Friday, May 25 2012
Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup
In 1953, the American and British intelligence agencies launched a coup in Iran against a bedridden 72-year-old man. Muhammad Mossadegh's crimes had been to flirt with communism and to nationalize his country's oil industry, which for 40 years had been in British hands. Mossadegh must go.
Friday, May 18 2012
The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game
Anthropologist John Fox sets off on a worldwide adventure to the farthest reaches of the globe and the deepest recesses of our ancient past to answer a question inspired by his sports-loving son: "Why do we play ball?"
Friday, May 11 2012
Fat, Drunk, and Stupid: The Inside Story Behind the Making of Animal House
In 1976 the creators of National Lampoon, America’s most popular humor magazine, decided to make a movie.
Thursday, May 3 2012
Seeing the Light: Inside the Velvet Underground
With exclusive new interviews from Velvet Underground, this is a captivating account of one of the most influential groups in rock history.
Friday, April 27 2012
The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food
We humans eat a wide array of plants and animals, but unlike other omnivores we eat with our minds as much as our stomachs.
Friday, April 20 2012
Squeeze This!: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America
No other instrument has witnessed such a dramatic rise to popularity -- and precipitous decline -- as the accordion. Squeeze This! is the first history of the piano accordion and the first book-length study of the accordion as a uniquely American musical and cultural phenomenon.
Friday, April 13 2012
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
A chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.
Thursday, April 5 2012
The Story of English in 100 Words
English language expert David Crystal takes readers on a tour of the winding byways of our language via the rude, the obscure and the downright surprising.
Friday, March 30 2012
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails.
Friday, March 23 2012
Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music
Henry Mancini has sold 30 million albums and won four Oscars and 20 Grammy awards. Through Mancini, mere background music in movies became part of pop culture -- an expression of sophistication and wit with a modern sense of cool and a lasting lyricism that has not dated.
Friday, March 16 2012
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
This reprint of the cult classic memoir, based on Ellen Ullman’s early years as a computer programmer, reaffirms the reach and relevance of her thoughts on technology and creativity. Her insight is also foresight, and her story remains immediate, critical – and very entertaining.
Friday, March 9 2012
Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times
Four jazz musicians from Brooklyn, Ghana, and South Africa demonstrate how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how such musical crossings altered the politics and culture of both continents.
Friday, March 2 2012
The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
From gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Kevin Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.
Friday, February 24 2012
Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Last Holiday’
This posthumous memoir provides Scott-Heron’s keen insights into the music industry, the civil rights movement, modern America, governmental hypocrisy, and our wider place in the world.
Friday, February 17 2012
The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society
The usefulness of physical money -- to say nothing of its value -- is coming under fire as never before. Told with verve and wit, this book explores an aspect of our daily lives so fundamental that we rarely stop to think about it. You’ll never look at a dollar bill the same again.
Friday, January 13 2012
The Sexual History of London
If Paris is the city of love, then London is the city of lust. From the bath houses of Roman Londinium to the sexual underground of the 20th century and beyond, this is an entertaining, vibrant chronicle of London and sex through the ages.
Thursday, December 15 2011
Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs…
This is an unapologetic and hilarious account of eight key years of "total assault on the culture", to quote William S. Burroughs.
Friday, December 9 2011
This is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl
This definitive biography tells the epic story of a singular career that includes Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and Them Crooked Vultures.
Friday, December 2 2011
The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun
Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun signed and/or recorded many of the greatest musical artists of all time. Always hip, he lived in the grand manner but was never happier than when he found himself in some down-and-out joint listening to music late at night.
Wednesday, November 23 2011
And Nothing but the Truthiness: The Rise (and Further Rise) of Stephen Colbert
A funny and personal portrait of the comedian who became the headline-making, ground-breaking star of The Colbert Report.
Friday, November 18 2011
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever
From post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were born, to Lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGBs and the Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation...
