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From the concert stage to the dressing room, from the recording studio to the digital realm, SPIN surveys the modern musical landscape and the culture around it with authoritative reporting, provocative interviews, and a discerning critical ear. With dynamic photography, bold graphic design, and informed irreverence, the pages of SPIN pulsate with the energy of today's most innovative sounds. Whether covering what's new or what's next, SPIN is your monthly VIP pass to all that rocks.
Following hard on the explosion of British punk, in 1979 Gang of Four produced post-punk's smartest record, Entertainment! For the first time, a band wedded punk's angry energy to funk's propulsive beats�and used that music to put across lyrics that brought a heady mixture of Marxist theory and situationism to exposing the cultural politics of everyday life. But for an American college student from the suburbs�and, one expects, for many, many others, including British youth�Jon King's and Andy Gill's mumbled lyrics were often all but unintelligible. Political rock �n' roll is always something of an oxymoron: rock audiences by and large don't tune in to be lectured to. But what can it mean that a band that made pop songs as political theory actively resisted making that theory legible? Coming to terms with the impact of Entertainment! requires us to take the mondegreen�the misunderstood lyric�seriously. The old joke has it that the title of R.E.M.'s debut album should have been not Murmur, but Mumble: true, so far as it goes. But that's the title, too, of rock �n' roll's Greatest Hits compilation�and that strategic inarticulateness itself, which creates such an important role for the listener, has an important politics.
In Britain during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new phenomenon emerged, with female guitarists, bass-players, keyboard-players and drummers playing in bands. Before this time, women's presence in rock bands, with a few notable exceptions, had always been as vocalists. This sudden influx of female musicians into the male domain of rock music was brought about partly by the enabling ethic of punk rock ('anybody can do it!') and partly by the impact of the Equal Opportunities Act. But just as suddenly as the phenomenon arrived, the interest in these musicians evaporated and other priorities became important to music audiences. Helen Reddington investigates the social and commercial reasons for how these women became lost from the rock music record, and rewrites this period in history in the context of other periods when female musicians have been visible in previously male environments. Reddington draws on her own experience as bass-player in a punk band, thereby contributing a fresh perspective on the socio-political context of the punk scene and its relationship with the media. The book also features a wealth of original interview material with key protagonists, including the late John Peel, Geoff Travis, The Raincoats and the Poison Girls.
Based on detailed interviews with band members, Red Set considers the music, art and politics that shaped Gang of Four and how the band, in turn, left an indelible mark on popular music. In the autumn of 1976, two young British Fine Arts students travelled to New York on a university grant, but instead of merely studying ended up staying with one of the city’s pioneering punk journalists, visiting the Museum of Modern Art by day and hanging out in punk epicentre CBGBs by night. It is from this trip that Gang of Four emerged. Blending revelations from interviews with the band conducted by the author with snippets from newspaper articles and record reviews, Jim Dooley tells the history of Gang of Four as they remember it. From their days at art school through countless tours, records and reunions, Red Set is the definitive history of one of Britain’s greatest and most influential bands.
There is a well-developed vocabulary for discussing classical music, but when it comes to popular music, how do we analyze its effects and its meaning? David Brackett draws from the disciplines of cultural studies and music theory to demonstrate how listeners form opinions about popular songs, and how they come to attribute a rich variety of meanings to them. Exploring several genres of popular music through recordings made by Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello, Brackett develops a set of tools for looking at both the formal and cultural dimensions of popular music of all kinds.
Was punk just another moment in music history, a flash in time when a group of young rebels exploded in a fury of raw sound? Greil Marcus delves into the afterlife of punk as a much richer phenomenon and as a form of artistic and social rebellion.
Fleetwood Mac's distinctive sound, first really captured in the 1977 record Rumours, launched the group into the commercial stratosphere, and over the past three decades they have never looked back. All along the way their dysfunctional relationships have informed their professional success, as well as their personal downfalls. By writing and singing about their problems, Fleetwood Mac has transformed what breaks them apart into what keeps them together. They have turned their dark relationship dilemmas into glittering entertainment. In this highly entertaining chronicle, author Donald Brackett provides readers with a special opportunity to review the band's complicated history and reconsider the personal, dynamic sources of their classic albums and enduring hits. The band drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie started in 1967 has gone through more personnel changes and stylistic innovations than any other pop group in our cultural history. The story of the group began when John Mayall and Alexis Korner, the band's mentors, launched a mid-'60s British blues revival. Ex-Mayall players Fleetwood and McVie then went on to form an incendiary band of psychedelic blues under the name Fleetwood Mac. But it was not until hearing a little-known 1973 record from Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks that Mick Fleetwood heard the future sound and true pop potential of his own group.
In this engaging new book, Bradford Martin illuminates a different 1980s than many remember—one whose history has been buried under the celebratory narrative of conservative ascendancy. Ronald Reagan looms large in most accounts of the period, encouraging Americans to renounce the activist and liberal politics of the 1960s and ‘70s and embrace the resurgent conservative wave. But a closer look reveals that a sizable swath of Americans strongly disapproved of Reagan's policies throughout his presidency. With a weakened Democratic Party scurrying for the political center, many expressed their dissatisfaction outside electoral politics. Unlike the civil rights and Vietnam era protesters, activists of the 1980s often found themselves on the defensive, struggling to preserve the hard-won victories of the previous era. Their successes, then, were not in ushering in a new era of progressive reforms but in effecting change in areas from professional life to popular culture, while beating back an even more forceful political shift to the right. Martin paints an indelible portrait of these and other influential, but often overlooked, movements: from on-the-ground efforts to constrain the administration's aggressive Latin American policy and stave off a possible Nicaraguan war, to mock shanties constructed on college campuses to shed light on corporate America's role in supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa. The result is a clearer, richer perspective on a turbulent decade in American life.
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