The Last Holiday: A Memoir
Gil Scott-Heron | 2012
Selected by Patrick Corcoran
Gil Scott-Heron’s autobiography sparkles with brilliance from the opening of the prologue in the same way that his music did. “I always doubt detailed recollections authors write about their childhoods,” he confesses. “Maybe I am jealous that they retain such clarity of their long agos while my own past seems only long gone.”
This magic is created in several ways. Firstly it is impossible not to hear the book read in his voice—particularly if you have listened to his final act as a musician, I’m New Here (2010). The same warm, grizzled tones that light up that album reverberate through the reader’s mind as the fierce intelligence that earned him the role as godfather of rap appears on the page.
Secondly, it reflects exactly the same character that lit up his recorded life—brutal honesty about his own failings, incomparable wit and colossal insight into life as a black man in America.
Finally, it comes laden with the poignancy resulting from a posthumous release. Oh, how the world would have benefitted from at least a few more years of Gil Scott-Heron.
Love Is A Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
Rob Sheffield | 2007
Selected by Justin Chadwick
The Rolling Stone editor and acclaimed music scribe embarked upon arguably his most personal and poignant writing assignment with his debut book Love Is A Mix Tape, written in the wake of his wife Renee’s unexpected passing due to a pulmonary embolism in 1997. Throughout his memoir, which includes different mixtape track listings to introduce each chapter, Sheffield explores how music was vital to the blossoming of his romance with Renee and subsequently integral to his grieving process in the face of such a life-altering loss.
For anyone who has ever made a mix tape for a loved one or lost someone close to them, Sheffield’s sweet and sincere recollections are sure to resonate in powerful ways. “Nothing connects to the moment like music,” Sheffield explains. “I count the music to bring me back, or more precisely, to bring her forward.”
Saint Morrissey: A Portrait of This Charming Man by an Alarming Fan
Mark Simpson | 2001
Selected by Libby Cudmore
Morrissey’s Autobiography is complete rubbish, a heartbreak for anyone who’s ever loved a Smiths song. But Mark Simpson’s Saint Morrissey is as much a biography of Moz as it is a musing on what the Smiths mean. No book has ever captured the complex and occasionally confusing nature—how could someone so lyrically lovely be so horrid!—as this.
Wannabe: How The Spice Girls Reinvented Pop Fame
David Sinclair | 2004
Selected by Quentin Harrison
Released three years before the first official reformation of the Spice Girls in 2007, David Sinclair’s Wannabe: How the Spice Girls Reinvented Pop Fame was a welcome critical reappraisal of the British girl group at a time when they needed it. Prior to their reunion, many in the music press and general pop culture sphere had written off the initiating phase of the Spice Girls’ successes (from 1996 to 2001) as a byproduct of major label marketing. As Sinclair attests, succinctly—and as someone removed from the group’s supposed target audience—that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Sinclair focuses on Beckham, Brown, Bunton, Chisholm and Horner’s (née Halliwell) prowess as astute business figures and creative mavericks; all of it is carefully cast by Sinclair in a fair and balanced light. This made his book the first to espouse on the sizable legacy of the Spice Girls in the United Kingdom and beyond until my book “Record Redux: Spice Girls” was published in 2016. Still, Wannabe remains essential reading for any Spice Girls fan or pop music aficionado looking for an engaging read.
Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop
Bob Stanley | 2013
Selected by Justin Chadwick
If any group embodies the purity, power, and possibilities of contemporary pop music during the past three decades, it’s most certainly Saint Etienne. So it should come as no great surprise that group co-founder Bob Stanley—who wrote for the prominent UK papers NME and Melody Maker prior to forming the band—possesses an expansive understanding and seemingly insatiable passion for pop songcraft, both of which are the driving forces behind Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop.
An incredulously exhaustive and cohesive assessment of pop music in its multiple incarnations across the latter half of the 20th century, Stanley’s meticulously researched book traverses roughly fifty years from the inception of the 7-inch single and birth of rock & roll in the early 1950s to the advent of streaming shortly after the turn of the century. Scratching the surface, it does not.
“What creates great pop?” Stanley contemplates in the book’s introduction. “Tension, opposition, progress, and fear of progress. I love the tensions between the industry and the underground, between artifice and authenticity, between the adventurers and the curators, between rock and pop, between dumb and clever, between boys and girls. A permanent state of flux informed the modern pop era and taking sides is part of the fun.”
Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson | 2013
Selected by Patrick Corcoran
Too often music books are written at the far end of life when details can be sketchy and memories obscured. Pain can be forgotten or at least soothed by the passing of time, leaving an anodyne remembrance on the page. This is most definitely not the case with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s memoir Mo’ Meta Blues.
It seems barely possible that he would have time to co-write (with Ben Greenman) a memoir of this importance given his manifold enterprises. Musician, TV bandleader, producer, DJ extraordinaire and budding foodie he may be, but above all he is one thing: a music fanatic. This shines through in his discussion of both his West Philly childhood and his years of grinding away at the business of music.
Yet his encyclopedic knowledge of music is not the abiding memory on completion of the book —it is the man behind it. Not just knowledgeable, but engaging and honest about his work and place in the musical ecosystem, he emerges as a figure to be admired and a reminder that passion needs to be carried at all times in life and work.
Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried To Be a Pop Star
Tracey Thorn | 2013
Selected by Justin Chadwick
With honesty, humility and humor, Tracey Thorn revisits the various stages of her musical coming of age, from her early forays into recording with Marine Girls to forming Everything But the Girl with her partner and kindred spirit Ben Watt to the group’s mid ‘90s commercial breakthrough to her brave transition toward a solo career.
Thorn’s prolific, four-decades-strong career has been defined by peaks and valleys along the way, but through it all, she has maintained a clear conscience and an undying passion for her songcraft. And as evidenced by last year’s sublime Record (included in our list of 2018’s top ten albums), her well of sublime songs shows no signs of drying up anytime soon. (P.S. Her new memoir Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia arrives in stores—and hopefully on your bookshelves—February 7th.)
Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader
Tom Waits | 2005
Selected by Libby Cudmore
Tom Waits’ elusiveness is part of his charm. In Innocent When You Dream, a series of collected interviews edited by Mac Montandon, the carnival-barker bard tells exactly the sort of fabulous tales that have cropped up in his songs, from the legendary tale of being born "in a taxi cab with the meter still running," to telling Terry Gross that he "couldn't wait to be an old man." Like Unfaithful Music, it is not a showbiz memoir, and anyone looking for scandal had best look elsewhere. Instead, it presents Waits as a deliberately complex maze for only the most devoted of music listeners, while the constructor himself sits in the center with a twinkle in his eye.
Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and The Journey of a Generation
Sheila Weller | 2008
Selected by Quentin Harrison
Penned by renowned author Sheila Weller, “Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon - and the Journey of a Generation” gives the heroines of her youth the treatment they rightly deserve. The separate stories of King, Mitchell and Simon are compellingly sketched by Weller detailing their trek from childhood to womanhood, capturing all their music and life along the way. Readers will be taken by how Weller opens each woman’s immersive tale.
Weller’s fondness for her subjects is clear, but she never loses her objective lens throughout the length of the book. In the end, what makes “Girls Like Us” so vital is that while Weller is reverent to the period in which all three came to prominence, she also brings the women into a present-day context and evinces how they continue to resonate in today’s climate.
Out Of The Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis On Rock Music
Ellen Willis | 2011
Selected by Sarah Paolantonio
Thanks to Ellen Willis’ essay on Bob Dylan for Cheetah magazine in 1967, she became the first pop critic for The New Yorker. Out Of The Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis On Rock Music is a compilation of her writing from the late 1960s until 1981 when she stepped away from rock writing and became a feminist critic. Published in 2011 thanks to the efforts of her daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz, Out Of The Vinyl Deeps catalogs her love for Dylan, The Velvets, and her favorite band of all time, Creedence Clearwater Revival. From Janis to Elvis, this collection of Willis’ studied criticism will take you to school on rock writing even if you’re just a fan.
Willis had an exquisite eye for detail and wonder. She questioned why certain sounds were popular even as she wrote, “all noise is interesting in some way.” Willis contributed liner notes, wrote for The Village Voice, and critiqued pop and rock spanning Bette Midler to Van Morrison. This collection is legendary in the simple sense in honoring the first popular woman rock journalist and Dylanologist. Her feminist lens on rock music in the 60s and 70s was unique and remains one of the greatest voices in the genre. Willis went on to found the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU. She passed in 2006.