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“[A] compulsively readable biography . . . Essential for fans of Yoakam and lovers of good music writing.” ―Library Journal From his formative years playing pure hardcore honky-tonk for mid-’80s Los Angeles punk rockers through his subsequent surge to the top of the country charts, Dwight Yoakam has enjoyed a singular career. An electrifying live performer, superb writer, and virtuosic vocalist, he’s successfully bridged two musical worlds that usually have little use for each other: commercial country and its alternative/Americana/roots-rocking counterpart. Defying the label “too country for rock, too rock for country,” Yoakam has triumphed while many of his peers have had to ...
Covering the expanse of arts featured in The Times, from orchestral music and museum exhibitions to video games and hip-hop, this Reader makes no hierarchical distinction between the pop arts and the fine arts. Don McLeese explores both critical essays and reviews (by genre) as well as profiles and trend pieces to help students sharpen their critical instincts. How we respond to the arts reveals as much about us individually as it does about the art being evaluated. Seasoned teacher McLeese, who has worked both as a critic covering a wide range of arts and as a magazine editor, adeptly weaves his insightful commentary to show there are no right or wrong opinions, just stronger and weaker arguments.
Slippery Steps isn't your typical, helland- back recovery memoir. I never intended to quit drinking, rarely gave it a thought. I'd spent decades as a successful and productive journalist. I was a loving husband and father. My life worked, and worked well. Until it didn't. Freedom from drinking has enriched my life in ways I'd never imagined. I'd been numbing myself to sleep, and sleepwalking my way through life. It's never too late to wake up. This is a book about how the worst day of my life turned out to be one of the best.
Mark Hollingsworth, a manager of rock bands and an advocate for the poor, tells his story about his family and his many travels around the world, always seeking to understand the uncertainties of life.
Traces the history of Austin City Limits, from its humble beginning as a weekly broadcast to the multi-faceted brand it has become.
The essays in Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence find important connections in the ways that women are portrayed in relation to violence, whether they are murder victims or killers. The book’s extensive cultural contexts acknowledge and engage with contemporary theories and practices of identity politics and debates about the ethics and politics of representation itself. Does representation produce or reproduce the conditions of violence? Is representation itself a form of violence? This book adds significant new dimensions to the characterization of gender and violence by discussing nationalism and war, feminist media, and the depiction of violence throughout society.
An October 2022 IndieNext pick ”[An] engaging and beautifully narrated quest for personal fulfillment and musical recognition...This is a fast-paced tale in which music and love always take center stage...A truly gifted musician, Price writes about her journey with refreshing candor.”—Kirkus, starred review ”Brutally honest...a vivid and poignant memoir.”—The Guardian Country music star Margo Price shares the story of her struggle to make it in an industry that preys on its ingenues while trying to move on from devastating personal tragedies. When Margo Price was nineteen years old, she dropped out of college and moved to Nashville to become a musician. She busked on the street, ...
A moving and essential exploration of what it takes to find your voice as a woman, a survivor, an artist, and an icon. The first time Lynn Melnick listened to a Dolly Parton song in full, she was 14 years old, in the triage room of a Los Angeles hospital, waiting to be admitted to a drug rehab program. Already in her young life as a Jewish teen in the 1980s, she had been the victim of rape, abuse, and trauma, and her path to healing would be long. But in Parton’s words and music, she recognized a fellow survivor. In this powerful, incisive work of social and self-exploration, Melnick blends personal essay with cultural criticism to explore Parton’s dual identities as feminist icon and ob...
Painstakingly researched with copious citations from books, newspapers, and news magazines, this new edition has become the classic reference work praised by professional copy editors.
The Mexican American orquesta is neither a Mexican nor an American music. Relying on both the Mexican orquesta and the American dance band for repertorial and stylistic cues, it forges a synthesis of the two. The ensemble emerges historically as a powerful artistic vehicle for the expression of what Manuel Peña calls the "dialectic of conflict." Grounded in ethnic and class conflict, this dialectic compels the orquesta and its upwardly mobile advocates to waver between acculturation and ethnic resistance. The musical result: a complex mesh of cultural elements—Mexican and American, working- and middle-class, traditional and contemporary. In this book, Manuel Peña traces the evolution of the orquesta in the Southwest from its beginnings in the nineteenth century through its pinnacle in the 1970s and its decline since the 1980s. Drawing on fifteen years of field research, he embeds the development of the orquesta within a historical-materialist matrix to achieve the optimal balance between description and interpretation. Rich in ethnographic detail and boldly analytical, his book is the first in-depth study of this important but neglected field of artistic culture.