You have to listen to music, sing it or dance to it. But we can understand it much better if we also read about it. The literatura musical It is a genre in itself, and can be approached from a thousand different perspectives. From the biography that delves into the hidden ins and outs of the industry up to andl essay that theorizes about any appearance, artist or movement. In that sense, 2023 has brought us a good handful of books for music lovers that anyone with a minimum of sense and sensitivity can enjoy. We select the ones we liked the most.
‘1, 2, 3, 4. The Beatles marking time’ – Craig Brown (Contra)
Can you write something new about the most famous band of all time? Is there anything left to tell? Probably not. But if you approach it from an unconventional perspective and use a good dose of igenius, insight and sense of humor, surely we can delight like dwarfs returning for the umpteenth time to the greatest (music) story ever told. Craig Brown summarizes in 150 pills why the Fab Four are still and will continue to be relevant. And in its more than 600 pages it never, ever bores us.
‘Those accidental years. DRO, the independent record label that changed everything’ – Laura Piñero (Libros Cúpula)
Organized Radioactive Discs It began as the hobby of a handful of friends organized in a modest apartment in Madrid in the early 80s and ended up becoming the independent label most important music in Spain. Journalist Laura Piñero tells the choral story of those crazy pioneers and along the way she ends up documenting the most exhaustive and definitive chronicle of the who’s who of the national music industry. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, dreams, successes and failures of an unrepeatable generation.
‘A Furious Devotion’ – Richard Balls (Liburuak)
With the echoes of Shane MacGowan’s wonderful funeral still fresh, meeting again with the charismatic and endearing singer of The Pogues Through the pages this written biography of Richard Balls is quite an experience. The text avoids the suspicious smell that any ‘authorized’ biography usually has and is painfully honest, recounting a life as hectic as it was hectic and without hiding addictions, excesses and complexes of all stripes and conditions.
‘Diaries, 1957-1982’ – Jane Birkin (Two-Headed Monster)
The British actress and singer, an icon of style and feminist modernity in the 60s and 70s, died this summer at the age of 76, but before leaving she had put to print, without any retouching or revision, a diary that extends from 1957 to 1982. A treasure for mythomaniacs. From the haute bourgeois girl who escaped her destiny to become the muse of Swinging London to her legendary love story with Serge Gainsbourg. A vital journey punctuated by albums, movies, parties, trips and planetary scandals.
‘Bodies. Life and death in music’ – Ian Winwood (Liburuak)
Beyond the fascination exerted by the exquisite corpses of rock (Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse), all these premature tragic deaths reveal a larger structural problem in the music industry. To explain the reason for this anomaly in the form of suicides, overdoses and accidental deaths which affects not only musicians, but also technicians, managers, press or editors, says music journalist Ian Winwood. And he does it knowingly, but also with warmth, humor, insight and honesty.
‘Aladdin Sane: 50 years’ – Chris Duffy (Libros Cúpula)
In 2023 it will be the 50th anniversary of David Bowie’s most iconic image, the one on the cover of ‘Aladdin Sane’ with lightning piercing his face. And on the occasion of such a relevant name day, this volume was published, coordinated by Chris Duffy, son of the photographer who created that snapshot for history, including hundreds of photographs, many of them unpublished, and essays carried out by various experts on the importance and influence of the cover of that album. A perfect gift for music lovers.
‘Good pop, bad pop. An Inventory’ – Jarvis Cocker (Blackie Books)
It should surprise no one that a memoir written by the Pulp frontman is not your typical memoir. Too cool to be ordinary. So what he does is start searching in the attic of his London house and, from the valuable or absurd objects who decides to discard (good pop) or keep (bad pop), paint a Proustian self-portrait loaded with irony and fun about a teenager with a head full of birds who always knew he would be a pop star.
‘Macrofestivals. The black hole of music’ – Nando Cruz (Peninsula)
Journalist Nando Cruz was an ardent fan of music festivals in his youth. But when one day, exhausted, he fell asleep standing on the fences in the middle of a concert, he decided that it wasn’t for him anymore. So in ‘Macrofestivals’ he gives a good account, supported by data, theories and testimonies, of the reasons why these events in constant and seemingly infinite expansion have ended up becoming expression of the most frenetic consumerismin which music, paradoxically, ends up being the least of it.
‘The Velvet Underground, etc.’ – Rafa Cervera (Dome Books)
With The Velvet Underground it happens like with The Beatles, that everything has already been told about them. Which has more merit in the case of the New York band, so ignored and despised at the time for its sonic and aesthetic radicalism. But, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of Lou Reed’s death, Rafa Cervera, a veteran journalist and hardened in a thousand battles, manages to combine erudition and encyclopedism with the enthusiasm of the fan to overcome the boredom that lurks in the typical biography and provide a transversal and open look at a band that is still very present 60 years later.
‘A world in every song’ – Jeff Tweedy (Contra)
Jeff Tweedy, alma mater of the wonderful Wilco, says that this book is the one he probably would have written first if he had been a little more ambitious. Before this he published some nostalgic and melancholic memoirs, ‘Let’s go (so we can come back)’and a personal essay on creativity, ‘How to compose a song’. Now, at 56, she has come to the conclusion that what matters most to her in the world are the songs of others. That is why this work talks about the experiences that are hidden behind it, and what he learned with each of them. And he does it without prejudice or a trace of snobbery. From Deep Purple to Rosalía.
Themes
2023-12-22 07:33:00
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