Friday, November 4 2011
‘Pulphead’: A Sharp-Eyed, Uniquely Humane Tour of America’s Cultural Landscape
An exhilarating tour of America’s popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Sullivan shows us—with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that’s all his own—how we really (no, really) live now.
Friday, October 28 2011
The Beatles in Hamburg: The Stories, the Scene and How It All Began
When the Beatles went to Hamburg in 1960, in the company of gangsters and prostitutes they changed their sound, wore black leather, lost their bass player, sacked their drummer, developed a vast repertoire of raucous rock ’n’ roll songs, and fashioned a new hairstyle.
Friday, October 21 2011
A Rocket in My Pocket: The Hipster’s Guide to Rockabilly Music
This the story of rockabilly music, the primal ‘50s howl of rockin'rage. With roots in country, blues, folk, hillbilly, R&B, boogie-woogie and other Deep South forms it was young people's music, wild and primitive, and despised by adults and the country music establishment.
Friday, October 14 2011
Beethoven in America
Beethoven is in American commercialism and the black power movements. He’s in film and theater, disco, country, rock and rap. To examine Beethoven on American soil is to examine America itself.
Friday, October 7 2011
Red Rock: The Long Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll
From pivotal concerts by local legends to controversial visits from international rock superstars, clashes with state censors and government-sponsored rock festivals, this work encapsulates the thrills and frustrations experienced by Chinese rockers.
Monday, October 3 2011
Michael Moore’s ‘Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life’
Capturing the zeitgeist of the past 50 years, yet deeply personal and unflinchingly honest, this memoir takes readers on an unforgettable, take-no-prisoners ride through the life and times of Michael Moore.
Friday, September 30 2011
How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior
Bad behavior is the entry point for a brilliant cultural romp as well as an anti-civics lesson. "Shove your rules," says scandal, and no doubt every upright citizen, deep within, cheers the transgression—as long as it's someone else's head on the block.
Friday, September 23 2011
Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America
Acclaimed author Tom Piazza follows his prize-winning novel City of Refuge and the post-Katrina classic Why New Orleans Matters with a dynamic collection of essays and journalism about American music and American character, in Devil Sent the Rain.
Friday, September 16 2011
Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion
By mixing different musical and cultural traditions, fusion artists sought to disrupt generic boundaries, cultural hierarchies, and critical assumptions.
Friday, September 9 2011
Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism
Chuck Eddy is one of today’s most entertaining, idiosyncratic, influential, and prolific music critics. This book features the best, most provocative reviews, interviews, columns, and essays written by this singular critic.
Friday, September 2 2011
Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation
Can hip-hop change the world? From the south side of Chicago to the barrios of Caracas and Havana and the sprawling periphery of Sydney, Sujatha Fernandes grapples with questions of global voices and local critiques, and the rage that underlies both.
Friday, August 26 2011
Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future
A up-close account of a city—and a world—at a thrilling and confounding moment in history, in which nothing can be counted as stable, from the sidewalk underfoot to Western assumptions about democracy and progress.
Friday, August 19 2011
Groove Interrupted: Loss, Renewal, and the Music of New Orleans
New Orleans' history is fraught with tragedy and triumph. Both are reflected in the city’s vibrant, idiosyncratic music community. This excerpt tells of but one of the city's musicians captured in this fine book; the somewhat curmudgeonly, terribly talented Gatemouth Brown.
Friday, August 5 2011
Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music from Blues to Hip-Hop
Joining authentic voices with a bittersweet narrative covering more than 50 years of fighting oppression through song, Keep On Pushing defines the soundtrack to revolution and the price the artists paid to create it.
Friday, July 29 2011
Alina Simone’s Indie Rock World Comes Alive in ‘You Must Go and Win’
Ukrainian-born musician Alina Simone traces her bizarre journey through the indie rock world, from disastrous Craigslist auditions with sketchy producers to catching fleas in a Williamsburg sublet. She begins her tale in a strange place called Kharkov.
