For many music fans, the next best thing to the actual songs is the story “behind the music”. For book lovers who are also music lovers, a well-written and often unexpected music book is a treat that feeds both passions. Music books come in various formats, including band memoirs, music criticism, and pop culture philosophizing. From Lester Bangs’ collection of reviews in Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung to Henry Rollins’ incredible journal-turned-memoir Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag, the music book is a valuable part of the art and the industry, providing fans with insight and context on the artists and the music they love.
I can still recall the first music book that grabbed and held my attention from cover to cover – No One Here Gets Out Alive (1981), the seminal biography of legendary Doors frontman Jim Morrison by Danny Sugarman. That book was more than just a memoir; it was a key player in my rock ‘n’ roll coming of age. Over the last few years, I have seen numerous innovative and informative books from various music genres. From rock to hip-hop to country to punk to emo, here’s a list of superb reads to deepen the music education for you or the music lover in your life.
Black Punk Now (2024)
Edited by James Spooner and Chris L. Terry
(Soft Skull)
James Spooner, the filmmaker and graphic novelist known for the 2003 documentary Afro-Punk, begins this fascinating mixed media anthology by recalling how, after purchasing his first computer in 2001, “one of the first things I did was Google ‘Black Punk’. There were exactly zero links.” Spooner’s feeling of being alone and his certainty that “I wasn’t the only one” grounds the book and its importance in chronicling the significance of race in the punk movement.
From the seminal all-Black proto-punk band Death developing during the Motown era of Detroit to the rise of hardcore pioneers Bad Brains, the connection between punk culture and the African-American experience is profound. Bobby Hackney of Vermont punk band Rough Francis tells the story of discovering that his father and uncle were in the band Death, and he writes, “Being Black and punk challenges the notions of what people think ‘Black’ is supposed to be … and that is so punk.”
The multi-genre format of the collection, with zines, fiction, nonfiction, comics, and more, emphasizes the intersectionality and DIY spirit of punk culture. With discussions of “Sista Grrrl Riot”, extensive personal narratives about being Black and punk, and a short film script called Let Me Be Misunderstood by Kash Abdulmalik, this book is a treasure trove of insight on music, race, and culture. Abdulmalik explains, “Nobody is more punk than the Black youth of America.” Black Punk Now affirms that belief.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023)
Rick Rubin
(Penguin)
Rick Rubin is a musician’s producer, despite being a man who claims to be not remotely musical. The founder of Def Jam Records has played a pivotal role in countless noteworthy and even-career-altering albums over a diverse collection of bands ranging from LL Cool J and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Johnny Cash and Adele. This book is not explicitly focused on music and the art of making it – though Rubin has vast knowledge and experience about some of the most significant music recordings of the past 30 years.
Instead, Rubin’s somewhat stream-of-consciousness pondering of the creative process is rooted in one basic idea: An artist must make art first and foremost and solely for themselves to achieve their maximum creativity. Anything created with a market in mind is automatically less authentic. Although the music industry incessantly pushes musicians to compromise their artistic voice in search of greater marketability, Rubin believes the best music comes from artists uninterested in such economic compromise.
While not technically a music book, Rubin’s tome is an investigation to explore the creative process in perhaps the same way that some artists have done under his tutelage.
Hip Hop Is History (2024)
Questlove
(AUWA)
Framed against the Hip-Hop 50 Tribute for the 2023 Grammys, the book is a definitive history of hip-hop, establishing that hip-hop is a significant and indispensable component of the history of America at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. One could argue that it’s impossible to understand late contemporary American history without understanding the role hip-hop culture has played. Inspired by common reflection of the pandemic years, Questlove says, “I began to think more about preservation. Too much culture, especially Black culture, has passed into the past without a second thought.”
From the man who directed Summer of Soul, the Oscar-winning documentary about the Harlem Culture Festival of 1969, the book is an incredible academic achievement that is incredibly familiar and readable as a bit of pop culture criticism. He begins pondering, “So here we are at the fiftieth anniversary of this wonderful bottomless creative meaning-crying shape-shifting genre. So what is the state of the art?” Questlove answers that question tenfold.
