Series: Genre: A 33 1/3 Series

1970s Jazz Fusion is the once derided musical hybrid that has since become one of the most influential genres of music in jazz, rock, soul, and hip-hop. This book is a celebration of one of the most adventurous but unappreciated eras in popular music, wherein the traditional sounds of jazz were melded and mashed up with funk, soul, hard rock,...

Trip-Hop described some of the 1990s’ best music, and it was one of the decade’s most revealing bad ideas. This book chronicles the music and its leading artists, packed with recommended listening, essential tracks, great remixes, and under-recognized albums. Your playlists will soon be overflowing. - Spectrum Culture The music itself was an intoxication of beats, bass, and voice. It...

This comprehensive portrait of Tropicália, exploring everything from influences and results to context and main players, demonstrates how the genre helped reinvent Brazil's cultural identity in a post-colonial world. While bossa nova nurtured a snobbish audience rooted in jazz and Música Popular Brasileira (MPB) spoke to a multicultural yet oppressed nation, Tropicália invested in a crossover instigated by the progressive...

Krautrock is not a music genre. Krautrock is a way of life. Its sonic diversity and global reach belie the common culture from where it emerged. This is a band-by-band history. In May 1945, the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, putting an end to the European front of World War II and the Third Reich. In the immediate aftermath, German youth...

Math Rock sounds like blueprints look: exact, precise, architectural. This trance-like progressive metal music, with indie rock and jazz influences, has been captivating and challenging listeners for decades. Bands associated with the genre include King Crimson, Black Flag, Don Caballero, Slint, American Football, Toe, Elephant Gym, Covet, and thousands more. In an online age of bedroom producers and sampled beats...

Featuring interviews with John Oswald, Negativland, and others and drawing on a wealth of research on copyright and intellectual property, Plunderphonics explores the impact of a genre that made illegality a point of pride. In Plunderphonics, Matthew Blackwell tells the story of a group of musicians who advocated for changes to the copyright system by deploying unlicensed samples in their...

What the hell is shoegaze? A scene? A movement? A sound? Back in the Nineties, many would have said the so-called genre was entirely fabricated. The term itself, an offensive piss-take given by the notoriously catty and scene-obsessed British music press, was plainly rejected by the absurdly small collection of bands to which it supposedly applied. Today shoegaze is undeniable....

Through text and comics, 20th Century Ambient searches through ambient music’s recent history to unearth how the genre has evolved and the role it plays in our daily lives. Ambient music is a part of our daily lives, whether we all realise it or not. It’s the undercurrent in some of our favourite songs. It’s the mood-setting background music in...

Beginning in the late 1970s as an offshoot of disco and punk, dance-punk is difficult to define. Also sometimes referred to as disco-punk and funk-punk, it skirts, overlaps, and blurs into other genres including post-punk, post-disco, new wave, mutant disco, and synthpop. Dance-Punk explores the historical and cultural conditions of the genre as it appeared in the late 1970s and...

Featuring exclusive interviews with key figures, from Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway to guitarist Bill Steer of Gentlemans Pistols, Carcass, and Napalm Death, this is your guide through the history of death metal. Guitars playing abrasive, discordant riffs, the thunderous double-kick of the drums acting like an accelerated heartbeat, and porcine, guttural vocals pummeling twisted lyrics. Courting controversy from inception...

Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), or “German New Wave,” was made extraordinarily popular in the 1970s and 1980s by the likes of Nena's "99 Luftballons" and Trio's "Da Da Da"—and then left as quickly as it came. Conventional wisdom among artists dictates that it’s better to burn out than fade away, but this doesn’t tell the full story of NDW—the reason...

Minimalist Music looks critically into the music's past, shows how the genre thrives across styles, and points the way toward minimalism's ongoing future. Minimalism as a genre is best defined not by any style or flavour but by its means. Certain rhythms and chords in other music may identify things like jazz or bossa nova or reggae; take those same...

The scene that bulldozed the path from prog and glam to punk and new wave, pub rock was a short-lived phenomenon in the U.K., emerging amidst the bloated landscape of prog rock and an increasingly oppressive economic outlook. In the U.K. in the early ‘70s, in response to the glitz of glam and the excess of prog, there emerged a...

Transatlantic knowledge of the queer underground punk scene that ultimately became queercore developed through the spirit of DIY resistance that guided earlier feminist artists as queer musicians pushed back against the homophobia and sexism that remained pervasive in hardcore punk. Queercore officially got its name in the mid-1980s when G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce named it in their revolutionary zine...

From the storied ache of mbube harmonies of the ‘40s to the electronic boom of kwaito and the amapiano and house explosion of the ‘00s, South African Popular Music explores vignettes taken from across South Africa’s popular music history. There are moments in time where music can be a mighty weapon in the fight for freedom. Disguised in a danceable...

Teen pop is a sub-genre of popular music marketed to tweens and teens. Its melodic yearning and veneer of sincerity appeal to an emerging romantic eroticism and autonomy. But tweens and teens buy music that isn’t primarily marketed to them as well. Teen pop encompasses several kinds of musical styles, not limiting itself to just one—teen pop wants to play....

Folk music of the 1960s and 1970s was a genre that was always shifting and expanding, yet somehow never found room for so many. In the sounds of soul-folk, Black artists like Terry Callier and Linda Lewis began to reclaim their space in the genre, and use it to bring their own traditions to light—the jazz, the blues, the field...