
Music
A Subversive History
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Narrated by:
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Jamie Renell
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By:
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Ted Gioia
About this listen
"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.
©2019 Ted Gioia (P)2019 Basic BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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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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Written by award-winning jazz historian Ted Gioia, this comprehensive guide offers an illuminating look at more than 250 seminal jazz compositions. In this comprehensive and unique survey, here are the songs that sit at the heart of the jazz repertoire, ranging from "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Autumn in New York" to "God Bless the Child," "How High the Moon," and "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." Gioia includes Broadway show tunes written by such greats as George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, and classics by such famed jazz musicians as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane.
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- A History of America's Music
- By: Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns
- Narrated by: LeVar Burton
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
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The story of jazz encompasses the story of American courtship and show business; the epic growth of cities, and the struggle for civil rights and simple justice that continues into the new millennium. If you haven't already, download the accompanying audio to Ken Burns' remarkable documentary!
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Good content but reading not clear
- By Ken on 02-07-03
By: Geoffrey C. Ward, and others
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The Rest Is Noise
- Listening to the 20th Century
- By: Alex Ross
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 23 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The Rest Is Noise takes the listener inside the labyrinth of modern music, from turn-of-the-century Vienna to downtown New York in the '60s and '70s. We meet the maverick personalities and follow the rise of mass culture on this sweeping tour of 20th-century history through its music.
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Learned so much!
- By Paula on 02-18-08
By: Alex Ross
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The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles
- How Music Has Shaped Civilization
- By: Howard Goodall
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multilayered orchestration can seem bewilderingly complex. In his dynamic tour through forty thousand years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation—harmony, notation, sung theater, the orchestra, dance music, recording—strikes us with its original force.
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Great intro to musc history
- By Enthusiast on 03-06-16
By: Howard Goodall
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Music Is History
- By: Ahmir Khalib Thompson, Questlove
- Narrated by: Questlove
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author and Sundance award-winning director Questlove harnesses his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and his deep curiosity about history to examine America over the past 50 years. Choosing one essential track from each year, Questlove unpacks each song’s significance, revealing the pivotal role that American music plays around issues of race, gender, politics, and identity.
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This would be better read than listened to
- By HomeChef on 11-05-21
By: Ahmir Khalib Thompson, and others
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Listen to This
- By: Alex Ross
- Narrated by: Alex Ross
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross described his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of Ross’s writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively.
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Educational!
- By Jason Anschutz on 07-10-15
By: Alex Ross
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Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion
- By: Bill Messenger, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Bill Messenger
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Original Recording
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Jazz is a uniquely American art form, one of America's great contributions to not only musical culture, but world culture, with each generation of musicians applying new levels of creativity that take the music in unexpected directions that defy definition, category, and stagnation. Now you can learn the basics and history of this intoxicating genre in an eight-lecture series that is as free-flowing and original as the art form itself.
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A Disappointingly Distorted, Myopic View Of Jazz
- By Parallax View on 08-18-13
By: Bill Messenger, and others
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3 Shades of Blue
- Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool
- By: James Kaplan
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1959, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. James Kaplan’s magnificent 3 Shades of Blue captures how that golden era came to be, and its pinnacle with the recording of Kind of Blue. It’s a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the cities that gave jazz its home, and the Black geniuses behind its rise. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange environments where it can flourish most.
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Great deep dive into a pinnacle of jazz, marred by author bias against later jazz years
- By Michael J. Anderson on 04-08-24
By: James Kaplan
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How Music and Mathematics Relate
- By: David Kung, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: David Kung
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
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Great minds have long sought to understand the relationship between music and mathematics. Both involve patterns, structures, and relationships. Both generate ideas of great beauty and elegance. Music is a fertile testing ground for mathematical principles, while mathematics explains the sounds instruments make and how composers put those sounds together. Understanding the connections between music and mathematics helps you appreciate both, even if you have no special ability in either field....
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No visuals provided! Very hard to follow without.
- By Anonymous User on 03-23-20
By: David Kung, and others
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The Jazzmen
- How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America
- By: Larry Tye
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.
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Well Organized and Themed
- By unhae campbell on 05-23-24
By: Larry Tye
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Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll
- By: Peter Guralnick
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 29 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The music that Phillips shaped in his tiny Memphis studio, with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day.
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Good Rockin' Tonight!
- By tru britty on 11-16-15
By: Peter Guralnick
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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America’s Musical Heritage
- By: Anthony Seeger, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Professor Anthony Seeger
- Length: 5 hrs and 56 mins
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Professor Seeger reveals the origins of the American music industry; the impact of instruments like the piano and the banjo; and the myriad ways music has shaped American wars, dances, elections, and public demonstrations. You’ll learn the secret histories of songs, including “The President’s March”, “Amazing Grace”, and “We Shall Overcome”, You’ll also hear informative interviews and eclectic performances from scholar-musicians, and sample original recordings that reflect the incredible richness of the American musical experience.
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Too much talking - too little music
- By Roberto on 08-09-20
By: Anthony Seeger, and others
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This Is Your Brain on Music
- The Science of a Human Obsession
- By: Daniel J. Levitin
- Narrated by: Daniel J. Levitin
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
- By alex velasquez on 11-24-20
What listeners say about Music
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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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- FiguredGrounds
- 01-22-25
Impressive depth and rigor
Mr. Joia navigates this expansive topic like only a professional musician with extensive studies in philosophy, history, and music theory could: all the way. The journey takes us to places I never imagined by deeply examining human (and animal) factors, like violence, religion, hunting, herding, sexuality, crime, ego, temptation/restraint, and technology, in music’s history and development. While this gets quite dense throughout the book, he injects plenty of humor to keep it light.
The narration is fantastic - inspiring and engaging voice and delivery that helps digest this dense information.
Highly recommended!
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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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7 people found this helpful
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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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1 person found this helpful
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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.
Sad!
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15 people found this helpful