
Music Is History
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Narrated by:
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Questlove
About this listen
Best-selling author and Sundance award-winning director Questlove offers a thrilling, music-driven ride through the last 50 years of American history
In Music Is History, 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.
Music Is History focuses on the years 1971 to the present, not only the country’s most complex and rewarding half-century when it comes to the ways that pop culture and culturally diverse history intersect and interact, but also the years that overlap with Questlove’s own life. Music Is History moves fluidly from the personal to the political, examining events closely and critically, to unpeel and uncover previously unseen dimensions, and encouraging listeners to do the same. Whether he is exploring how Black identity reshaped itself during the blaxploitation era, analyzing the assembly-line nature of disco and its hostility to Black genius, or remembering his own youth as a pop fan and what it taught him about America, Questlove finds the hidden connections in the American tapestry.
Complete with playlists organized around personal, playful themes that touch on everything from the relationship of hip-hop to music’s past to the secret ingredient in all funk songs, Music Is History is filled with and informed by Questlove’s preferences, perspectives, and particularities. It feels like both a popular history of contemporary America and a conversation with one of music's most influential and unique voices.
©2021 Ahmir Khalib Thompson (P)2021 Recorded Books, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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And now, it's time to honor and celebrate the achievements of the artists who brought these treasures to the big screen. No matter who you're rooting for when the ceremony begins, these listens are all worthy of a golden statuette in our books. Here are the audiobooks that directly inspired the nominees and a few others to check out based on your own personal frontrunners.
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PHENOMENAL !!!!!
- By juliajovone on 12-02-23
By: Tariq Trotter
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Great Music of the 20th Century
- By: The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Professor Robert Greenberg PhD
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
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The 20th century was a hotbed of musical exploration, innovation, and transformation unlike any other epoch in history. Ranging across the century in its entirety, these 24 lectures present a musical cornucopia of astounding dimensions - a major presentation and exploration of the incredible brilliance and diversity of musical art across a turbulent century. Far more than simply a series of lectures, the program comprises a huge and many-sided resource for discovering the endless riches of 20th-century concert music across the globe.
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Disappointment
- By MAdison on 03-11-18
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Music
- A Subversive History
- By: Ted Gioia
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell
- Length: 17 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Squeezing cherry-picked facts into a simplistic narrative
- By Erik A. Ritland on 11-24-20
By: Ted Gioia
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Long Train Runnin'
- Our Story of the Doobie Brothers
- By: Pat Simmons, Tom Johnston, Chris Epting - contributor
- Narrated by: Chris Henry Coffey, Graham Winton, T. Ryder Smith, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Only a very few rock bands that have had the longevity, success, and drama of The Doobie Brothers. Born out of late 1960s NoCal, they stood alongside their contemporaries The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers, and many others as an iconic American rock band. The train was rolling along, hits were flowing like wine, and arenas were packed with fans who wanted to see them live...then Tom Johnston, the band’s front man and lead guitarist, almost died.
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Fans of the band will enjoy
- By JIM HOWELL on 01-24-23
By: Pat Simmons, and others
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The History of Rock & Roll
- Volume 1: 1920-1963
- By: Ed Ward
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 15 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Ed Ward covers the first half of the history of rock & roll in this sweeping and definitive narrative - from the 1920s, when the music of rambling medicine shows mingled with the songs of vaudeville and minstrel acts to create the very early sounds of country and rhythm and blues, to the rise of the first independent record labels post-World War II, and concluding in December 1963, just as an immense change in the airwaves took hold and the Beatles prepared for their first American tour.
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Author's blindspots mar this book
- By Mark Clark on 03-28-17
By: Ed Ward
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Century of Song
- 101 Songs That Shaped American Music
- By: Noah Lefevre
- Narrated by: Brian Telestai
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Noah Lefevre, creator of Polyphonic, explores how our favorite music does more than entertain. From Aretha Franklin carving out her own space in what had been considered a man's world by reworking the chauvinistic lyrics to the 1967's hit "Respect," to Doja Cat's successful backlash against toxic fans of the digital age; from a broken amplifier on "Rocket 88" ushering in the distorted sounds of rock n' roll, to Kendrick Lamar's release of "Alright," which became the unofficial anthem to the BLM protests-each song mirrors the strife, change and progress of our country's narrative.
