The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. by Peter Ames Carlin (Doubleday)
R.E.M.’s ascension from post-punk purists to an unstoppable pop juggernaut might be the most unlikely in the history of pop culture. Even more unlikely, they did it without compromise, building their band with relentless touring, striking musicianship, and an unusual worldview. R.E.M.s story is a rock ‘n roll Cinderella story.
Peter Ames Carlin‘s The Name of this Band is R.E.M. tells their story in awe-inspiring detail. Impressively, he balances the keen-eyed observations of a historian, the pacing of a born storyteller, and the breathless zeal of a true fan. It’s a must-read for R.E.M superfans, alternative music historians, anyone wanting to know more about the Athens, Georgia, music scene, or anyone looking to understand how bizarre the 1980s and 1990s in American music really were. – J Simpson
Never Understood: the Jesus and Mary Chain Story by William Reid and Jim Reid (Hachette)
The Reid Brothers may be the most dysfunctional siblings this side of the Gallagher Brothers. During their legendary first run, they were as famous for on-stage dust-ups and rock ‘n roll debauchery as for their strychnine-and-steel-shavings noise pop. In Never Understood, Jim and William Reid set the record straight about the stories behind the 32-point headlines.
The drinking, drugs, and fist fights are just window-dressing, though. The stories of their upbringing in the slums of Glasgow, bonding over records and, later, punk rock, are even more entertaining, not to mention revelatory. Never Understood emphasizes the importance of family, unity, and forgiveness. In a world where people are so quick to condemn, it’s inspiring to see two people who love one another overcome their differences and their demons to make some of the best music in their career. – J Simpson
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen (Dutton)
When was the last time you had a nightmare about nuclear war? If it’s been a while, or (for the youths out there) never, then it is probably time to reacquaint yourself with just how truly horrible such a scenario would be.
In earlier decades, ticking-clock thrillers like Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (1964) haunted dramas about the aftermath such as Nicholas Meyer’s The Day After or Lynne Littman’s Testament (both released in 1983), and frequent op-ed arguments over nuclear war policy kept it front of mind for many Americans. Annie Jacobsen (author of 2011’s Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base) does a public service with Nuclear War. She describes not only each step of how a nuclear war would proceed toward Armageddon (each page bristling with Tom Clancy-level research and hair-raising historical anecdotes) but also the aftermath’s harrowing reality and the false promise that any major nuclear exchange would result in anything less than the end of human civilization. – Chris Barsanti
Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna (Ecco)
Kathleen Hanna has long aligned herself with punk, expressing her allegiance in explicit ways. With the recent release of her memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, now is an opportune time to assess how Hanna’s career has been informed by punk, but also how punk has been transformed by the Riot Grrrl phenomenon she helped birth and develop. Some of the Riot Grrrls that made up Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heaven’s to Betsy had studied feminism at Olympia’s Evergreen State College, where their eyes were opened to theorists like Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. However, learning about feminism was not the same as learning how to be one as an artist. For tips, they looked less to academia than to certain pioneering precedents from punk’s past.
Willful amateurism, child-like rhetoric, and gender-related satire were common features of the music and the zines essential in making Riot Grrrl a subculture rather than just a musical trend. Punk may not receive the media scrutiny it once did, but that does not negate that women participate in its cultural offshoots today more than ever—as performers, fans, and citizens. Would such gender realignments within and beyond punk have occurred but for the bold gestures of Kathleen Hanna and the Riot Grrrls, which interrupted male privilege to make music and art in their images for their own (creative) empowerment? – Iain Ellis
Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family by Jordan Mechner (First Second)
Jordan Mechner is the creator of the award-winning Prince of Persia video game series and the narrative adventure masterpiece The Last Express. His memoir, Replay, is an accomplished work as a graphic memoir, and it has enough insight into Mecher’s career as a video game developer to uphold interest for those like me who were initially interested in his design process.
However, like Steve Reich’s 1988 composition Different Trains, Mechner’s Replay is a personal work of introspection that looks to history and tragic synchronicity. Both works are told through the perspective of Jewish men reexamining their childhoods under the shadow of the Holocaust. Reich’s Different Trains speaks to the elephant in the room, while Mechner only hints at it. What if…?
