cancer, her knack for howling out raw emotion.
Written by an experienced drummer and philosopher, Groove is a vivid and exciting study of one of music's most central and relatively unexplored aspects.
Described as the perfect fusion of poetry and garage band rock and roll (the original concept was "e;rock and Rimbaud"e;), Horses belongs as much to the world of literary and cultural criticism as it does to the realm of musicology.
The story of the Minutemen has been told before (Our Band Could Be Your Life, We Jam Econo), but this book focuses purely on their music - the punk ethic and the remarkable, enduring songs that comprise this, their greatest achievement.
An album which distilled a genre from the musical, cultural, and social ether, Portishead's Dummy was such a complete artistic achievement that its ubiquitous successes threatened to exhaust its own potential.
On the back of his published diary Brian Eno describes himself variously as: a mammal, a father, an artist, a celebrity, a pragmatist, a computer-user, an interviewee, and a 'drifting clarifier'.
Released when ELP and Elton John were plodding from one packed stadium to the next, Radio City was a radical album influenced by records that were already deemed oldies and yet sounding like a lean electrical jolt from the future.
Roger Scruton first addressed this topic in his celebrated book The Aesthetics of Music (OUP) and in this new book he applies the theory to the practice and examines a number of composers and musical forms.
Stephen Catanzarite takes a close look at what many consider to be U2's most fully formed album through the prisms of religion, politics, spirituality, and culture, illuminating its previously unexplored depths, arguing that it's a concept album about love and the fall of man.
It has been sixty years since Rock 'n' Roll exploded into the mainstream, yet we remain limited in our understanding of how its bawdy excesses absorbed into the annals of mass popularity in such a short amount of time.
On the back of his published diary Brian Eno describes himself variously as: a mammal, a father, an artist, a celebrity, a pragmatist, a computer-user, an interviewee, and a 'drifting clarifier'.
Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll explores the interaction between two of the most powerful socio-cultural movements in the post-war years - the literary forces of the Beat Generation and the musical energies of rock and its attendant culture.