Friday, July 22 2011
Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s
In the early '80s, new wave’s most successful acts -- groups like the Cars, the Police, the Talking Heads, and newcomers the Go-Go’s -- had established themselves among the upper echelon of critically acclaimed and top-selling rock artists.
Friday, July 15 2011
A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster
All his life Morgan Forster lived in a world imprisoned by prejudice against homosexuals. He was 16 when Oscar Wilde was sent to prison, and he died the year after the Stonewall riots.
Friday, July 8 2011
Bob Marley: The Untold Story
Bob Marley’s story is that of an archetype, which is why it continues to have such a powerful and ever-growing resonance: it embodies, among other themes, political repression, metaphysical and artistic insights, gangland warfare, and various periods in a mystical wilderness.
Friday, July 1 2011
Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY and the Lost Story of 1970
David Browne’s Fire and Rain tells the story of four iconic albums of 1970 and the lives, times, and constantly intertwining personal ties of the remarkable artists who made them.
Friday, June 24 2011
Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica
While Ride the Lightning was Metallica’s first exceptionally accomplished recording, Master of Puppets would swiftly become recognised as their first stone cold masterpiece; their Led Zeppelin II; their Ziggy Stardust; their legacy. There would never be a Metallica album quite like it again.
Friday, June 17 2011
Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future—And Locked Us In
As technology becomes more intimately woven into our lives, the implications of a single point of control over our digital experiences, such as Apple has over the iPhone, are threatening creative freedom.
Friday, June 10 2011
Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style
Los Angeles’s 1943 “zoot suit riot” may be the only time in American history that fashion was believed to be the cause of widespread civil unrest.
Friday, June 3 2011
I Know Where I’m Going: Katharine Hepburn, A Personal Biography
Katherine Hepburn’s mother was a suffragette, her father, a prominent doctor. At 13, she discovered the body of her adored older brother Tom, an apparent suicide. From then on, Kate assumed her brother’s birthday as her own and always considered Tom “the most important man in my life.”
Friday, May 27 2011
Prince: Chaos, Disorder, and Revolution
Prince imbued his art with his idiosyncratic view of life, turning out music from the mind of a sex-obsessed deviant, a bomb-fearing party-animal, and a God-fearing man searching for a ways to reconcile the spiritual with the sexual… and so much more.
Friday, May 20 2011
The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait
Bob Dylan lurched toward his place onstage wearing a steel harmonica holder around his neck that made him look like a wild creature in harness, blinking at the floodlights, hunching his shoulders to adjust the guitar strap that held the Gibson Special acoustic high on his slender body.
Friday, May 13 2011
The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
There is a deep current of cynicism that runs through much of American journalism… It is safe and painless to produce "balanced" news. It is very unsafe… to produce truth.
Friday, May 6 2011
The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes
Despite or even because of its jumble of missing pieces, half-finished recordings, garbled chronologies of composition or performance -- the basement tapes can begin to sound like a map; but if they are a map, what country, what lost mine, is it that they center and fix?
Friday, April 22 2011
Excerpt from ‘A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS’
Julia and Paul Child were on the front lines of the Cold War in Europe, though Julia could not help feeling that the chill in the air had its origin in the “rampant right wingery” that had seized their own country… Washington was awash in paranoia and suspicion.
Tuesday, April 19 2011
‘Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling’
“We thought sampling was just a way of arranging sounds,” says Chuck D… Public Enemy wanted “to blend sound. Just as visual artists take yellow and blue and come up with green, we wanted to be able to do that with sound.”
Friday, April 1 2011
Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Queen
'Good on showmanship, but not sure about the singing,’ admitted Brian May, about the future Freddie Mercury. ‘Fred had a strange vibrato,’ chuckled Roger Taylor, ‘which some people found rather distressing.’
Friday, March 25 2011
‘The Art of Immersion’: From Frank Rose’s Book on How Digital Generation Is Changing Our World
Alternate reality games such as Why So Serious? are a new kind of interactive fiction, one that blurs the line between entertainment and advertising, as well as between fiction and reality, in ways barely imagined a decade earlier.