Indeed, the tracks converge with Reich and Mechner’s work. Both are minimalist in the sense that their oeuvres are focused on providing short and concise feedback loops. Different Trains is an elaborate and painful echo, a sonic rumination of the fragility of life and circumstances. Where Replay transcends, though, is in its telling of The Mechner family history. It’s a tale whose retelling reverberates today and forever. – Luis Aguasvivas
Shake It Up, Baby! The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963 by Ken McNab (Pegasus)
It’s hard to imagine the Beatles playing to less-than-packed houses or being heckled onstage, but those are the situations John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr faced as they toured Scotland in January 1963. A month after the group’s final residency in Hamburg, Germany, and eight months after producer George Martin signed them to EMI Records, the Beatles were intent on conquering Britain. Stars in their native Liverpool, the rest of the world barely knew them.
Ken McNab’s Shake It Up, Baby! is a gritty account of the Beatles’ rise to fame. McNab, an award-winning journalist and communications professional in Glasgow, breaks down the Beatles’ concerts, business deals, sleepless nights, and bloody fights month by month during the transitional year of 1963. McNab’s prose is light and vivid, even when discussing contractual negotiations, promotional campaigns, and record company contracts. The author’s compulsion for detail makes Shake It Up, Baby! feel scholarly without sacrificing readability.
Beatles scholarship is a crowded and ever-expanding field. Regardless, Shake It Up, Baby! is essential as it details one crucial year in the Beatles saga. – Peter Thomas Webb
She’s a Badass: Women in Rock Shaping Feminism by Katherine Yeske Taylor (BackBeat)
Music journalist Katherine Yeske Taylor’s She’s a Badass was born from her need to celebrate women rockers’ influence on the wider feminism movement. It features intergenerational interviews with 20 significant female rockers from across the decades, mostly from the US, about their adventures and misadventures navigating a machismo music industry. They are not here to get a patriarchal stamp of approval. They are here to achieve transcendence.
Each rocker gets her chapter in She’s a Badass, and each story is starkly illuminating. Indeed, the fierce females interviewed for She’s a Badass – including such underground and aboveground luminaries as Lydia Lunch, Suzanne Vega, Joan Obsorne, Amanda Palmer, and Gina Shock – have persevered in a profession notoriously riddled with sexism and misogyny not because they have something to prove, but because it’s their inherent right to indulge their creative impulses. One thing that becomes clear while reading She’s a Badass is that it is vital to keep fighting for women’s rights; as the horrifying reversal of Roe v. Wade proves, those cherished rights can be rolled back – Alison Ross
Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind by Annalee Newitz (W.W. Norton)
Everyone knows that stories are weapons, but we need more people to understand how these weapons work, or stories will continue to be used against us. This is part of what Winston Churchill meant when he said, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Annalee Newitz’s Stories Are Weapons goes the distance in examining this question of how stories are manufactured to exploit our weaknesses. This compelling exploration of how psychological manipulation has been used as a tool of control and influence throughout history is divided into three parts, each focusing on different aspects and case studies of psychological warfare, ultimately presenting a clear argument for why understanding these tactics is essential today.
Newitz’s work is an urgent reminder that understanding and addressing psychological warfare is crucial to preserving democracy and personal freedoms. From marketing manipulation to all-out psychological warfare, Stories Are Weapons clarifies how our world – and worldview – is seldom our own. – Megan Volpert
The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History by Karen Valby (Pantheon)
In her dance history book The Swans of Harlem, author Karen Valby structures a magnificent, wide-ranging, complex narrative that’s both engaging and emotional. The five women featured—Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton-Benjamin—are restored their rightful legacy with this work.
Each came from different social and economic backgrounds, but they all passionately loved ballet as youngsters and wanted to be professional ballet dancers. However, in 1960s America, Black dancers were scarce in ballet classes and were rarely hired by ballet companies. Even the most talented Black ballet dancers were largely excluded because they didn’t fit the White European visual norms of classical dance; Sells’ mother Mamie, watching her teenage daughter perform in the corps de ballet of The Nutcracker, heard another audience member complaining about the “dirty snowflake”. Other Black ballet dancers were encouraged, subtly and not so subtly, to pursue contemporary or modern dance instead.
