Category Music books

Auto Added by WPeMatico

‘Ambition is a punishing sphere for women’: author Maggie Nelson on why Taylor Swift is the Sylvia Plath of her generation

What do Swift and Plath have in common, and should Kamala Harris have spoken out about her political ambitions? The Argonauts author turns her lens on poetry, pop and patriarchy

Maggie Nelson is an unapologetic Taylor Swift fan. She knows the discography, drops song lyrics into conversation and tells me she took her family to the Vancouver leg of the Eras tour. So she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Swiftie? Nelson seems not entirely comfortable with the breathless connotations of that term but yes, the love is real. So much so, she has written a book about the billionaire singer-songwriter, or rather, a joint analysis of Swift and Sylvia Plath, who recurs in much of Nelson’s oeuvre.

The notion of uniting these two cultural titans, who are seemingly poles apart in sensibility – one a melancholic American poet, the other an all-American poster girl – came to her when she heard Swift’s 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department. Alongside its literary references to F Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare, there are heavy resonances of Plath in its introspection and emotional tumult. But the book only started to take shape after a chat with her 13-year-old son’s friend, Alba. “We were making bracelets and she said ‘Have you ever heard of Sylvia Plath?’ I thought that was funny because I’d written my undergraduate thesis on Plath and I was [almost] 40 years older than her. So I said: ‘I have heard of Sylvia Plath.’ As I sat there, I thought, these kids don’t want to hear me talk on this topic but I have a lot to say because I’ve been thinking of it all.”

Continue reading...

Wings by Paul McCartney review – a brilliant story of post-Beatles revival

A compelling oral history traces the rise one of the most successful bands of the 70s from the ashes of a creative breakup

The Beatles learned how to be Beatles together. From 1963 to 1970, the group’s four members experienced an entirely new kind of fame, while leaning on each other to get through it. After splitting up, they faced another unprecedented challenge: how to be an ex-Beatle? This one had to be confronted alone.

The heaviest burdens of expectation fell on the group’s main songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were also suffering from the emotional shock of an acrimonious personal split. Both of them leaned on their wives. As John and Yoko Ono pursued political campaigns and avant-garde art projects, Paul and Linda McCartney retreated with their children to their ramshackle Scottish farm, where Paul licked his wounds, sheared sheep and tinkered with new songs. Paul insisted that Linda become his new musical partner, despite her inexperience. As she said later: “The whole thing started because Paul had nobody to play with. More than anything he wanted a friend near him.” The album he made with her, Ram, sold well but received savage reviews, deepening his crisis of confidence.

Continue reading...

Cat On The Road To Findout by Yusuf/Cat Stevens review – fame, faith and charity

The enigmatic singer-songwriter on pop stardom, becoming a Muslim and returning to the stage decades later

When Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam and announced his conversion to the Muslim faith and retirement from music in the late 70s, Bob Dylan apparently remarked that he had “finally stopped trying to be the prophet and begun to follow The Prophet”. It’s a quote that Islam reproduces in his autobiography, viewing it as a benediction, but it also tells you something about the music that made him globally famous.

In the early 70s, the charts were awash with sensitive folky singer-songwriters. Their constituency, as Islam perceptively notes, was “the college generation, away from home, lonely and trying to find their place in the university of high academic expectations”. But none were as obsessed with spirituality as Cat Stevens, with his album titles that namechecked Buddha or referenced Zen poems, his conceptual song cycles based on numerology, his lyrical exhortations to “kick out the devil” and “get to heaven, get a guide”, and Morning Has Broken, the hymn he made a 1972 US No 1. If you’d had to place bets on which 70s superstar would pack it all in for religion, you’d have got far lower odds on Cat Stevens than, say, Noddy Holder.

Continue reading...

Night People by Mark Ronson review – a superstar DJ’s coming of age

Nerdery triumphs over gossip in this earnest but compelling memoir of the 90s New York club scene

It is bizarre to learn that, despite a career spent desperately trying to fill the dancefloor, reading the room night after night to predict how he might make it pop off, Mark Ronson never dances – “unless you count standing around, bobbing my head, and reciting rap lyrics as dancing”.