Talking about “The Roots”—a perfect name for his group, the Tonight Show band—he watches new hip-hop come and go and shares sweet moments, like when he talks fondly of artists like Doja Cat, who not only knows his generation but also the music that influenced it. Picking up on and playing off his previous memoir, Music Is History, he selected songs that formed his history. This latest work is a beautiful blend of memoir and criticism.
Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (2024)
Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay
(University of Texas Press)
This collaborative mixed media work between a pop culture writer and a contemporary fine art painter delves into one of music history’s most loved/hated bands. The catalog of Steely Dan is nothing short of Dickensian or Dylanesque in the characters and stories it contains, and music fans all know about protagonists like Rikki, who shouldn’t “lose that number”. From “Dr. Wu” to “Cousin Dupree” or even a nostalgic dreamer known by the address “Hey, Nineteen”, the people of Steely Dan’s songs are a cast as varied and interesting as many of the most well-known characters from American literature.
The music of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen draws from a seemingly endless well of influences, with everything from existential philosophy to the inner workings of jazz legends. Pappademas, the senior culture editor for GQ and author of Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant: The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon (2022), has done some thorough scholarly investigative work into the history of “the Dan” and has amassed a comprehensive collection of the stories behind the songs. This innovative music book is a work of art unto itself, with the detailed commentary of Pappademas alongside the captivating art of LeMay.
Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk (2024)
Kathleen Hanna
(Ecco)
When Bikini Kill hit the road for a massive summer tour, it was clear the hardcore feminism that grounded Riot Grrrl remains more critical than ever. Thus, it makes sense for punk rock badass Kathleen Hanna to tell her story. The memoir, building off the Kill’s seminal “Riot Grrrl” song, is a timely and essential reminder of why the genre exists and the vital role music plays in social movements. If #MeToo had a soundtrack, then Bikini Kill would be an indispensable track.
Hanna’s story is raw, honest, and vulnerable, coming across as hardened, tough, and triumphant. Hanna pulls no punches and bluntly recounts and indicts the harsh misogyny endemic to the music industry – a condition necessitating the rise of Riot Grrrl “girls to the front” battle cry.
The stories are almost conversational like we’re sitting around with Hanna recollecting the highs, lows, and in-betweens of a legendary career. She delivers her soft recollections of Kurt Cobain while also recounting the strange story of how she contributed to the title of Nirvana’s breakthrough hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Hanna has seen it all in the music world, and her stories are invaluable to the industry’s history.
She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs (2021)
Sara Smarsh
(Scribner)
Sarah Smarsh is an award-winning journalist from Kansas who has chronicled the lives of working-class people in the American Heartland. She writes with honesty and integrity about the challenges of being poor in the wealthiest country on Earth. Her book on Dolly Parton‘s music and the lives of the people her songs honor began as a long-form series for the roots-music magazine No Depression about music that tells the stories of America’s unsung people.
Smarsh is well-versed in both the lives of the people and the music of the country music queen. She brings an honest, often painfully so, portrait of people like her grandma Betty, who are the truest portrait of feminism while also being averse, or simply too busy to acknowledge and understand, the term and its political implications. Smarsh weaves her narrative and music commentary with an authentic voice that understands how “Parton jokes that she had to get rich to sing like she was poor again.”
Growing up rural and poor while working to rise above her challenges, Smarsh explains through authentic stories and characters from Parton’s songs how “People can be found packing up and leaving in the lyrics of most musical genres, but there is something particularly poor, female, and American in the leaving that happens in country music.”
60 Songs that Explain the 90s (2023)
Rob Harvilla
(Twelve)
Music critic and pop culture writer Rob Harvilla writes he is “loathe to lay on you some ultra pretentious Grand Unified Theory of the 1990s, which is far away enough to feel like the past, but close enough to be hounding the present …” He doesn’t actually do that. Still, he clearly has a thesis about the 1990s, and this fascinating collection of music commentary is the mix-tape soundtrack for his theory.