Valby is the ideal writer for The Swans of Harlem precisely because she’s not part of that world and its self-referential, sometimes impenetrable discourse. Valby knows enough about ballet to understand the Swans’ experiences, but more importantly, she knows how to structure a wide-ranging, complex narrative that’s both engaging and emotional. Her confident, well-informed writing is accessible to a wide audience of readers who might know little about ballet or dance – all will learn a world of things from this work. – Fiona McQuarrie
Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Capital by David Browne (Hachette)
New York’s Greenwich Village is a compact sanctuary that has attracted a legion of visionaries and non-conformists who had an outsized influence on 20th-century culture – on alternative lifestyles, progressive politics, and the arts, especially music. Within the maze of coffeehouses, nightclubs, and watering holes on its narrow streets, the legends-to-be of folk, jazz, and rock coalesced into tight-knit communities that birthed sound innovations that continue to resonate.
Veteran music journalist David Browne, who is well-equipped to take on this task, has expertly chronicled this community’s sprawling history and impact in Talkin’ Greenwich Village. A senior writer at Rolling Stone Magazine, he authored acclaimed biographies of musicians including Sonic Youth, Tim and Jeff Buckley, the Grateful Dead, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. This longtime tri-state New Yorker also witnessed some of the many watershed moments that transpired during the book’s pivotal epochs – from the 1950s folk jamborees and turbulent rock and jazz revolutions of the 1960s to the no-holds-barred punk 1970s to the all-too-brief folk music revival of the 1980s. Based on 150 interviews with notables like Judy Collins, John Sebastian, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Suzanne Vega, and Terre and Suzzy Roche, Talkin’ Greenwich Village lends this saga the epic scope it has long deserved. – Sal Cataldi
The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey by Carol Verburg (Chronicle)
Edward Gorey’s art is often associated with the macabre, the sinister, and the gothic. For decades, his signature crosshatched black-and-white drawings lent melodramatic whimsy to the PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery! title sequence. His costume designs for the Broadway revival of Dracula won him a Tony award. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events all nod to Gorey’s sensibility and wicked humor as their inspiration.
Award-winning playwright, theater director, and author Carol Verburg produced and co-directed approximately 20 of Gorey’s original plays or “entertainments” at Cape Cod. With The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey, she paints a portrait of a multifaceted artist, an exceptional friend, a grand collaborator, and a witty instigator. She meticulously braids her first-person account and Gorey’s archival photos with rare sketches, unpublished scripts, and anecdotes from friends and collaborators to create a comprehensive, visually vibrant book. The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey is a visual and intellectual treat: part biography, part meditation on the artistic process, and part “mini art exhibit” of previously unpublished material. – Elizabeth Marshall
Too Much Too Young: The 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation by Daniel Rachel (Akashic)
2 Tone found a sweet spot between punk anger and pop sensibility that mirrored the myriad poles they were trying to bridge in their band members and audiences. 2 Tone may have been, as Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian singer Pauline Blac self-deprecatingly sums it up, “a two-year blip between the end of punk and New Romantics”, but what a blip it was.
Daniel Rachel’s immersive history marvelously details what made that blip so resonant and enduring, even as he and his interviewees resolutely cannot agree on what, exactly that resonance may mean. Too Much Too Young suggests that, while punk has left a more robust musical legacy, its “air of despondency and willfulness to reject a generation’s future” also limits that legacy to repeated adoption by successive generations of disaffected young musicians.
In contrast, Rachel argues, “2 Tone encouraged audiences to be positive, engage with music as an active tool of change, and above all to enjoy themselves and have fun.” This conclusion may downplay the subversive power of punk that permeates 2 Tone as it permeates the more recent appropriation of punk by feminist, Black, Indigenous, and global South artists, but it captures how effectively joy and anger together can, at times, also be channeled into positive change, especially in the sphere of culture. It also illuminates the thrill, power, pressures, and costs of instant fame for young musicians. – David Pike
Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life by Richard King(Anthology)
Arthur Russell has become a cult figure over the past three decades for his work as a musician and composer in New York during the 1970s and 1980s. Like many polymaths of that fertile period, such as Patti Smith or Andy Warhol, Russell experimented with many genres that reflected an eclectic set of interests. However, in contrast to these figures, he passed away in relative obscurity in April 1992, suffering from AIDS-related illnesses, just as his career was gaining wider notice.