By: Noah Lefevre
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All Things Must Pass Away
- Harrison, Clapton, and Other Assorted Love Songs
- By: Kenneth Womack, Jason Kruppa
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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George Harrison and Eric Clapton shared a legendary and tumultuous friendship that shaped not only their respective lives and careers, but the shifting face of rock itself in the early 1970s. All Things Must Pass Away traces that friendship from its earliest roots in 1964, when Beatles-averse blues-rocker Eric met George backstage at the Hammersmith Odeon, through the messy trials of Clapton's affair with Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd, to the turn of the century, as the two elder statesmen of rock traded honors during Harrison's final days.
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I know some but not all…
- By Rick R. on 08-25-21
By: Kenneth Womack, and others
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This Is What It Sounds Like
- What the Music You Love Says About You
- By: Ogi Ogas, Susan Rogers
- Narrated by: Susan Rogers
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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When you listen to music, do you prefer lyrics or melody? Intricate harmonies or driving rhythm? The “real” sounds of acoustic instruments or those of computerized synthesizers? Drawing from her successful career as a music producer (engineering hits like Prince’s “Purple Rain”), professor of cognitive neuroscience Susan Rogers reveals why your favorite songs move you. She explains that we each possess a unique “listener profile” based on our brain’s reaction to seven key dimensions of any record: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre.
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Needed to include the music
- By Sarah on 01-18-23
By: Ogi Ogas, and others
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The History of Jazz, Second Edition
- By: Ted Gioia
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 21 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Gioia's History of Jazz has been universally hailed as a classic - acclaimed by jazz critics and fans around the world. Now Gioia brings his magnificent work completely up-to-date, drawing on the latest research and revisiting virtually every aspect of the music, past and present. Gioia tells the story of jazz as it had never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. Here are the giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history.
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An Exciting Opportunity Missed
- By Kindle Customer on 02-02-15
By: Ted Gioia
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The Age of Insight
- The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
- By: Eric R. Kandel
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 16 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind - our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions - and how mind and brain relate to art.
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Worth the listen
- By Amazon Customer on 01-28-19
By: Eric R. Kandel
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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
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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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The Come Up
- An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop
- By: Jonathan Abrams
- Narrated by: Dion Graham, Diontae Black, Torian Brackett, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.
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Excellent detailed history
- By Damian Andrews on 12-02-24
By: Jonathan Abrams
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Major Labels
- A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres
- By: Kelefa Sanneh
- Narrated by: Kelefa Sanneh
- Length: 18 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music - as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities.
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Humbling
- By Greg Adamson on 11-20-21
By: Kelefa Sanneh
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Anatomy of a Song
- The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits That Changed Rock, R&B and Pop
- By: Marc Myers
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Mick Jagger, Jimmy Cliff, Roger Waters, Jimmy Page, Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt, and many other leading artists reveal for the first time the emotions, inspirations, and techniques behind their influential works. Covering the history of rock, R&B, country, disco, soul, reggae, and pop, Anatomy of a Song is a love letter to the songs that have defined generations of listeners.
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Why Listen when you can read?
- By Shipshape on 02-02-17
By: Marc Myers
Yes to all of this!
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If you love music...
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History/Music love affair
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Great Listen/Read
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Unique & Interesting
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Five stars
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The concept of this book is outstanding. However, I don't feel like it translates well to audiobook. It seems to jump around a bit with what seems like footnotes or side topics. Now that I've experienced the audiobook, I'll be picking up a hard copy of this one.
Possibly Better in Hard Copy Format
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Really Approachable Book!
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Almost Perfect
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Time well spent
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