Wednesday, January 12 2011
Lost and Found in Russia: Lives in the Post-Soviet Landscape
This is the story of a nation going through a nervous breakdown, pulling through, but paying the price. It's about a people lost and found, about their search for meaning.
Wednesday, January 5 2011
Memoirs of a Geezer: Music, Mayhem, Life
One of my first memories of watching TV consisted of seeing a performance by the Rolling Stones... My dad and my mum’s brother Johnny were in the living room having a beer... They both went totally mental.
Monday, November 8 2010
Fab: The Life of Paul McCartney
Post-war Britain seemed to embrace colour and change. A creative and cultural renaissance was taking place in the heart of the capital, one that caught the attention of the world, and Paul was at the centre of it.
Friday, November 5 2010
The Best You Can Is Good Enough: Radiohead vs. The Corporate Machine
PopMatters' coverage of Kid A's 10th anniversary concludes with an exclusive excerpt from Marvin Lin's forthcoming 33 1/3 book about the album, here discussing why the band decided to abandon all conventional publicity mechanisms to promote the album, and what such gestures ultimately said about the band's mindset at the time ...
Wednesday, November 3 2010
Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker
"Nothing is more natural, or more essential to human achievement," writes James McManus, "than gambling— than risking something, taking a chance."
Tuesday, November 2 2010
A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett
Pink Floyd's ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ was a zeitgeist moment in the development of English pop music, the moment when pop liberated itself from its blues roots.
Thursday, October 28 2010
Excerpt from Alex Ross’ New Book ‘Listen to This’
I don't listen to music to be civilized; writes the author of The Rest Is Noise, sometimes, I listen precisely to escape the ordered world.
Friday, October 22 2010
Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy
As representative of an all-American ideal, the dream of unlimited success and total lack of restraint, Ken Kesey remains hard to beat, and through his “freak freely” ministry great ideas flew from his head like illuminated dandruff.
Wednesday, October 20 2010
The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power
Kaiser Wilhelm II's oriental fixation had... the feeling of a love affair, as he courted the affections of the various peoples of the Ottoman Empire... Wilhelm wanted Germans to lead the way in 'civilizing' the Middle East, reinvigorating its moribund economy and integrating it with Europe’s.
Monday, October 18 2010
Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London
Private Billy Cox stood near an open window of Service Club 1, where he heard a solo guitar playing in a wildly unique manner, as if Beethoven and John Lee Hooker had merged. The guitarist: Private Jimi Hendrix.
Thursday, October 14 2010
They Dared Return: The True Story of Jewish Spies Behind the Lines in Nazi Germany
He was deep behind the lines, and, remarkably, the enemy headquarters he spied was not that well guarded. On his belly, .45 in hand, he slithered forward.
Tuesday, October 12 2010
In Praise of Copying
Vuitton is a mass-producer of luxury, artisanal, unique individual bags, faking the faking of its own products at an art exhibition, while zealously pursuing the prosecution of the actual fakers through police action and courts of law around the world.
Friday, October 8 2010
Bob Dylan in America
Over Coppertone-slicked bodies on Santa Monica Beach and out of secluded make-out spots and shopping-center parking lots and everywhere else American teenagers gathered that summer, it seemed that the ba-de-de-bum-de-bum announcing Dylan’s hit about getting stoned was blaring from car radios and transistor radios.
Tuesday, October 5 2010
Apathy for the Devil: A Seventies Memoir
Music remains the only key that can unlock the past for me in a way that I can inherently trust.
Friday, October 1 2010
Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life
Where there’s equality, there’s so much more in an affluent country to see, to taste, to touch… There’s more order. But it’s the order of not having the disorder of mass poverty. [In Europe], in the really social democratic parts, I can inhale whole cities like banks of violets.
