New Books In Music

Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam (Feral House, 2025) uncovers a forgotten yet fascinating chapter on glam rock music and culture...from Canada. Los Angeles-based multi-disciplinary artist Robert Dayton taps his Canadian roots to reveal mind-blowing stories of musicians fighting to be heard. It's a universal story of determined creators striving to make their voices heard. Dayton has spent years researching and interviewing these ground-breaking musicians trapped by geography, colonial mindsets, and the cultural behemoth that is the United States. There's no denying that glam rock was marginalized in Canada. In fact, RCA almost didn't release the 1973 Bowie-produced Lou Reed album "Transformer" in Canada because they didn't see a market for it.  Of course, they were wrong! Young Canadians, like youth around the world, were rebelling against the oppressive conservative mainstream culture and saw themselves in the anything-goes freedom of glam rock. Cold Glitter gets at the reasons why: nature vs.

The 1950s looks placid from the outside, but underneath that calm post-war exterior roiled the intellectual and activist beginnings of the political movements that tore through the 1960s and 1970s. In Women in American Operas of the 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes (University of Rochester Press, 2023), Monica A. Hershberger considers the main female characters in four operas written in the 1950s: The Ballad of Baby Doe, Lizzie Borden, The Tender Land, and Susannah. For each work, Hershberger analyzes the historical context and musical treatment of these four characters, who are all stereotyped as the virgin or the whore, or sometimes even both. In an unusual and productive analytical choice, Hershberger also includes the interpretive decisions and perspectives of the sopranos who originated or popularized these four roles, rather than focusing exclusively on the scores and the views of the male creative teams that wrote the works. Several of the operas include instances of emotional abuse as well as gender

Take funny music seriously! Though often dismissed as silly or derivative, funny music, Lily E. Hirsch argues, is incredibly creative and dynamic, serving multiple aims from the celebratory to the rebellious, the entertaining to the mentally uplifting. Music can be a rich site for humor, with so many opportunities that are ripe for a comedic left turn. Taking Funny Music Seriously (Indiana UP, 2024) includes original interviews with some of the best musical humorists, such as Tom Lehrer, "the J. D. Salinger of musical satire"; Peter Schickele, who performed as the invented composer P. D. Q. Bach, the supposed lost son of the great J. S. Bach; Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome of the funny music duo Garfunkel and Oates; comedic film composer Theodore Shapiro; Too Slim of the country group Riders in the Sky; and musical comedian Jessica McKenna, from the podcast Off Book, part of a long line of "funny girls." With their help, Taking Funny Music Seriously examines comedy from a variety of genres and musical context

On today’s show, we address a performer’s nightmare—the nightmare of not being able to hear yourself onstage. My guest is ethnomusicologist Jacob Danson Faraday, who takes us behind the scenes of the famed Cirque du Soleil to learn how even Cirque’s world-class musicians struggle with technology when they want to hear themselves.  Building on his international career as a touring sound technician, ethnomusicologist Jacob Danson Faraday researches the working communities and hidden labor of live sound technicians on large-scale touring productions. He is a recent graduate of the PhD program in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Today Jake takes us behind the scenes of Cirque du Soleil, sharing his dissertation research on how sound engineers and musicians negotiate the power to hear oneself.  Stage monitoring, the technology that allows musicians to hear the performance as they play, is a topic we rarely hear about, but it’s absolutely essential to performers. Faraday suggests that, while

In Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke UP, 2023), I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, and media from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment. Drawing on psychoanalysis, affect theory, and black studies, Durham explores the black mother as both a lost object and a found subject often obscured when constituting a cultural legacy of genius across history. He analyzes the works of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Marvin Gaye, Octavia E. Butler, and Kendrick Lamar to show how black cultural practices and aesthetics abstract and reveal the lost mother through performance. Whether attributing Douglass’s intellect to his matrilineage, reading Gaye’s falsetto singing voice as a move to interpolate black female vocality, or examining the women in Ellison’s life who encouraged his aesthetic interests, Durham demonstrates that melancholy becomes the catalyst for genius and genius in turn is a signifier of the maternal. Using psychoanalysis to develop a t

This summer, sound artist and “guerrilla academic” Ben Coleman got in touch to say how much he enjoys Phantom Power. He also suggested we check out another podcast he’s into called Love is the Message.  We’re glad we did! Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a fantastic show from Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert, both of them authors, academics, DJs and audiophile dance party organisers. I recognized Tim Lawrence’s name from his great book on Arthur Russell. Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London and a prolific author. Tim and Jeremy have been longtime collaborators and when the clubs closed and universities cut faculty hours due to covid, they started podcasting.  The way I’d describe their show is, imagine the amazing college class you never got to take where you learn about the intersections of global dance music and radical politics, from the 1960s to today. They do shows on disco, Motown, reggae, tropicalia, funk, you name it with a s