Night People is intended as Ronson’s memoir but is as much an attempt to immortalise the people and scenes he came up in as it is a reflection on a childhood shaped by the late-night parties hosted by his parents – first in London, where a distant memory of Robin Williams tucking him in to bed with “Nanu nanu” floats through, then later in Manhattan, when his mother marries Mick Jones from Foreigner.

Continue reading...

From a new Thomas Pynchon novel to a memoir by Margaret Atwood: the biggest books of the autumn

Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… all among this season’s highlights

Helm by Sarah Hall
Faber, out now
Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she’s been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria’s Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm – the only wind in the UK to be given a name – from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It’s a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.

Continue reading...

Everything We Do Is Music by Elizabeth Alker review – how the classics shaped pop

From Stravinsky to Donna Summer, the story of connections that enriched music – in both directions

One of many things I did not expect to learn in this book is that the BBC benefited from Nazi technology. Its standard tape recorder, in use till the 1970s, was called the BTR-2: EMI’s original model, the BTR-1, had been copied from a captured example of the German “magnetophon”, as used by Hitler to record a radio broadcast.

Musicians who liked fiddling with machines, too, benefited from this legacy. Delia Derbyshire, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneer who produced the original Doctor Who theme tune and otherwise particularly enjoyed playing an enamel green lampshade, influenced Paul McCartney’s experiments with tape loops, while Steve Reich hit upon his compositional technique of “phasing” phrases in and out of sync with one another on tape recorders, before training live musicians to do the same.

Continue reading...

Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland review – the Dexys Midnight Runners frontman tells all

A picaresque story of massive success and deep despair that Rowland narrates with an impressive lack of self-pity

In the summer of 1979, Dexys Midnight Runners were a band you would have been hard-pushed to describe as anything other than unique. Their sound was a pugilistic update of classic 60s soul, topped with frontman Kevin Rowland’s extraordinary vocals, impassioned to the point that he permanently sounded on the verge of tears. It was fervent and a little retro, perfect for a musical climate in which mod and ska revivals were already bubbling. But Dexys’ image threw a spanner in the works. “I wore a white 1930s shirt and big baggy light-grey trousers tucked into white football socks just below the knee to give the effect of ‘plus fours’,” writes Rowland of a typical outfit. “I wore pink Mary Jane ballet shoes and my hair swept back, Valentino style.”

Other members appear on stage clad in jodhpurs and satin harem pants. The disparity between how they sound and how they look is so disconcerting, even their manager seems baffled. After a gig supporting the Specials, at which their appearance so enrages the crowd that the band have to be locked in a dressing room (“for our own safety”), they tone things down completely and begin taking to the stage in donkey jackets and mariner-style beanie hats.

Continue reading...

Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence by Will Hodgkinson audiobook review – indie pop’s ultimate underdog

This warm, funny account of a mercurial talent gone to waste teems with love for its subject

When the music journalist Will Hodgkinson proposed writing a book on Lawrence, ex-frontman of the post-punk band Felt and latterly of Go-Kart Mozart (recently re-christened Mozart Estate), he was told there would be conditions. Lawrence – who goes by his first name only – said he couldn’t speak to any old bandmates. Furthermore, there could be no anecdotes or use of the word “just”. Asked what is wrong with “just”, Lawrence tells him: “I just don’t like it.”

A simultaneously entertaining and melancholic account of an overlooked musician, Street-Level Superstar depicts the sixtysomething Lawrence as a pallid eccentric who passes his time walking around London, who lives on liquorice and milky tea and is fearful of cheese – “We know that in nature if something smells, it is dangerous to eat.” We learn that Lawrence hasn’t had a girlfriend for years. Reflecting on sex, he says: “I was a two-minute wonder. They’re not missing much.”

Continue reading...