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A collection of rock's fifty worst singles and albums
Guterman delves into dramatic moments from every phase of Springsteen's career, looking deep into the music, the man, and culture at large to deliver a nuanced portrait of The Boss, which both new fans and longtime followers will find compelling.
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Over the course of a career now in its fourth decade, Bruce Springsteen has earned one of the most passionate, devoted followings in all rock &'n' roll. He's selling more records and concert tickets in his fifties than he sold in his twenties. Yet to many fans he remains an enigma. How has Springsteen produced such a consistent body of work and retained his currency while other top rock 'n' rollers have gone by the wayside? Jimmy Guterman, an accessible and entertaining music writer, has been writing about Springsteen since the late 1970s. In Runaway American Dream, he delves deep into dramatic and crucial moments from every phase of Springsteen's career, interpreting the songs and incisively commenting on the man and the culture at large to deliver a nuanced portrait of The Boss from the earliest days right up to Springsteen's 2005 album, Devils & Dust.
The infamous British punk rock group's abortive 1979 tour of America's Deep South is recorded by the tour's manager and a music journalist, in a story of chaos and decadence on the road
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.
This is the first study of "hard" country music as well as the first comprehensive application of contemporary cultural theory to country music. Barbara Ching begins by defining the features that make certain country songs and artists "hard." She compares hard country music to "high" American culture, arguing that hard country deliberately focuses on its low position in the American cultural hierarchy, comically singing of failures to live up to American standards of affluence, while mainstream country music focuses on nostalgia, romance, and patriotism of regular folk. With chapters on Hank Williams Sr. and Jr., Merle Haggard, George Jones, David Allan Coe, Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam, and the Outlaw Movement, this book is written in a jargon-free, engaging style that will interest both academic as well as general readers.
Smart. Funny. Fearless."It's pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented" --Dave Eggers. "It's a piece of garbage" --Donald Trump.
This is the hard cover edition of the new release