Andrew Field, in his new book Rocking China (Earnshaw Books, 2023), documents one of the most exciting moments in the history of Chinese indie music. Through interviews with key players in these scenes over a period of two decades, Field explores the meanings of rock music in Chinese society as well as the many challenges and obstacles to the development of indie rock scenes in China. Highlights include a journey by rail into the heartlands of China with the hardcore rock band SUBS and legendary “rock godfather” Cui Jian. Along the journey to document the live rock music scenes of Beijing, he discovered an emerging world of musicians, bands, clubs, festivals, promoters, record shop and record label owners that were pushing the envelope of indie music for China and the world. This book takes the reader deep into the world of independent rock music that has been flourishing in urban China since the 2000s. Andrew Field is an American historian, documentary film producer, and professor at Duke Kunshan University.

From the frontman of Band of Holy Joy, Johny Brown, Corpse Flower (Skill, 2024), is a long-form prose poem that shares Brown's journey through one of the most challenging times in his life. Released as a multimedia project, Corpse Flower includes not only Brown's book but the music and reading that goes along with it. Moving from dark to light and ending in hope and joy, Brown's work shares with readers his world in lyrical verse.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

It’s summer and we are busy working on episodes for our fourth season. We’ve also rebuilt our website–check out the the fabulous new phantompod.org. There’s other great stuff in store for the podcast, so stay tuned! But today, I want to share one of my favorite podcasts with you: Will Robin’s Sound Expertise. For those of you into musicology or popular music studies, there’s a great chance you’re already a subscribe. That’s because Will’s show is fantastic and I personally know many music scholars who are devoted fans of this show that features conversations with established and up-and-coming music scholars. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dr. Robin, you might remember that I quoted his New York Times obituary of R. Murray Schafer in our first episode on Schafer. He has written about music for the Times for at least a decade. He’s also an assistant professor of Musicology at the University of Maryland and the author of the book Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music. Sound Expertise will be dropping

From rock & roll to contemporary pop, Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music (Repeater, 2024) is a timely and original exploration of popular music’s role in shaping our society. Told through a Marxist lens, Toby Manning traces the last seventy years of political and social upheavals through its most iconic US and UK-based music. Mixing Pop and Politics examines the connections between popular music and political ideology and explores themes like the liberation of rock ’n’ roll, containment of girl groups, defiance of glam, resignation of soft rock, the communal spirit of disco, and the individualism of 1980s pop. Spanning the early 1950s to today, the book reveals how music—from doo-wop to hip-hop, punk to crunk, and grunge to grime—has both reflected and resisted the political forces of its time. Toby Manning is the author of The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd (2006) and John le Carré and the Cold War (2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by

Hounds Of Love invites you to not only listen, but to cross the boundaries of sensory experience into realms of imagination and possibility. Side A spawned four Top 40 hit singles in the UK, 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)', 'Cloudbusting', 'Hounds of Love' and 'The Big Sky', some of the best-loved and most enduring compositions in Bush's catalogue. On side B, a hallucinatory seven-part song cycle called The Ninth Wave broke away from the pop conventions of the era by using strange and vivid production techniques that plunge the listener into the psychological centre of a near-death experience. Poised and accessible, yet still experimental and complex, with Hounds Of Love Bush mastered the art of her studio-based songcraft, finally achieving full control of her creative process. When it came out in 1985, she was only 27 years old. Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (Bloomsbury, 2024) charts the emergence of Kate Bush in the early-to-mid-1980s as a courageous experimentalist, a singularly expressive recording

Becoming a more equitable librarian is an ongoing process. In the face of the last decade’s events and increased public awareness of issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), library workers in music libraries can do things to create the space in our teaching for optimal creativity and connection by and with our library users. As the editors of Music Information Literacy: Inclusion and Advocacy (Library Juice Press, 2024), Kathleen A. Abromeit and Dyani Sabin bring together contributions that imagine what it would be like to expand our inclusion structures so that we increasingly recognize and accommodate differences in our music libraries. The ways librarians teach and assist students must change to amplify the voices of those who have been traditionally marginalized and create effective and equitable libraries and classrooms. Doing so is a multi-part process, where critical information literacy overlaps with self-reflection as a librarian and a deep understanding that our students ha

Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press, 2024)  provides a much-needed study of the political economy of music streaming, drawing from Western Marxism, social reproduction theory, eco-socialist thought and more to approach the complex and highly contested relationship between music and capital. By attending to the perverse ways in which recorded music has been ultimately decommodified under the current regime of music production, circulation and consumption, Eric Drott explores issues that far exceed music - consumer surveillance, Silicon Valley monopolism, the crisis of care, capitalist extractivism and the climate emergency - while showing us how the streaming economy is thoroughly imbricated, and implicated, in these processes. Drott's rigorous and wide-ranging analysis thus offers novel ways of understanding music, culture, digitalisation and capitalism in present and future tenses . Eric Drott is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about

How does the music industry actually work? In Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out Toby Bennett, a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Organisation in the School of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster offers a deep ethnography of everyday life in a contemporary record company. The book examines the challenges facing music, both businesses and artists, as digital transforms every element of the industry. Offering a detailed theoretical framework for understanding these changes, as well as rich details on the ordinary organisational practices that keep the music industry running, the book will be essential reading across humanities, social sciences, and for anyone interested in music and culture industries. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetw

What happened to culture in 2020? In Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture During Covid (Repeater, 2024), Joy White, a Lecturer in Applied Social Studies at the University of Bedfordshire, explores the impact of Covid, along with social, community and artistic responses. The book ranges widely, including comparative analysis of the UK and Jamaica, deep dives into contemporary Black music and Black culture on TV, digital modes of making and distributing music, and emerging cultural practices on platforms such as TikTok. Theoretically rich as well as offering detailed media and cultural analysis, the book is essential reading of humanities, social science and public health scholars, as well as for anyone interested in reflecting on the era when Covid first hut society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Seth Rogovoy's latest book for Oxford University Press is called Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2024). Often, biographies of musicians put the story of the subject’s life front and center, letting the music recede into the background. For a musician like George Harrison, this would be a mistake. George, the lead guitarist of the Beatles, sometimes referred to as the “quiet one,” was one of his generation’s greatest guitarists. He quietly steered the Fab Four in directions that made them legendary, through his innovative use of sitar or his thoughtful, self-reflective song-writing that contrasted with John’s ironic poetics and Paul’s cheery symphonies. A late-bloomer of sorts, George truly came into his own as a solo artist pursuing a rock and roll that centered spirituality and existential yearning. For a chapter-by-chapter playlist, check out Seth's guided listen. Subscribe to Seth's Substack: Everything is Broken. Seth Rogovoy is the author of Bob Dylan: Proph

From Broadway to the Bronx: New York City’s History through Song (Intellect, 2024) tells the history of New York City in song across a variety of different genres that the city has been home to and instrumental in developing, covering everything from early twentieth-century sheet music to Broadway’s musical theater, hip-hop, disco, punk, dancehall, but also contemporary metal, rock, and pop. It features an analysis of the work of artists with intimate connections to the city like Billy Joel, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Debbie Harry, Shinehead, and the Wu-Tang Clan, as well as an exclusive interview with RENT original cast member, Anthony Rapp. The collection includes essays from authors across the disciplines of cultural studies, media studies, cultural history, and musicology, resulting in a far-ranging treatment of the interconnection of the city space and its musical history. Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoic

In his new book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of the America's Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024), David Suisman shows that the US military has deep and multilayered investment in music. It employs thousands of musicians, whose music creates communal norms and identities. Music also helps soldiers to grapple with the realities of combat, while serving as a weapon in its own right, at places like Guantánamo Bay. Suisman calls music "a lubricant in the gears of the American war machine," and he ably shows how its elemental qualities have been used and transformed, much as the military itself has, by technology and by changing understandings of the self.  Instrument of War is a first-of-its-kind study of music in the lives of American soldiers. Although musical activity has been part of war since time immemorial, the significance of the US military as a musical institution has generally gone unnoticed. Historian David Suisman traces how the US military used—and continues to use—music to trai

Margaret Mehl’s Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert (Open Book 2024) examines the ways in which Western classical (or “art”) music contributed to Japanese nation-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mehl’s analysis of this critical half-century or so in modern Japanese history is sensitive to the power of the participative “musicking” in shaping shared understandings of national and local community and their place within a larger world. The book, which is split into the global, national, and local, also demonstrates that as much as Western art music shaped Japan, Japan shaped back. In doing so, “Japanese” music was defined in important ways that have continued to influence a sense of national self and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scientific demonstration of new techniques in acoustic measurement. It aimed to address a surprising question: could a building be a musical instrument? Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Fiona Smyth tells the fascinating story of the scientists, architects and musicians who set out to answer this question. Beginning at the turn of the century, their innovative experiments, which took place at sites ranging from Herbert Baker's Assembly Chamber in Delhi to Abbey Road Studios and a disused munitions factory near Perivale, would come to define the field of 'architectural acoustics'. They culminated in 1951 with the opening of the Royal Festival Hall - the first building to be designed for musical tone. Deeply researched and richly illustrated, Pistols in St Paul's brings to light a s