Happy Holidays From The Beast

We're going dark for about a month.

We're not taking a vacation BTW, we're going to be working on IT.

Peace + Love To Y'all.

THE SNERD'S STOCKING Pt. 2: The 52 Best Music Books of 2013

Sorry, Nick Carter, your book was not included. Oh, and by the way, Horace Silver is NOT dead. And neither is Ricky Lawson. Jeez-Louise...

Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat (Duke UP) by Tony Allen & Michael E. Veal

Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD (The Friday Project) by Martin Aston

Sparks-Tastic: Twenty-One Nights with Sparks in London (Rare Bird) by Tosh Berman

Birth School Metallica Death: The Biography, Volume 1 (Da Capo) by Paul Brannigan & Ian Winwood

Late Life in Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (Oxford UP) by Ken Crossland & Malcolm MacFarlane

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (Harper) by Stanley Crouch

Barred for Life: How Black Flag's Iconic Logo Became Punk Rock's Secret Handshake (PM Press) by Stewart Dean Ebersole

More Important Than the Music: A History of Jazz Discography (Chicago UP) by Bruce

D. Epperson

No Beethoven: Autobiography & Chronicle of Weather Report (Fuzzy Music LLC) by Peter Erskine

ECM: A Cultural Archaeology (Prestel) by Okwui Enwezor & Markus Mueller

Eminent Hipsters (Viking Adult) by Donald Fagen

Willin': The Story of Little Feat (Da Capo) by Ben Fong-Torres

Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles (Duke UP) by Cindy Garcia

Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (Knopf) by John Eliot Gardiner

Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation (Headpress) by Mark Goodall

Mingus Speaks (University of California Press) by John F. Goodman & Sy Johnson

Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (Bloomsbury) by Robert Gordon

Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork (Insight Editions) by Scott Gutterman

Verve: The Sound of America (Thames & Hudson) by Richard Havers

I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp (Ecco) by Richard Hell

E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (Viking Adult) by Clinton Heylin

Johnny Cash: The Life (Little, Brown & Co.) by Robert Hilburn

Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (It Books) by Peter Hook

Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of the Rolling Stones (St. Martins Press) by Bill

Janovitz

Songs in the Key of Los Angeles (Angel City Press) by Josh Kun

The Book of Levon: The Trials and Triumphs of Levon Helm (Bolt Books) by Jamie  Malanowski

Beatbox: A Drum Machine Obsession (GetOnDown) by Joe Mansfield

Beatles vs. Stones (Simon & Schuster) by John McMillian

Detroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock 'n' Roll in America's Loudest City (Da Capo) by Steve Miller

Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock 'n' Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues) (Northeastern) by Jon Mitward

Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke UP) by David Novak

Experiencing Nirvana: Grunge In Europe, 1989 (Bazillion Points) by Bruce Pavitt

Dreadnaught: King of Afropunk (Rare Bird) by D.H. Peligro

Being Here: Conversations on Creating Music (Radio.org) by Radhika Philip

Benjamin Britten: A Life For Music (Henry Holt) by Neil Powell

Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (University of Massachusetts Press) by Devon Powers

The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop (University of California Press) by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.

The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild (Knopf) by Hanna Rothschild

Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (Bloomsbury) by William Todd Schultz

Brian Eno: Visual Music (Chronicle) by Christopher Scoates

Nilsson: The Life of A Singer-Songwriter (Oxford UP) by Alyn Shipton

The Leonard Bernstein Letters (Yale UP) ed. by Nigel Simeone

Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop (Faber & Faber) by Bob Stanley

Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris and the Renegades of Nashville (It/HarperCollins) by Michael Streissguth

Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives (It Books) by Brendan Jay Sullivan

Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (Gotham Books) by Terry Teachout

Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove (Grand Central) by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson

Soul Train: The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation (Harper Design) by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson

I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon (Atria Books) by Touré

Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture (Bloomsbury) by Simon Warner

Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (It Books) by Jon Weiderhorn & Katherine Truman

Yes Is The Answer: (And Other Prog-Rock Tales) (Rare Bird), ed. by Marc Weingarten & Tyson Cornell

THE SNERD'S STOCKING Pt. 1: Passive-Aggressive Music Books

Sometimes we give people the gifts they want; sometimes we give them the gifts we think they need. Maybe you have a friend who doesn't know much about music, isn't inspired to push their boundaries, and probably wouldn't buy a music book on their own. But you want to get them a music book anyway. You're in luck. Beyond the stately biographies, trashy tell-alls, and "remember when" critical panoramas, 2013 was a banner year for "gateway" music books. Here's a shortlist of tomes to tickle your Gnostic friends' fancies.