Author and Planet Records founder Richard King has synthesized an unusual collection of photographs, interview excerpts, personal letters, music composition sheets, and other ephemera from Russell’s papers at the New York Public Library. Part biography, a work of criticism, and a visual portfolio of Russell’s oeuvre, Travels Over Feeling is a beguiling mix of the public and the personal, simultaneously revealing and adding mystery to his life.
Furthermore, Travels Over Feeling is an elegy for an entire generation that died too soon, with figures like Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz among those lost. Similar to the memoirs of Patti Smith, King’s book is also a requiem for a vanished New York, which sustained younger artists and musicians and has all but disappeared. – Christopher J. Lee
Under The Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush by Graeme Thomson (Omnibus Remastered)
When updating a previously published work, some biographers might be tempted to slap a few new chapters on the end and call it done. When Graeme Thomson’s biography Under The Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush was first released in 2010, it was justifiably hailed as the definitive chronicle of Bush’s career. “Definitive” is a subjective assessment, but among the many books written about Bush by then, it was easily the best-informed and most thoughtful.
To Graeme Thomson’s credit, he has revised the entire text in this 2024 reissue, weaving in references to her newer projects to draw out the themes such as family, sexuality, and the spiritual world that have consistently resonated throughout Kate Bush’s work. Yes, there are new chapters at the end of Under The Ivy’s third edition, but they maintain the same measured tone and careful attention to detail that first made this book stand out.
Under The Ivy will appeal to long-time fans, anyone who has encountered Bush’s music over the past 40 years, and anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of an incredible musical career. While Kate Bush’s work and life defy clichés and easy categorization, Thomson accomplishes the rare feat of chronicling her story while conveying its inherent ambiguity and mystery. – Fiona McQuarrie
Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion by Eleanor Medhurst (Hurst)
Eleanor Medhurst has devoted her academic and professional career to uncovering and analyzing lesbian history through the lens of clothing. Her blog, Dressing Dykes, and its corresponding Instagram account illustrate how her contributions have established her as a significant voice in the fields of queer and fashion history. Unsuitable, a culmination of her extensive research and personal passion, fills a crucial gap in historical literature, highlighting the often invisible narratives of lesbian fashion.
Medhurst’s approach is far from the studiously detached. She states, “I didn’t write this book as an objective observer; I wrote it because I wanted it. Because as a lesbian and a fashion historian I was desperate to discover a history that I was at the end of. I wanted that end to be open and inclusive, because history is not a closed door. In the billions of human lifetimes across the entirety of the world, there have been other people who felt what we feel today, and innumerable moments when clothing has been chosen or changed to reflect those feelings.”
This personal investment is palpable throughout Unsuitable, infusing the historical narrative with a sense of urgency and relevance. Stitching fashion, gender, and sexuality into a perfectly tailored, comprehensive, and inclusive book, Medhurst’s work is an essential addition to both fashion studies and queer history, providing readers with a deeper understanding of how clothing has been used to express lesbian identities and resist societal norms. – Megan Volpert
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A very uncomfortable pop political history for Gen-Xers to read, John Ganz’s survey of an early period of American extremism, When the Clock Broke, is a lucid and unnerving survey of the fractured national psyche that presaged the current state of play and augured the frazzled listlessness of the 1990s. While the 1992 presidential election is generally remembered for the victory of Bill Clinton and the ascendancy of the new centrist Democratic party, Ganz studies the not-so-fringy candidates like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, who injected extremism into the mainstream.
The moment he vividly describes is a very familiar one, where the sudden end of Cold War certainties met deindustrialization, economic malaise, and a fractious conspiratorial public looking, as always, for someone to blame. – Chris Barsanti
Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffah (Harper Perennial)
In Whiskey Tender, Deborah Jackson Taffa, born to a mixed Hispanic mother and mixed-tribe Native father, tells us, “Talking to outsiders is taboo.” Other writers, from Philip Roth to Toni Morrison, have expressed similar sentiments about sharing, or airing, their people’s inner lives and workings.
