This is, unfortunately, a timeless book. I say unfortunately because there shouldn’t be a need for Joan Kuhl’s Dig Your Heels In: Navigate Corporate BS and Build the Company You Deserve in these presumably enlightened times. You would think that our modern age and society would have long since put out to pasture the workplace/professional inequality that has bedeviled women since time immemorial, but you would be wrong to believe so. Kuhl’s…
The most notable facet of this book, for me, is its lack of a dogmatic or partisan point of view. Ira Kaufman and Velimir Srića’s The World is Broken, We Need to Fix It: Path to Strategic Harmony acknowledges and examines the many challenges humanity faces nearly twenty years into the 21st century, but it never latches onto a particular school of political thought, but rather takes a broad-based humanistic…
The ever growing, ever evolving presence of technology in our lives means we will be seeing works like Greg Kieser’s Dear Machine: A Letter to a Super-Aware Intelligent Machine (SAIM) more. This slim tome, barely exceeding one hundred pages when you take out extraneous material like title pages and whatnot, nevertheless takes on an enormous mandate – Kieser structures the work as a “letter” composed to a future intelligent and “aware” machine…
You’d be hard pressed to find a recent musical genre that’s been dissected more in the past two decades than Grunge. Countless books, articles, documentaries, and radio and TV interviews dig into the Seattle-based phenomenon and just about every single discussion on the topic eventually comes around to the ground-breaking indie label Sub Pop. So, it’s surprising there was any new material left to report about the label, let alone…
Wayne Kramer and his bandmates in the MC5 helped put down the foundations of punk rock, alongside fellow Detroiters Iggy Pop and The Stooges, paving the way for everyone from The Ramones to The Clash to make careers out of their music. Unfortunately, Kramer was in a federal prison in Lexington, KY, serving time for a botched drug deal when punk was just taking off. And at the time, the…
The Clash’s record label once dubbed the group as “the only band that matters” in the promotional materials introducing them to the U.S. and while the phrase was certainly polarizing at the time, you can’t help but find their influence stronger today than ever before. Whether it was adding strong, sing-able melodies to punk rock – heard in bands like Green Day and every Green Day clone since; their strong…
Over the years, Bill Sullivan has served as tour manager for bands like Soul Asylum, Bright Eyes, Yo La Tengo, The New Pornographers and many more. All were clearly a walk in the park, compared to his first gig in music, a roadie for The Replacements, quite possibly the most self-destructive band in the history of rock.
Ah, Yacht Rock – the guiltiest of all the musical guilty pleasures. That 1970s soft rock sound best associated with Southern California (though the bands were from all over). Think linen sportscoats and espadrilles; soft jazz, clean vocals, catchy hooks and maybe a little white boy R&B. Kenny Loggins? Yup; Hall & Oates? Sure thing; Christopher Cross? Are you kidding me? He had a song called “Sailing,” so, yeah; Rupert…
One of the most interesting phases in the life of one of music’s most interesting talents was Bob Dylan’s conversion from a Jewish liberal to an Evangelical Christian. Although the phase seemingly lasted only a few years, it’s a spiritual move that’s still being dissected more than 30 years later.
The timing of Martin Popoff’s latest AC/DC book comes at a rough time for fans of Australia’s greatest hard rock export.
You know you’ve got a drug problem when Courtney Love – circa the late ‘90s – is taking part in your intervention.
From the tight jeans and mullets uniform of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the cringe-worthy hairspray and glitter era, to the burning churches and scary-as-fuck Norwegian Black Metal sect, Axl Rosenberg and Chris Krovatin have managed to break down just about every imaginable subgenre of Heavy Metal in their satisfyingly thorough Hellraisers. This massively heavy hardcover is crammed with hundreds of color photos, playlists and essays throughout.
Corbin Reiff must have known what he was setting himself up for when he decided to tackle a list of the best concerts, year by year. No matter how spot on his picks are – and with a couple of nitpicks here and there they are – there are bound to be people who have a problem with his selections. The only thing music nerds like more than talking about…
One of the greatest aspects of this long-running, hilariously creative cartoon series that posits a word where Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig are life partners is summed up on the back of the book with a blurb from Rollins.
In a sentence that should be a surprise to many, Corey Taylor – best known for his metal bands Slipknot and Stone Sour – is a published author. Let that one sink in for a moment.
You could build a library solely dedicated to books written about Guns N’ Roses, the genre is that deep. Band members Slash, Duff McKagan and Steven Adler have all written books about their time in the infamous band. Slash’s childhood friend Marc Cantor was able to cash in on a book, even Adler’s mom was able to get a publisher for Sweet Child of Mine: How I Lost My Son…
Noel Monk managed Van Halen from 1978 – 1985, the biggest rock band in the world during that run. And while he was ultimately fired from the band and cut out of millions of dollars, he certainly left the gig with a slew of stories, funny, sad and salacious. Thanks to a 30-plus year NDA agreement that has recently run out, he’s now able to channel the best of those…
I have been out of the DC Comics loop for a bit, only keeping up to date with the cartoons and feature films. As such, we missed the initial run of New Super-man, a fascinating story that showcases new locales and a Superman-like character in Kenan Kong. Kenan starts the story as an American-styled bully in China, beating up and stealing from a fellow school mate. After the falls into…
The tech industry is fertile ground for satire; just look at what Mike Judge has been able to do with his show Silicon Valley. But Doree Shafrir proves there are no geographical boundaries to the characters that are drawn to the bizarre world of tech startups. From tech bros to the journalists who follow their every move, Shafrir, in her debut novel, creates an addictively compelling world in a city…
The idea behind this books seems a mix of cynicism and the morbid – running a series of excerpts from rock star bios focusing entirely on their drug stories. In realty, if we’re being honest, it actually makes for a wildly entertaining read.
