No Boomeresque celebration of the "music that defined an era," Rock and Roll vs. Modern Life is instead a deeply critical analysis of rock and roll as a chaotic, caterwauling project to upend the foundational presumptions of postwar values. What we have here is the closest thing yet to a unified field theory of rock and roll. In seminal performances, films, and recordings, Iggy Pop, James Brown, Patti Smith, the Last Poets, and the Sex Pistols disrupt the implicit ontologies of modernism and late-stage capitalism. With its comrades, conceptual art, Black power, and poststructuralism, rock and roll strips back the linoleum surface of modern life to reveal a feral sensibility unwilling to be boxed up for clean consumption.

The definitive chronicle of underground music in the 1980s tells the stories of Black Flag, Sonic Youth, The Replacements, and other seminal bands whose DIY revolution changed American music forever. Our Band Could Be Your Life is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan Eighties -- when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives re-energized American rock with punk's do-it-yourself credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging, and immensely influential. This sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing, and faith is an indie rock classic in its own right. The bands profiled include: Sonic Youth Black Flag The Replacements Minutemen Husker Du Minor Threat Mission of Burma Butthole Surfers Big Black Fugazi Mudhoney Beat Happening Dinosaur Jr.

The Art of Populism in US Politics investigates connections between populist politics and artistic expressions in the United States in the Trump era. Beginning with comparisons between frontier populism and millennial-era populism, the author examines how citizens imitate and improvise on political sentiments, global histories, images, and discourses to create their own senses of community, identity, belonging, and exclusion. Political art, narratives, opinions, polemics, and abstract artistic expressions are shared instantly, creating new political and affective communities that challenge the power and stability of previous institutions and ideologies. These modes of digital sharing create communities of practice, groups who come together through shared creation and consumption, whether it be memes and vlogs, homemade signs and T-shirts, music videos, or political dialogues. The book analyzes the physical and digital art practices that support the growth and proliferation of populist politics and the fractious communities in America that support it. With modular chapters providing in-depth case studies within the larger context of populism, this book provides alternate methodologies for working through key issues of politics, production, distribution, globalization, and political economy, particularly because of the ways in which different forms of media—art, video, text, music—are brought into productive dialogue with each other. This book is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students of political science, cultural studies, music studies, American studies, and art and media studies.

The legendary critic and author of Mystery Train “ingeniously retells the tale of rock and roll” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Unlike previous versions of rock ’n’ roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs and dramatizes how each embodies rock ’n’ roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts out—a new language, something new under the sun. “Transmission” by Joy Division. “All I Could Do Was Cry” by Etta James and then Beyoncé. “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” first by the Teddy Bears and almost half a century later by Amy Winehouse. In Marcus’s hands these and other songs tell the story of the music, which is, at bottom, the story of the desire for freedom in all its unruly and liberating glory. Slipping the constraints of chronology, Marcus braids together past and present, holding up to the light the ways that these striking songs fall through time and circumstance, gaining momentum and meaning, astonishing us by upending our presumptions and prejudices. This book, by a founder of contemporary rock criticism—and its most gifted and incisive practitioner—is destined to become an enduring classic. “One of the epic figures in rock writing.”—The New York Times Book Review “Marcus is our greatest cultural critic, not only because of what he says but also, as with rock-and-roll itself, how he says it.”—The Washington Post Winner of the Deems Taylor Virgil Thomson Award in Music Criticism, given by the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers

A comprehensive, visual reference, enhanced by two thousand photographs and illustrations, provides information on all major fields of knowledge and includes timelines, sidebars, cross-reference, and other useful features.

“Jesus for Most People” is for people who believe God used the Big Bang to create the universe, used evolution to create people, and sent Jesus to teach. The book updates the Enlightenment outlook. It summarizes scholarly work on Jesus and the early Church. It explains the biological evolution of morality and it looks there for clues about God. Some ideas here about Jesus and about the evolution of morality are new but not silly. The book builds a solid base for reasonable belief, so people can avoid religious and secular wackiness.

Trash has been blowing across the rock'n'roll landscape since the first amplified guitar riff tore through American mass culture. Throwaway tunes, wasted fans, crappy reviews, junk bins of remaindered albums: much of rock's quintessence is handily conveyed in terms of disposability and impermanence. Steven L. Hamelman sums up these rubbishy affinities as rock's "trash trope." Trash is an obvious physical presence on the rock scene -- think of Woodstock's littered pastures or the many hotel rooms redecorated by the Who. More intriguingly, Hamelman says, trash is the catalyst for a powerful mode of rock composition and criticism. It is, for instance, both cause and effect when performers like the Ramones or Beck at once critique junk culture and revel in it. But Is It Garbage? spills over with challenging insights into how rock's creators, critics, and consumers transform, and are transformed by, trash as a fact and a concept. In the music's preoccupation with its own trashiness readers will perceive a wellspring of rock innovation and inspiration -- one largely overlooked and little understood until now.

Against Ambience diagnoses - in order to cure - the art world's recent turn toward ambience. Over the course of three short months - June to September, 2013 - the four most prestigious museums in New York indulged the ambience of sound and light: James Turrell at the Guggenheim, Soundings at MoMA, Robert Irwin at the Whitney, and Janet Cardiff at the Met. In addition, two notable shows at smaller galleries indicate that this is not simply a major-donor movement. Collectively, these shows constitute a proposal about what we wanted from art in 2013. While we're in the soft embrace of light, the NSA and Facebook are still collecting our data, the money in our bank accounts is still being used to fund who-knows-what without our knowledge or consent, the government we elected is still imprisoning and targeting people with whom we have no beef. We deserve an art that is the equal of our information age. Not one that parrots the age's self-assertions or modes of dissemination, but an art that is hyper-aware, vigilant, active, engaged, and informed. We are now one hundred years clear of Duchamp's first readymades. So why should we find ourselves so thoroughly in thrall to ambience? Against Ambience argues for an art that acknowledges its own methods and intentions; its own position in the structures of cultural power and persuasion. Rather than the warm glow of light or the soothing wash of sound, Against Ambience proposes an art that cracks the surface of our prevailing patterns of encounter, initiating productive disruptions and deconstructions.

This book explores the relationships between rock and roll, social protest, and authenticity to consider how rock and roll could function as social protest music. The author begins by discussing the nature and origins of rock and roll and the nature of social protest and social protest music within the wider context of the evolution of the commercial music industry and the social and technological infrastructure developed for the mass dissemination of popular music. This discussion is followed by an examination of the causes of the public disapproval originally expressed toward rock and roll, and how they illuminate its social protest and subversive quality. By further investigating the nature of authenticity and its relationship to social protest and to commercialization, the author considers how social protest and commercialization are antithetical. This conclusion, if correct, has broad implications for human culture in advanced industrial society.

Phil Spector is a musician, songwriter and producer whose musical ability and visionary foresight as a producer charted the future of popular music and culture of the late 20th century. He revolutionized recording processes and re-shaped the business and marketing approach of the music industry. While he raised the bar for other musicians and producers to follow and gave a voice to groups struggling to achieve equality during the 60s, Spector was, however, a complex character whose need for control brought much damage and confusion into the lives of those around him as well as into his own career and life. Phil Spector: Sound of the Sixties follows the ups and downs of Spector’s career as an entrepreneur and businessman, technical wizard and musical visionary, record label master and collaborator with the biggest bands of the age. Spector left an indelible mark on American pop music, creating an iconic soundtrack that still attracts new listeners today.