Harvilla astutely notes how “the music you loved as a teenager will be the sweetest music you’ll ever hear, the music will be in all likelihood the greatest wildest purest love affair of your whole life.” Harvilla covers all the genres and doesn’t shy away from explaining why Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” is every bit as significant as Eminem’s “My Name Is” and Beck’s “Loser”.
Harvilla ponders unique historical moments such as the philosophical significance of Dion, “the bombastic pop diva”, and Elliott Smith, “the sad, quiet guy with the acoustic guitar”, both performing at the Academy Awards for best movie theme song in 1999. Harvilla’s knowledge and research are vast, and readers will enjoy loving and challenging his opinions.
Sonic Life: a Memoir (2023)
Thurston Moore
(Doubleday)
When bands break up, fans often feel like the children of divorce, betrayed and confused by the division. That situation was all the more significant during the breakup of post-punk pioneers Sonic Youth, which featured a punk rock power couple of cool, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. Now, fans have two books that explore the history and dissolution of the group.
With Moore’s memoir, the relationship, and more importantly, his infidelity that ultimately derailed it, is loudly noticeably absent. What’s not is a nearly encyclopedic recollection of the rise of punk rock, its control of a young fan, and its impact on a seminal second-wave band. The memoir is so detailed you’d think Moore kept a daily journal of his 40-year career, beginning with the noise rock movement connected to the late 1970s and early 1980s punk scene in New York City.
The book is so filled with vivid narrative recounting his endless stream of influences – the Stooges, Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads, Ramones – it seems like he listened to and deconstructed every band he heard on the way to forming a unique musical experiment known as Sonic Youth. Sonic Life: a Memoir seems to be simply and exclusively about his love affair with music. He talks a great deal more about other groups than he does about the significance of his own.
Moore was so embedded in the early scene that he sounds like a proper historian at times, and that’s the appeal of this music book, chronicling his first-hand experience of the rise of the punk movement.
There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland (2024)
Steve Hyden
(Da Capo)
Perhaps the most academically and culturally ambitious book on the list, Steve Hyden’s tome is incredibly well-researched and insightful and might just be one of the best overall books of the year. As the music critic at large for UPROXX, Hyden is the consummate Gen X music fan, and he has published numerous books and lists of significant music and its historical context. His 2023 book, Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation, was an innovative and insightful bit of music criticism, as Hyden explained the history of Pearl Jam through 15 songs, a chapter for each song in their incredible history.
With There Was Nothing You Could Do, Hyden acknowledges that while most fans would cite Born to Run as Bruce Springsteen’s masterpiece, he believes “Born in the USA is undoubtedly his most iconic record from a pop culture perspective. It defines his persona in the broadest sense. The way Bruce sounds, looks, and acts in the popular imagination derive mostly from the BUSA era.” Steve Hyden is a critic’s critic with an everyman’s voice, and the Springsteen book is an impressive achievement. His intricate music knowledge enables him to connect the album’s influence on 21st-century politics and sociology.
Where Are Your Boys Tonight? The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008 (2024)
Chris Payne
(Dey Street Books)
According to the author’s disclaimer, “This book is not meant to be an encyclopedia of emo, but a narrative of a specific moment in history.” Granted, with interviews of more than 150 people over three hundred hours, Chris Payne has certainly amassed an encyclopedic history of that moment in the early 2000s, a time during which the heirs to punk, post-punk, hardcore, indie rock, and grunge became immensely popular in the third wave of emo.
Payne even concedes that many bands mentioned would not consider themselves emo, likely because of the negativity surrounding the term at various times. That said, the groups from My Chemical Romance to Panic! at the Disco to Fall Out Boy to Paramore truly represent a notable musical movement that was rich and varied and synonymous with the popular culture of the era. Organized as an oral history with a cinematic “cast of characters” introducing each section of the book, Where Are Your Boys Tonight? aptly covers the various disconnected but relative emo scenes geographically and somewhat chronologically.
Movements like punk and all its offshoots, including the multiple waves of emo, are rooted in local scenes. Payne’s incredibly well-researched and insightful history effortlessly moves from New Jersey to Chicago to South Florida, documenting each scene as influential on emo as the Lower East Side, Washington DC, or Berkeley, California were to early punk waves.
