Rock And The Pop Narcotic

Long out-of-print classic of rock criticism. Author worked with Black Flag, Negativland, Birthday Party, Dead Kennedys, Husker Du, Meat Puppets, and others. Excerpted in the Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing. "It is the Moby Dick of Rock-Crit -- nothing else I've read comes close." --James Parker / The Idler (U.K.)

Avery Cates is a very bad man. Some might call him a criminal. He might even be a killer - for the Right Price. But right now, Avery Cates is scared. He's up against the Monks: cyborgs with human brains, enhanced robotic bodies, and a small arsenal of advanced weaponry. Their mission is to convert anyone and everyone to the Electric Church. But there is just one snag. Conversion means death. "Some debuts simply set new bars in a genre. Jeff Somers' THE ELECTRIC CHURCH is one such book, a gritty noir story that challenges and surprises with every page. A novel that is equal parts Raymond Chandler and William Gibson. A major new talent has arrived -- and it's about time!" -- James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of MAP OF BONES and BLACK ORDER

Washington, D.C.-based rock 'n' roll antihero Ian F. Svenonius provides an unparalleled and exquisitely provocative how-to guide for rock bands.

NPR Great Read of 2016 From the acclaimed author of Rip It Upand Start Again and Retromania—“the foremost popular music critic of this era (Times Literary Supplement)—comes the definitive cultural history of glam and glitter rock, celebrating its outlandish fashion and outrageous stars, including David Bowie and Alice Cooper, and tracking its vibrant legacy in contemporary pop. Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late Sixties, glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds takes you on a wild cultural tour through the early Seventies, a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up, thrilling music and larger-than-life personas. Shock and Awe offers a fresh, in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon, placing it the wider Seventies context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genre’s major themes—stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse—Reynolds tracks glam’s legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from Eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to twenty-first century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga. Shock and Awe shows how the original glam artists’ obsessions with fame, extreme fashion, and theatrical excess continue to reverberate through contemporary pop culture.

An introduction to L.A's punk culture with biographical information about music photographer Naomi Petersen.

(Book). In the tradition of Nick Tosches, Tom Wolfe and Lester Bangs comes an epic and riveting history of rock and roll that reads like a novel. Sonic Cool presents the saga of rock and roll as the closest thing we have to genuine "myth" in the modern world, and it is the first book about rock to be written in the spirit of rock. Immense, fierce, opinionated and hilarious, Joe Harrington masterfully presents rock as a movement of near-religious proportions, against a backdrop of social factors and important events such as the invention of the guitar, the jukebox, LSD, the 12-inch phonograph record, the '70s recession, the Reagan Revolution, and the Internet. This is the history of rock as it's never been told, as the legend of a massive cultural movement, one that had meaning, but ultimately failed because it sold its soul. Radically egalitarian in its assessments towering figures such as Lennon, Dylan and Cobain stand along side lesser-known but equally influential artists like the MC5, the Misfits and Joy Division Sonic Cool is gripping reading for anyone who ever believed in the music. Includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert. Joe S. Harrington began writing at the age of 10, an act that provoked a rejection slip from Mad magazine. He has written about music for the Boston Globe , Boston Phoenix , New York Press , Seattle Stranger , Lowell Sun , Wired , Reflex , Raygun , High Times , Seconds , Rollerderby and numerous fanzines. He is currently employed as an on-line jazz critic at Amazon, and lives in Portland, Maine. Softcover.

The Western transplanted Greek nostos to the new world where an American hero stepped out from the chorus as the first filmmakers left New Jersey and Chicago for Colorado, Texas, and finally Hollywood, California. Joe Carducci traces the development of action film Acting after the Westernmakers went west. The realism of late 19th century Actualities continued into these Westerns of the 1910s which featured cowboys and Indians born before the closing of the frontier in 1890. This new untheatrical style of acting developed within the 2nd unit culture of the action genres into the sound era by John Wayne and others, until a Montgomery Clift took training from stuntman Richard Farnsworth for Red River, and a Marlon Brando spent his downtime on One-Eyed Jacks studying Ben Johnson. Finally Carducci looks at the cultural collision of the sixties and seventies as Manhattan cinephiles reject the style triumphant in the careers of Bronson and Eastwood.

What led scientists to have acrobats copulate inside an MRI machine? Why do wordless patterns of sound send shivers down our spines and tickle ancient parts of our brains? How did a chemist's quest to create a drug to ease the pain of childbirth result in the creation of LSD? And did it change our understanding of the brain forever? From tortoiseshell condoms to superstar athletes on hallucinogens, science writer Zoe Cormier dissects these and other burning questions, amplifying them with insights from some of the world's bravest, cleverest, and downright weirdest scientists. Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll explores science at the edge, where scientists ask big, strange questions -- and sometimes experiment on themselves to find answers. It shines a light into the lesser-known corners of scientific research to gain insight into the nature of consciousness, happiness, and humanity. Not to mention our parties. Here are stories of unconventional scientists, innovative inquiries, hedonistic impulses -- and how the renegades of science have illuminated the secrets of our baser impulses.