Wednesday, September 29 2010
Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World
A journalist enters the dystopian world of Franz Kafka in an attempt to journey to Gaza to study the local surf scene.
Friday, September 17 2010
Bring on the Books for Everyone: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture
Apparently, the love of literature can now be fully experienced only outside the academy and the New York literary scene, out there somewhere in the wilds of popular culture.
Tuesday, September 7 2010
Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
Long before there were streetlights, when only the night watchman’s lantern glowed, night travelers who dared defy curfew were forbidden to wear hoods or cloaks, carry weapons, or gather in groups of more than three or four.
Wednesday, August 25 2010
The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance
In 18th century Germany, new beliefs, new tempers, new ways of thinking were taking place. Many of the new ideas transformed Europe and would also transform North America.
Wednesday, August 18 2010
Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy
Two groups met that summer: The first – mostly white – had just finished another year at Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, Berkeley… Guitars slung over shoulders, idealism lifting their strides. The second group – mostly black – brought no guitars and had little idealism left to pack. They arrived with stories of being beaten, targeted, tortured.
Tuesday, August 17 2010
Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language
The making of a recognizable Englishness, the painful transition to Anglo-Saxon ‘Englaland’, is a history of four invasions and a cultural revolution… English was a mirror to its island state, an idiosyncratic mixture of splendid isolation and humiliating foreign occupation.
Tuesday, August 3 2010
Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars
Those who controlled the numbers game in Harlem possessed a license to print money. And there, of course, was the rub... Desperately outnumbered and outgunned, she used every conceivable stratagem at her disposal.
Friday, July 23 2010
A Fierce Radiance
"... the man on the stretcher was dying. His lips were blue from lack of oxygen. His cheeks were hollow, his skin leathery and tight against his bones. His eyes were open but unfocused, like the glass eyes in a box at a doll factory she’d once photographed."
Friday, July 16 2010
Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth
As a small child lying awake in bed at night, Pearl grew up listening to the cries of women on the street outside calling back the spirits of their dead or dying babies. In some ways she herself was more Chinese than American.
Tuesday, July 13 2010
The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War
The Americans might be the strongest military power, but they would be powerless if western Europe fell naturally into Communist hands, and in any case there would be an economic crisis in America should Europe collapse.
Tuesday, June 29 2010
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War
Legend was he was ruthless in war, killing enemies with his bare hands. He said he knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding. And now he was petting me like a puppy.
Thursday, June 10 2010
Raisin’ Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter
“There was always a line outside the Scene and lots of celebrities,” says Johnny. “Jimi Hendrix and all of the English bands who came to New York—once they left their gigs, they came to jam…"
Friday, June 4 2010
Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century
The future was revealed by a ‘radiant’ woman ‘in flowing, graceful robes’, who explained that in a hundred years’ time, no one would be tramping the streets without a home, or be unemployed. By then the world’s labour would be shared equally, so that each individual only worked five hours a day.
Monday, May 24 2010
The Invisible Bridge
Men and women in evening dress descended, but Andras saw only architecture: the egg-and-dart molding along the stairway, the cross-barrel vault above, the pink Corinthian columns that supported the gallery.
Wednesday, May 12 2010
Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour
In the chaos-filled days of June 1940, with their future bordering on the calamitous, the British hoped the United States would pay more attention to them than they had to Europe.
Thursday, April 22 2010
The History of White People
Evolutionary biologists reckon that all living peoples share the same small number of ancestors... thereby making nonsense of anybody’s pretensions to find a pure racial ancestry.
Wednesday, April 21 2010
Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival
Delegates of the Sixth Chinese Communist Party Congress in 1928 declared that it was of the “greatest importance to absorb... peasant women into... the revolutionary movement.”
Friday, April 9 2010
Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow
When composer W.C. Handy published the first major collection of blues songs in 1926, reimagining pop tunes as folk songs, he explicitly framed the blues as folk music.
Monday, March 29 2010
Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training
There’s a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or the cemetery or as a bag of ashes, that remains a black hole, invisible to the rest of the world, and everyone’s happy with the arrangement.
