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Music
- A Subversive History
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell
- Length: 17 hrs and 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
"A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched" (Los Angeles Times) global history of music that reveals how songs have shifted societies and sparked revolutions
Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact, and disguised their sources. In Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs.
Gioia tells a 4,000-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval. He shows how outcasts, immigrants, slaves, and others at the margins of society have repeatedly served as trailblazers of musical expression, reinventing our most cherished songs from ancient times all the way to the jazz, reggae, and hip-hop sounds of the current day.
Music: A Subversive History is essential for anyone interested in the meaning of music, from Sappho to the Sex Pistols to Spotify.
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Critic reviews
"A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched labor of cultural provocation."—Robert Christgau, Los Angeles Times
"[A] sweeping study...The author aims to subvert our ideas about music history—essentially, Western classical tradition and its contemporary and popular offshoots—in part by removing its pedestals...Gioia challenges notions of progress based solely on aesthetic or stylistic innovation...characteriz[ing] music history as a cyclical power struggle with shifting battle lines."—Larry Blumenfeld, Wall Street Journal
"Music: A Subversive History is by some distance the most wide-ranging and provocative thing he's [Gioia's] come up with... In terms of scope, well, put it this way: it starts out talking about a bear's thighbone that Neanderthal hunters apparently turned into a primitive flute somewhere between 43,000 and 82,000 years ago and ends up, 450 pages later, discussing K-pop and EDM."—Guardian
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With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States, covering everything from the penny press to Playboy, the NBA to NASCAR, big band to hip hop, and other topics including film, comics, television, sports, and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race, gender, class, economics, and politics, LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms American culture.
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So Much Fun!
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Dig If You Will the Picture
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Ben Greenman, New York Times best-selling author, contributing writer to The New Yorker, and owner of thousands of recordings of Prince and Prince-related songs, knows intimately that there has never been a rock star as vibrant, mercurial, willfully contrary, experimental, or prolific as Prince. Uniting a diverse audience while remaining singularly himself, Prince was a tireless artist, a musical virtuoso and chameleon, and a pop-culture prophet.
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Reads like a indepth career review & analysis
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The Secret Life of the American Musical
- How Broadway Shows Are Built
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- Narrated by: David Pittu
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Performance
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Story
For almost a century, Americans have been losing their hearts and losing their minds in an insatiable love affair with the American musical. It often begins in actors and reaches its passionate zenith when it comes time for love, marriage, and children, who will start the cycle all over again. Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical?
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Great review lacked music
- By joseph f mcgovern on 10-14-18
By: Jack Viertel
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Jewish Comedy
- A Serious History
- By: Jeremy Dauber
- Narrated by: Jeremy Dauber
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In a major work of scholarship both erudite and very funny, Jeremy Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from Biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing his book thematically into what he calls the seven strands of Jewish comedy - including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar - Dauber explores the ways Jewish comedy has dealt with persecution, assimilation, and diaspora through the ages. He explains the rise and fall of popular comic archetypes such as the Jewish mother, the JAP, and the schlemiel and schlimazel.
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Not funny
- By supermantwo on 08-31-20
By: Jeremy Dauber
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The Long March
- How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
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- Narrated by: Raymond Todd
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
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The architects of America's cultural revolution of the 1960s were Beat authors like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated figures like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver, and Susan Sontag. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Roger Kimball conceives a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guidebook of wrong turns, dead-ends, and blind alleys.
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The Long March
- By Suzanne on 05-16-06
By: Roger Kimball
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Write Songs Right Now
- By: Alex Forbes
- Narrated by: Alex Forbes
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Write Songs Right Now is a hands-on, step-by-step guide to creating original pop songs - an approach that been road-tested by thousands of Alex's students and coaching clients in New York City, some of whom have gone on to achieve great success. With insight, enthusiasm, and humor, Alex guides listeners through the process of brainstorming for ideas, crafting effective lyrics, and putting those lyrics to music.
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Kind of old wine in new skins, still good for that
- By Marc on 01-12-14
By: Alex Forbes
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Naked at the Albert Hall
- The Inside Story of Singing
- By: Tracey Thorn
- Narrated by: Tracey Thorn
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
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In her bestselling autobiography, Bedsit Disco Queen, Tracey Thorn recalled the highs and lows of a 30-year career in pop music. But with the touring, recording and extraordinary anecdotes, there wasn't time for an in-depth look at what she actually did for all those years: sing. She sang with warmth and emotional honesty, sometimes while battling acute stage fright.
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Fascinating
- By Jane Sheedy on 01-11-17
By: Tracey Thorn
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The Art Instinct
- Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
- By: Denis Dutton
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
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The Art Instinct combines two of the most fascinating and contentious disciplines, art and evolutionary science, in a provocative new work that will revolutionize the way art itself is perceived. Aesthetic taste, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. It's not, as almost all contemporary art criticism and academic theory would have it, "socially constructed".
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A breath of fresh air!
- By Michael on 02-19-14
By: Denis Dutton
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Incarnations
- India in Fifty Lives
- By: Sunil Khilnani
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 16 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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For all of India's myths, its sea of stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, recapturing the human dimension of how the world's largest democracy came to be. His trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, film stars, and corporate titans - some famous, some unjustly forgotten - bring feeling, wry humor, and uncommon insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.
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Great listen, the author is biased
- By Anonymous User on 02-15-19
By: Sunil Khilnani
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Pure Invention
- How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
- By: Matt Alt
- Narrated by: Matt Alt
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
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Japan is the forge of the world’s fantasies: karaoke and the Walkman, manga and anime, Pac-Man and Pokémon, online imageboards and emojis. But as Japan media veteran Matt Alt proves in this brilliant investigation, these novelties did more than entertain. They paved the way for our perplexing modern lives.
