Robert Chapman: Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio (1992)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, music, piracy, pirate radio, popular culture, public broadcasting, radio, united kingdom
Was it a non-stop psychedelic party or was there more to pirate radio in the sixties than hedonism and hip radicalism? From Kenny Everett’s sacking to John Peel’s legendary `Perfumed Garden’ show, to the influence of the multi-national ad agencies, and the eventual assimilationof aspects of unofficial pop radio into Radio One, Selling the Sixties examines the boom of private broadcasting in Britain.
Using two contrasting models of pop piracy, Radios Caroline and London, Robert Chapman sets pirate radio in its social and cultural context. In doing so he challenges the myths surrounding its maverick `Kings Road’ image, separating populist consumerism from the economic and political machinations which were the flipside of the pirate phenomenon.
Selling the Sixties includes previously unseen evidence from the pirates’ archives, revealing interviews and an unrivalled selection of rare audio materials.
Publisher Routledge, 1992
ISBN 0415079705, 9780415079709
295 pages
Simon Reynolds: Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · music, music criticism, music history, punk
Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdotes and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up and Start Again re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.
Publisher Penguin Books, 2006
ISBN 0143036726, 9780143036722
416 pages
Gary Indiana: Utopia’s Debris: Selected Essays (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, cinema, film, literature, popular culture
Gary Indiana is one of America’s leading cultural critics—a public intellectual who has written key essays on every aspect of American culture. Utopia’s Debris comprises selections of his very best work, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of the best and worst America has to offer. His writings range from popular culture—trash novels, architectural wonders and horrors—to appreciations of the best of modern literature, art, and cinema. They include his convincing (and highly entertaining) debunking of fashionable conspiracy theories, a spirited and contrarian defense of Bill Clinton’s autobiography, a Mencken-like examination of the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the politics of celebrity in what Indiana calls the Age of Contempt. A postmodern Emerson, Indiana wields scalpel-sharp wit and a fealty to logic on issues in which, all too often, irrationalism and emotionalism hold sway. At times rigorously serious, at other times whimsical, Indiana’s most conspicuous feature is skepticism—his wildly satirical contempt for conventional wisdom.
Publisher Basic Books, 2008
ISBN 046500248X, 9780465002481
315 pages