Music can carry the stories of history like a message in a bottle. Lord Kitchener, Neneh Cherry, Smiley Culture, Stormzy . . . Groundbreaking musicians whose songs have changed the world. But how? This exhilarating playlist tracks some of the key shifts in modern British history, and explores the emotional impact of 28 songs and the artists who performed them. This book redefines British history, the Empire and postcolonialism, and will invite you to think again about the narratives and key moments in history that you have been taught up to now. Thrilling, urgent, entertaining and thought-provoking, this beautifully illustrated companion to modern black music is a revelation and a delight. 'Engaging and accomplished . . . perfectly judged for young readers.' Guardian

In his groundbreaking book 'Musical Truth, ' DJ-turned author/ researcher Mark Devlin showed how the true nature of the corporate music industry tells a very different story to what's conveyed on its glossy, glamorous surface. The manipulations run so deep, however, that the full story couldn't be told in just that first book. Here, in Volume 2, he continues to guide readers through the dark labyrinth of machinations. Discover the world of Lifetime Actors and the crucial part they play in social engineering; delve into Heavy Rock, frequently touted as the most 'satanic' of all music genres; consider the evidence for the hip-hop scene being a cult-like fraternity on a staggering scale; reflect on the nature of sound itself and the ways it can be used to affect human behaviour; and study the striking parallels between the 1960s counter-culture and the UK's Acid House scene that kicked off 21 years later, all bearing the hallmarks of Establishment manipulation. Crucially, Volume 2 reminds readers of how the music industry's activities form only one small part of what's really going on in this reality, and how the power to bring it all to an end lies with us and us alone. It always has. We've just been programmed to forget. Amazon review excerpts for 'Musical Truth, Volume 1' "I came across this book by chance, and am so glad I did. It's very well-written and a fascinating subject. It goes far deeper than just the music, too, the first chapter explaining how music fits into the larger scheme of things is spot-on. The author explains everything he speaks about, and provides links and other resources so the reader can check all the facts for themselves... and it all checks out!" "Excellent tome! Very well-researched, engagingly presented, pithy, witty, incisive and compelling." "I was aware of much of its content already, but Mark Devlin has brought so many pieces of a puzzling jigsaw together in an immensely comprehensive and articulate way. His style of writing is very natural and readable which makes it effortless for the reader - a skill that not all writers of this genre possess." "Beautiful, easy-reading language, where his soul combined with his intellect controls the pen. I just wanted to continue reading the whole night. Important stuff about our reality."

Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. Expression and Truth rejects this opposition and proposes fluid new models of expression, truth, and knowledge with broad application to the humanities. These models derive from five theses that connect expression to description, cognition, the presence and absence of speech, and the conjunction of address and reply. The theses are linked by a concentration on musical expression, regarded as the ideal case of expression in general, and by fresh readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s scattered but important remarks about music. The result is a new conception of expression as a primary means of knowing, acting on, and forming the world. “Recent years have seen the return of the claim that music’s power resides in its ineffability. In Expression and Truth, Lawrence Kramer presents his most elaborate response to this claim. Drawing on philosophers such as Wittgenstein and on close analyses of nineteenth-century compositions, Kramer demonstrates how music operates as a medium for articulating cultural meanings and that music matters too profoundly to be cordoned off from the kinds of critical readings typically brought to the other arts. A tour-de-force by one of musicology’s most influential thinkers.”—Susan McClary, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music.

A world-renowned scholar and musician helps Christians respond with theological discernment to music.

Music can carry the stories of history like a message in a bottle. Lord Kitchener, Neneh Cherry, Smiley Culture, Stormzy . . . Groundbreaking musicians whose songs have changed the world. But how? This exhilarating playlist tracks some of the key shifts in modern British history, and explores the emotional impact of 28 songs and the artists who performed them. This book redefines British history, the Empire and postcolonialism, and will invite you to think again about the narratives and key moments in history that you have been taught up to now. Thrilling, urgent, entertaining and thought-provoking, this beautifully illustrated companion to modern black music is a revelation and a delight. 'Engaging and accomplished . . . perfectly judged for young readers.' Guardian

Learn about the amazing life of a little girl who grew up to use her gift of singing to help bring freedom to South Africa.

Since she first burst onto the international music scene, Melissa Etheridge has released seven albums that have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, garnering not only public adoration for her uncompromising honesty but numerous critical awards, including two Grammys and the prestigious ASCAP Songwriter of the Year award. The Truth Is . . . is a highly charged autobiography—a bold and unflinching account of an extraordinary life that Melissa describes as only she can: from her Kansas roots, through her early love of music, to her brilliant rise to superstardom in a male-dominated rock world. Melissa openly discusses the massive impact of her publicly coming out, a revelation that only increased her popularity, making her a highly visible spokesperson for the gay and lesbian community. The Truth Is . . . shares Melissa Etheridge’s fascinating story with unprecedented candor and insight.

Often described inadequately as the John Lennon or Bob Dylan of Brazil, Caetano Veloso is unquestionably one of the most influential and beloved of Brazilian artists and has developed a world-wide following. Now, in his long awaited memoir, he tells the heroic story of how, in the late 60s, he and a group of friends from the north-eastern state of Bahia created tropicalismo, the movement that shook Brazilian culture and civic order and pushed a nation then on the margins of world politics and economics into the pop avant-garde. Tropical Truth recounts the story of a country, its most subversive generation, and the odyssey of a brilliant constellation of artists. By turns erudite and playful, dreamlike and confessional, Tropical Truth is a revelation of Brazil's most famous artist, one of the greatest popular composers of the past century.

From the poems of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Emily Dickinson emerges what the author calls FemPoetiks, a discourse of female empowerment. Situating the work of these poets in their historical eras, Linda Nicole Blair considers a sampling of their poems side-by-side with a number of song lyrics by singer-songwriters Brandi Carlile, Rhiannon Giddens, and Lucinda Williams, having found commonalities of theme, motif, and language between them. Blair argues that while FemPoetiks has continued to develop in various ways in American poetry by women, the fact that this discourse finds expression in songs by Americana female artists indicates a matrilineal line of influence from the 1630s to today. In order to show the omnipresence of this powerful feminist discourse, she closes this book with eleven interviews she conducted with female singer-songwriters from around the United States. The phenomenon of FemPoetiks is not limited to the arts but extends into all areas of American life, from the domestic to the political. FemPoetiks is a woman’s truth.

Stranger Things meets Men in Black in this funny and eerie young adult novel. WHAT’S GOING ON IN BONE LAKE? THE TRUTH WILL SURPRISE YOU. In small town Michigan, Penny Hardjoy, an aspiring journalist, teams up with the nerdy boy next door and the town’s star quarterback to find her conspiracy theorist father after he goes missing and several other people turn up dead in the woods. The deeper she digs, the weirder things start to get. Townspeople repeat the same phrases—verbatim. Men in black suits stroll around Main Street. Chunks of Penny's memory go missing. Pretty soon, her research leads her to the long-ago meteorite crash in Bone Lake’s woods, and she’s going to have to reconsider her definition of “real” if she wants answers. . . .