In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood to the highest realms of fame. Riley portrays Lennon's rise from Hamburg's red light district to Britain's Royal Variety Show; from the charmed naivetéf "Love Me Do" to the soaring ambivalence of "Don't Let Me Down"; from his shotgun marriage to Cynthia Powell in 1962 to his epic media romance with Yoko Ono. Written with the critical insight and stylistic mastery readers have come to expect from Riley, this richly textured narrative draws on numerous new and exclusive interviews with Lennon's friends, enemies, confidantes, and associates; lost memoirs written by relatives and friends; as well as previously undiscovered City of Liverpool records. Riley explores Lennon in all of his contradictions: the British art student who universalized an American style, the anarchic rock 'n' roller with the moral spine, the anti-jazz snob who posed naked with his avant-garde lover, and the misogynist who became a househusband. What emerges is the enormous, seductive, and confounding personality that made Lennon a cultural touchstone. In Lennon, Riley casts Lennon as a modernist hero in a sweeping epic, dramatizing rock history anew as Lennon himself might have experienced it.

The complex relationship between myths and music is here investigated.

This book is the first major study that explores the intrinsic connection between music and myth, as Nietzsche conceived of it in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), in three great works of modern literature: Romain Rolland’s Nobel Prize winning novel Jean-Christophe (1904-12), James Joyce’s modernist epic Ulysses (1922), and Thomas Mann’s late masterpiece Doctor Faustus (1947). Juxtaposing Nietzsche’s conception of the Apollonian and Dionysian with narrative depictions of music and myth, Josh Torabi challenges the common view that the latter half of The Birth of Tragedy is of secondary importance to the first. Informed by a deep knowledge of Nietzsche’s early aesthetics, the book goes on to offer a fresh and original perspective on Ulysses and Doctor Faustus, two world-famous novels that are rarely discussed together, and makes the case for the significance of Jean-Christophe, which has been unfairly neglected in the Anglophone world, despite Rolland’s status as a major figure in twentieth-century intellectual and literary history. This unique study reveals new depths to the work of our most enduring writers and thinkers.

Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth is a powerful exploration of the challenges facing art, music, and media in the digital era. With his fifth book, producer, activist, and author Ian Brennan delves deep into his personal story to address the inequity of distribution in the arts globally. Brennan challenges music industry tycoons by skillfully demonstrating that there are millions of talented people around the world far more gifted than the superstars for whom billions of dollars are spent to promote the delusion that they have been blessed with unique genius.

Music industry insiders on the nature of fame Our cultural darlings make music; we make them mythic. Every musical genre begets a community of listeners, performers, and critics, and quite often those categories are blurred. From the principled punk refusal of celebrity to hip-hop's celebration of its power, the music world is self-obsessed. Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky assembles scholars, music writers, industry workers, and musicians, who offer a range of opinions and experience of the nature of fame. The collection focuses on commerce, the crowd, performance and image, history and memory, and romance. Contributors discuss black women icons, love-songs, the legacy of the blues, the image of the tortured rock star, MTV, the politics of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the joy of line-dancing, and more. The contributors are James Bernard, Anthony DeCurtis, Katherine Dieckmann, Chuck Eddy, Paul Gilroy, Daniel Glass, Lawrence Grossberg, Jessica Hagedorn, Kathleen Hanna, James Hannaham, Dave Hickey, Jon Langford, Greil Marcus, Angela McRobbie, Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), Barbara O'Dair, Ann Powers, Toshi Reagon, Simon Reynolds, Robert Santelli, Jon Savage, Danyel Smith, Arlene Stein, Deena Weinstein, and Ellen Willis.

“Music has power: It influences our thinking and not only conveys emotions, it produces genuine emotional states in the body. This power has been speculated about for centuries...and now, these speculations have been substantiated by scientific evidence.” –Excerpt from chapter four.Music and Morals examines the effects music has on the listener, putting to rest the myth that music is amoral.You will learn...• scientific evidence proving that music has positive or negative effects on the listener.• why immoral music is more powerful than Christian lyrics.• the difference between moral and immoral music techniques.• the underlying meanings of certain types of rhythms.and much more! A mini-reference guide to different musical styles and their origins and a CD with example clips of moral and immoral music are included.

Why is musical mimesis so much a part of the cultural world of indigenous Filipinos? What does it tell us about their musical sensibilities and their social world? This book addresses these issues through a study of the relations between musical poetics, myth, and magic in the musical and spiritual lives of T'boli men and women from the highlands of southwestern Mindanao. Manolete Mora's study shows that musical mimesis is an intrinsic part of the cultural process of interpreting, articulating, making, and remaking the world. More significantly, it suggests that musical mimesis is intimately linked to a moral universe that is grounded in reciprocity. Musical mimesis is a way of establishing contact, fusion and identity with the other, and this is possible because of the existence of concepts of knowledge and being that are fundamentally different from our own. This book embraces wide-ranging ethnographic materials and issues that will be of interest to the musicologist, anthropologist, and student of Southeast Asian folklore and cross-cultural aesthetics.

Myth pervades heavy metal. With visual elements drawn from medieval and horror cinema, the genre's themes of chaos, dissidence and alienation transmit an image of Promethean rebellion against the conventional. In dialogue with the modern world, heavy metal draws imaginatively on myth and folklore to construct an aesthetic and worldview embraced by a vast global audience. The author explores the music of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica and many others from a mythological and literary perspective.