It is also a history, even multiple histories: family lore, overlooked cultural touchstones, and ultimately, an entire accounting of America. Between her parents’ wedding, the family’s precarious move off their California reservation to New Mexico, and much more, the reader learns about the WWII Code Talkers, colorism, and the Indian New Deal and Indian Relocation Act, going back to Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1893.
The personal and historical must be understood as intertwined. Each national act had a direct impact on Taffa’s family. However, analyzing memoirs can be tricky, potentially overreaching and overreading. For example, Taffa is assigned the role of England in her school play. Is that a commentary on colonialism or a teacher’s whim? The atomic bomb testing causes her grandmother’s cancer, but it also feels culturally metaphorical. As we come to understand, though, metaphors are powerful.
Whiskey Tender is a coming-of-age narrative. Its story is particular, depicting the singular experiences of the mixed-race girl who never saw anyone like her in movies or books. Taffa tells us that her story is “common as dirt.” Dirt, however, is a foundation to life. –Jesse Kavadlo
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (Penguin)
In PopMatters‘ review of Tommy Orange’s There There, I wrote, “Orange lends a critical voice that at once denudes the reality of cultural genocide while evoking a glimmer of encouragement.” In his follow-up release, Wandering Stars, Orange turns the glimmer into a blaze.
Wandering evokes a sense of movement without a destination. This is an apt metaphor for the novel’s opening focus on Native American displacement and cultural suppression. Despite the efforts to erase Native culture, the novel’s characters defy erasure. Whereas trauma and violence are part of the story, Orange’s novel unequivocally reminds readers that it is not the whole story. As such, Wandering Stars is not a story of generational trauma. It is a story about generational resilience. – Elisabeth Woronzoff
Weighted Down: The Complicated Life of Skip Spence by Cam Cobb (Omnibus)
Skip Spence was one of the Holy Trinity of critically revered and maybe unjustly labeled “acid casualties” of late 1960s/early ‘70s music. Along with Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and the 13th Floor Elevators’ Roky Erickson, Spence was a star-crossed figure idolized for his all-too-brief contributions to shaping psychedelia through his work with Moby Grape and his one incredibly stark and endlessly intriguing 1969 solo album, Oar.
His briefly burning creativity and agonizingly slow decline are profiled in Cam Cobb’s wonderfully comprehensive biography, Weighted Down. Cobb spoke with many of Skip’s family, friends, and bandmates to create the first authoritative chronicle of his artistic development and achievements and a sympathetic one of his long battle with mental illness, addiction, and homelessness.
Like Joel Selvin’s book on the mentally challenged drummer Jim Gordon, Drums & Demons, Cobb treats Skip Spence’s struggle with mental illness with insight and sympathy. While this is a solid reason to buy Weighted Down, a more powerful one is how he dissects and casts a glowing light on Spence’s slim but resonant work as a composer of some of the most influential music to come out of San Francisco’s psychedelic scene. – Sal Cataldi
What Nails It by Greil Marcus (Yale UP)
After half a century primarily writing about musicians, Greil Marcus delivers a personal and philosophical treatise on why he writes in What Nails It, as part of the Yale University Press’ series Why I Write, based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Dialed Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature prizes at Yale University. The result: a meditation on memory, myth, past, history, the role of art in society, and, of course, music.
Therefore, What Nails It is another Marcus book that is far more than its title and its subject; the interest lies in the peregrination of the author’s imagination: ideas flow from thought to thought—forwards, backward, laterally, not always in that order—that you become subsumed into the expansiveness and erudition of his mind.
The degree to which Marcus jumps across epochs, art forms, and songs in a single bound is that he could almost rival Bob Beamon for his Olympic record; What Nails It is that impressive. The pleasure is seeing where his train of thought will lead you—and not. Lastly, often in his sinuous and elliptical prose, fact and fiction merge into poetic indeterminacy, like a nebulous 1960s garage rock tune, only that it can be held. – Jack Walters