FOR THE D.I.Y. CRAFTER

With all the blogs and websites dedicated to cataloguing terrible album covers released by outsiders who never got close to the flame of fame, there's no reason for this book to exist, much less in a sumptuous coffee-table incarnation that costs $65. Which automatically makes Enjoy The Experience: Homemade Records 1958-1992 the greatest music book of 2013. Why would someone want to flip through this? Schadenfreude. Enjoy 512 pages of failed human endeavor that features nearly 1,200 "vanity press" albums released by creative souls way, WAY outside the music business bubble: supper-club organists, high-school marching bands, husband and wife gospel duos, regional heartthrobs, Partridge Family knockoffs (cult faves The Shaggs receive a lavish bio treatment here), would-be psychedelic gurus, angry reactionaries, and living-room crooners. The volume comes with a card that allows readers to download songs from these records. More interesting is the 7-inch single with instructions on how to put out your own album, which your friend could utilize to record their own soon-to-be-ignored-classic.

FOR THE HARD TO IMPRESS

Alan Rusbridger's Play It Again: An Amateur Against The Impossible offers a different take on musical amateurism along the lines of "Can a middle-aged editor for The Guardian learn a famously difficult Chopin piano concerto from scratch by practicing for twenty minutes every day for one year?" Before you respond, "Who cares?" remember that Rusbridger tried this stunt during a year when he worked a 24-hour news cycle while covering the Wikileaks scandal, the Japanese tsunami, Rupert Murdoch's phone-hacking scandal, the Arab Spring, riots in Great Britain, and the killing of Osama Bin Laden. (Rusbridger just testified in the case of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.)

 

FOR THE SUBCULTURE VULTURE

For those who are drawn to musical subcultures, Pitchfork scribe Nathan Rabin mashes up two doozies, jam band Phish and shock-rappers Insane Clown Posse, in You Don't Know Me But You Don't Like Me, his anthropological study/memoir on obsessive fandom. Rabin picked these bands for because both are so reviled: Phish for its excessive, Grateful Deadly noodlings and ICP for its nihilist poseur-dom and awful music. By infiltrating their legions of rabid and loyal fans and trying to understand them on their own terms, Rabin paves the way for a more universal appreciation of the need for community.

 

FOR THE POLLYANNA

In Stacy Horn's Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing With Others, a woman sings for 30 years in a church choir without actually being religious. Her reason sets the stage for a wider meditation on the history of people singing in groups for camderaderie as well as for healing. (The book begins in 1919 with the forming of a town choir in response to a horrific mining disaster in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.) Horn also plumbs the four-century history of choral pieces and their composers like Mozart, Brahms and Handel. In their own way, both You Don't Know Me and Imperfect Harmony might soften the hater's heart.

FOR THE TEARJERKER

Music is the backdrop and not the central focus of these two often harrowing memoirs. In Low Down: Junk, Jazz And Other Fairy Tales From Childhood, originally published in 2003 but reissued this year by Tin House Books, Amy Jo Albany details in haiku-spare prose her chaotic life growing up as the daughter of bebop pianist Joe Albany, who played with (and was admired by) Charlie Parker but for the most of his life carried a scorching heroin habit. Any romanticized notions of the hepcat life are blown away by Albany's graphic depictions of junkie decrepitude and jazzbo irresponsibility the rot that it inflicts on the nuclear family—not to mention playing into the popular imagination of jazz musicians as irresponsible and selfish louts as when Albany recounts a possibly stoned Dizzy Gillespie dropping her on her head when she was a baby. In The Train In The Night: A Story Of Music And Loss, music journalist Nick Coleman chronicles his middle-aged hearing loss thanks to the effects of the vaunted "club disease" known as tinnitus, which has also claimed the eardrums of Pete Townshend, Moby, and Lars Urlich. Thanks to his condition, in which listening to music sometimes literally causes him to vomit, Coleman's massive record collection is transformed from a world of treats and wonders to a useless monolith of ear-torture. "I began to treasure the thought as well as the actuality of silence," Coleman writes. Word.

FOR THE SECRET SCIENTIST

In these sciencey books, music is a vital but tangential presence that arose out of the noises of nature and was in part an attempt by primitive societies to imitate the sounds of the earth. (Cave-groupies came later.) David Rothenburg's breezy Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm And Noise posits the insects as the earth's first performing musicians; the author, a saxophonist, evens takes his instrument out to a field to jam with an orchestra of cicadas. Douglas Kahn's Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies And Earth Magnitude In The Arts and David Hendy's Noise: A Human History Of Sound And Listening might be catalogued under a more recent development in the study of sound. "Archaeocoustics" (a.k.a. "sensory history") considers everything from the roar of the crowds in ancient Rome, and the Aeolian sounds made by wind blowing through telegraph wires (which inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson) to the continuous white noise of the 24-hour media cycle. "To trace the story of sound," notes Hendy, "is to tell the story of how we learned to overcome our fears about the natural world."