Friday, March 26 2010
A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli
It was Judy Garland’s affinity for the absurd that triggered Vincent Minelli’s idea for a film version of The Pirate, a rakish story that would employ Garland, Gene Kelly, and a very strange song composed by Cole Porter.
Friday, March 19 2010
Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties
The glitter of 1920s America is seductive: jazz, flappers, wild parties, the cult of celebrity, and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene flourishing under Prohibition…
Wednesday, March 10 2010
Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s - The Golden Age of Paranoia
They say the darkest hour is just before the dawn, and caliginous thoughts often swirled through President Nixon's murky, insomniac mind.
Wednesday, August 5 2009
Pot, Skinny-Dipping, and Freedom Rock: Woodstock and the Year of the Outdoor Music Festival (Part 2)
PopMatters presents the second part of a chapter on Woodstock from Kirkpatrick's recent book 1969: The Year Everything Changed. Part two covers Woodstock appearances by the Who, the Band, Jimi Hendrix and more.
Monday, August 3 2009
Pot, Skinny-Dipping, and Freedom Rock: Woodstock and the Year of the Outdoor Music Festival (Part 1)
Today and Wednesday, PopMatters is presenting a chapter on Woodstock from Kirkpatrick's recent book 1969: The Year Everything Changed. Part one covers the run-up to the festival as well as those early sets by the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin.
Tuesday, May 19 2009
China Underground: The Uighur Jimi Hendrix
Like almost no other music in China, the kid’s improvising. He’s rattling off little motives from Spanish folk songs and then, without notice, shifting his fingering patterns and taking the music in completely new directions.
Wednesday, April 15 2009
China Underground: The Slacker
In this excerpt from PopMatters' new book China Underground, Zachary Mexico tells us about the tall, handsome Liu Jianfeng, of stylish clothes and beautiful hair -- for whom time is running out.
Friday, April 10 2009
Apocalypse Jukebox: Apocalypse in the 7-Eleven Parking Lot
In this excerpt from PopMatters' new book Apocalypse Jukebox, Janssen and Whitelock warn that no period of the human life cycle is as fraught with apocalyptic anxiety as adolescence.
Tuesday, April 7 2009
China Underground: The Black Society
In this excerpt from PopMatters' new book China Underground, Mexico tells us about Dalong the good-looking gangster, and his ‘little brother’ who, while high on ketamine, shot his friend.
Monday, March 9 2009
Apocalypse Jukebox: It’s Got a Beat and You Can Die to It
In this excerpt from PopMatters' new book Apocalypse Jukebox, Janssen and Whitelock remind us that underneath Devo’s flowerpot kitsch and low comic value lies a high-minded, sharply satiric argument that centers upon the principle of postapocalypse.
Monday, March 2 2009
Apocalypse Jukebox: Disaster, Revelation and Impossible Salvation
In this excerpt from PopMatters' new book Apocalypse Jukebox, Janssen and Whitelock inform us, “In no small way, rock ‘n’ roll’s early development took place in the shadow of a mushroom cloud.”
Tuesday, February 24 2009
Apocalypse Jukebox: The End is Near, There and Everywhere
In this excerpt from PopMatters' new book Apocalypse Jukebox, Janssen and Whitelock talk about “the devil’s masterpiece for trapping teenagers, making them his slaves, and causing them to be the enemies of God.”
Monday, January 12 2009
Rebels Wit Attitude: Nirvana
In this excerpt from PopMatters' new book Rebels Wit Attitude, Iain Ellis discusses how Nirvana were a rocking perfect storm of punk’s attitude, metal’s riffs, and pop hooks.
Monday, December 15 2008
Rebels Wit Attitude: Beastie Boys
In this excerpt of PopMatters' new book Rebels Wit Attitude, Ellis discusses how Beastie Boys were not afraid to play the enemy within, often mocking the macho strutting of harder rappers.
