For the most part, the summer read basically consists of the collection of books we can consume from front to back without any major interruption.
Due to this, it’s one of the most significant engagements with literature we experience throughout the year. However, with such a breadth of choice, investing in the correct story can be as mentally swampy as undervaluing the weight restrictions of your hand luggage at check-in.
Music commentary, as a singular category, also suffers from this same magnitude of variety. And the calibre of exceptional editorials grows year upon year.
Do you opt for reference-steeped oral histories, hyperspecific autobiographies, or theoretical dossiers? With this level of decision making being enough to make you require a long holiday, ease your neurological strain with this selection of the finest music writing so far this year. And don’t forget to relax.
Quit Your Band: Musical Notes from the Japanese Underground
Ian F. Martin
Replete with fastidious references to independent labels, esoteric band names and frequent commentary on the Japanese entertainment industry, Quit Your Band isn’t simply an abridged history of the country’s music. Instead, Martin presents a Japan that has gradually become strictly regulated by major record labels and where music criticism fails to overcome the big business of cultural homogenisation. All the while, the writer fawns adoringly over Japanese subculture and the real life practicalities non-mainstream gigging musicians undertake. It’s a voluminous and subtly cynical account of Japan’s underground and its artists’ resourcefulness in the face of what Martin refers to as “the economic hollowing out of the music business.”
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Comparing Notes: How We Make Sense of Music
Adam Ockelford
Drawing on the ‘tried and tested’ ideas of 20th century musicologists and composers and the revolutionary works of philosopher Edmund Husserl while simultaneously outlining some of the more recent developments in music psychology, Professor Ockelford attempts to lay out exactly how music works and why we are all instinctively musical. With great focus on neuroscience and how children on the autism spectrum respond to sounds, Comparing Notes is a tender yet sonorous journey that escorts you from the annals of your mind to the naive recesses of your heart.
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Rock In A Hard Place: Music and Mayhem in the Middle East
Orlando Crawford
A radically subversive yet masterful exposé set in the epicentre of a cultural and socio-political war zone, Crawford unifies disparate music scenes from Abu Dhabi to Lebanon to Saudi Arabia in this comprehensive report on Middle Eastern rock music. Many bands covered here have experienced such overt political repression and intimidation from their respective communities that prospects of a jail sentence (or worse) is commonplace. Crawford’s accrued tales of artistic survival in a land desecrated by political differences are equally as sobering as they are genuinely empowering.
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Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011
Lizzy Goodman
Packed with gossip-heavy vignettes and viciously candid appraisals, this tome to New York’s bygone era – where rock and dance converged, subsequently redefining the cultural cityscape – is a crucial read. Goodman’s exhaustive, hands-on involvement in a scene that brought unflappable rock personalities such as Karen O, Nick Valensi and James Murphy to the centre stage is encapsulated in these 600 pages of fly-on-the-wall interviews and oral histories. A colossal documenting of one city’s creative mutation from turgid rock’n’roll in the Lower East Side to sold out dance-punk shows at Madison Square Garden.
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From Cradle to Stage: Stories From The Mothers Who Rocked And Raised Rockstars
Virginia Hansen Grohl
This affectionately composed collection of memories penned by Dave Grohl’s mother examines the role of a parent in raising children who would go on to be defined, in life and death, as rock stars. Grohl’s intriguing perspective not only resonates with her son’s fame but with the other mothers she interviews such as Dr Dre’s Verna Griffin, Mike D of the Beastie Boys’ Hester Diamond, Michael Stipe’s Mariana Stipe and Amy Winehouse’s Janis Winehouse. Packed with exclusive family photographs, From Cradle to Stage is a familial ode to the infants that would reach international stardom.
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George Michael: The Biography
Rob Jovanovic
The sad loss of George Michael, one of the world’s most prominent pop stars, back in December 2016 has left a terminal wound on the music industry at large. And yet, while he was not only vehemently outspoken and honest, tales of his philanthropy were widely unheard of until after he died. Jovanovic aims to illuminate the greyer areas of the cultural icon’s past with this newly updated biography. From George’s spiky relationship with his father (who outwardly believed the star had ‘no talent’), to Wham! to the massively successful 25Live Tour, to his later years, this is a colourful albeit tragic celebration of the life of a true pop star.
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Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements
Bob Mehr
In this moderately typical biography of the self-destructive life of an alternative rock band, Trouble Boys recounts the story of a pioneering group of misfits on a collision course with dissolution. Mehr’s warts-and-all analysis of The Replacements is a concoction of tour stories and thwarted opportunities. The band’s life was not pretty but Mehr succeeds in delivering a thoroughly researched and occasionally hilarious bio that ultimately reveals the intrinsic, sometimes violent, incompatibility of a functioning band.
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Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime
Jefferey Boakye
Last year, Hattie Collins and Olivia Rose published the impeccable This Is Grime, one of the first widely comprehensive accounts available on grime’s trajectory. It was an important stride in archiving the genre’s mutation from the garage sound systems on the streets of Bow E3 to world stage. Jeff Boakye’s Hold Tight follows in the footsteps of Collins and Rose’s work, tracing grime back to its inner-city beginnings straight up to its present day successes. Dividing his chapters with focus on seminal tracks, Boakye shuns the conventions of your usual history book and instead offers us a compilation brimmed with Amen breaks, clashes and verbose hypermasculinity. A truly important read.
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The Second Sound: Conversations on Gender and Music
Julian Eckhardt & Leen De Graeve
A collation of talks on discrimination as paradigm and otherness, gendered music and sound art and the navigation of the field, The Second Sound aims to deconstruct the homogenised, male-dominated perspective on gender in the music industry. Through these imaginary conversations between musicians and sound artists, Eckhardt and De Graeve’s project provides a commodious expression of fear, doubt, honesty and (mis)understanding in the field of abstract art. Not to be taken lightly, unsolved questions arise such as ‘Is art itself gendered?’ and whether the under-representation of women and the LGBTQ community is a symptom or a cause of patriarchal dominance.
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The Lived Experience of Improvisation: In Music, Learning and Life
Simon Rose
With analytical contributions from highly esteemed improvisers such as Roscoe Mitchell, Pauline Oliveros and George Lewis, Rose’s The Lived Experience of Improvisation endeavours to reinstate improvisation as an art form back into the mainstream consciousness and relieve it from the margins of alternative sound art. As a practicing musician, Rose makes a strong argument in defence of improvisation as a means of educating and understanding the incalculable complexities of human existence.
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This Is Memorial Device
David Keenan
A novel set to the clamour of a fictional post-punk revolution, separated by 26 standalone interviews arranged by the book’s fictional editor with individuals whose lives have been transformed by the existence of the fictional band Memorial Device, based out of Airdrie. With wit and distant misanthropy, Keenan’s genuinely believable eye-witness testimonies carry equal amounts of pathos as they do raucous attitude set in a small town backdrop during the era of the punk rock fallout. A fallacious and subtly grievous experience by an enduring critical voice.
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