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great book ruined by ending
- By Grant Holder on 06-07-22
By: Matt Alt
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Irrationality
- A History of the Dark Side of Reason
- By: Justin E. H. Smith
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
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Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.
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A good brain workout
- By ThomasC on 04-09-19
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Apollo's Angels
- A History of Ballet
- By: Jennifer Homans
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 23 hrs and 27 mins
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For more than 400 years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. A ballerina dancing The Sleeping Beauty today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to 16th-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps and gestures are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and culture that followed.
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a great book poorly read
- By Anonymous User on 04-14-11
By: Jennifer Homans
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With a lifetime of experience, profound knowledge and understanding, and heartwarming appreciation, an internationally celebrated conductor and teacher answers the questions: Why should I listen to classical music? How can I get the most from the listening experience? Unpretentious, graceful, instructive, this is a book for the aficionado, the novice, and anyone looking to have the love of music fired within them.
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Whether you load your iPod with Bach or Bono, music has a significant role in your life - even if you never realized it. Why does music evoke such powerful moods? The answers are at last becoming clear, thanks to revolutionary neuroscience and the emerging field of evolutionary psychology. Both a cutting-edge study and a tribute to the beauty of music itself, This Is Your Brain on Music unravels a host of mysteries that affect everything from pop culture to our understanding of human nature.
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Really boring.
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Let's Spend the Night Together
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Pamela Des Barres, the world’s foremost supergroupie, here offers an all-access backstage pass to the world of rock stars and the women who love them. Having had her own affairs with legends such as Keith Moon and Jimmy Page--as documented in her bestselling memoir I’m with the Band--Pamela now turns the spotlight onto other women who have found their way into the hearts and bedrooms of some of the world’s greatest musicians.
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Time waster
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What listeners say about Music
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Will
- 12-22-19
Has expanded my mind!
Bravo! This is a magically potent walk through the history and present of music. Thank you!
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2 people found this helpful
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- Andy Tegethoff
- 10-27-21
Interesting and thought-provoking
Fun, lots of interesting facts and ideas. If you've read Howard Zinn's People'a History of the US, they've being made here (successfully, if less seriously) will be familiar.
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- W. Norman
- 11-02-19
Tour de force
Although I’d read and reread at least 4 of Gioia’s books on music, I was a little skeptical that the “subversive” conceit could plausibly be sustained for a whole book. I was wrong! This is a tour de force — a book he’s no doubt been training himself to write almost non-stop since childhood.
The book is well read. But you will have to figure out how not to cringe as Renell mangles every single French word or name.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Craig Doner
- 01-31-23
Groundbreaking Analysis
Easily the important book on music and its history that I have ever read
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- gee
- 09-15-21
Great for anyone trying to get a better understand
Great read for anyone trying to get a better understanding of the history of music. This book approaches and analyzes music from almost every angle. I greatly enjoyed it, and definitely recommend it.
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- Greynolds
- 05-09-24
Outsiders become insiders.
The thesis is that real change in music comes from outsiders and even despised parts of society until the “corporate” interests realize there is money to be made and it becomes mainstream. Then the process happens all over again. “Rock” over taken by the most down and out sections of the South Bronx and LA. Of course this theme applies to the Blues, Rock, Jazz, Rap and Hip Hop. The story begins a couple of millennia ago. So for someone who has followed this it may be blindingly obvious but I found the details interesting.
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- Chris
- 11-09-19
Pretentious
This book was not for me. I found no thread to latch onto, and the book in general felt pretentious and full of itself.
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- Austin Cape
- 08-04-23
Dry boring academic
Monotonous kill joy blurred an ambitious effort with cold academic boorishness. Bloody hell this could’ve been amazing but is so damn dull.
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- Erik A. Ritland
- 11-24-20
Squeezing cherry-picked facts into a simplistic narrative
The argument that “the man” took everything outside of the mainstream and neutered it to control it is such a banal assertion. The banal assertion is “backed” with cherry-picked facts that make the narrative seem plausible, as you can do with basically any narrative. That’s why narrative is so powerful. That’s why it’s so easy to brainwash people.
Ultimately, this is a forced, simplistic neo-Marxist narrative that pits the “subversive” pleb artists outside of the mainstream as against the terrible bourgeois establishment (that evidently stretches back thousands of years lol). Then supposedly the evil “man, maaaan,” like anyone who has any power according to neo-Marxism, shuts them down by incorporating them into the mainstream, thus taking away their power.
While the author (who I love, actually, his books about the history of jazz, listening to jazz, and the birth (and death) of the cool are a few of my favorites) strains and strains to make this case, the actual truth always bubbles beneath the surface, and this truth actually gives the outside the mainstream innovators their due.
What the subversives did was revolutionize the mainstream. They become accepted after years of hardship, struggle, and persecution *despite* the best efforts of the mainstream to stop them. Then the mainstream couldn’t ignore it anymore or brush it away so the subversives became mainstream. Which gives them the credit they deserve. They changed the course of history and music over and over.
To cheat them is that accomplishment by saying that all they did was get co-opted by the mainstream is stripping them of all their power and diminishes their struggle. The author can’t see this, however, because he wants so badly to see history as the a Marxist power struggle. So pathetic.
This book reminds me of Peter Doggett’s There’s a Riot Going On. Politics always bubbles under in his work, but in that book he got explicitly political, and it showed both just how warped his views are and how brainwashed by the far left he is. But he used music as a catalyst and engine for the book, basically ripping on any artist in the 60s who didn’t denigrate their work by getting explicitly political. What this author does is similar: he uses the subversive v establishment in music false binary as a screed to espouse his simplistic political views.
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