Tutorial: Accessing and Using Rock's Backpages:
Practice Searching the Catalog:
If you want to try searching the library catalog, try out the interactive tutorial designed for this course.
Finding Books and Articles:
There are several sources that you should consult to find resources for your artist paper:
- Library Search This link opens in a new windowThe library catalog allows you to search for physical materials in the collections (like books, scores, and audiovisual recordings), but also provides access to journal and newspaper articles, book chapters, reviews, and more by simultaneously searching a wide variety of open access repositories and many (but not all) of the subscription databases provided by the Heard Libraries.
- Bloomsbury Popular Music This link opens in a new windowThis new resource provides access to the International Encyclopedia of Popular Music, the 33 1/3 Series (books that provide in-depth analysis of individual albums by a wide variety of performers), and academic books. You can search all content through a single search box or browse.
- Rock's Backpages This link opens in a new windowFeaturing more than 30,000 articles on popular music from the past fifty years, Rock's Backpages is an outstanding resource for your artist paper. Articles cover artists from all genres, including rock, rockabilly, Britpop, country, garage bands, punk, girl groups, grunge, punk, and more. There are also audio interviews available for streaming with some of the most important artists of the last half century. All articles are available in full-text directly from your computer or device.
Selected Books:
The World of Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan has helped transform music, literature, pop culture, and even politics. The World of Bob Dylan chronicles a lifetime of creative invention that has made a global impact. Leading rock and pop critics and music scholars address themes and topics central to Dylan's life and work: the Blues, his religious faith, Civil Rights, Gender, Race, and American and World literature. Incorporating a rich array of new archival material from never before accessed archives, The World of Bob Dylan offers a comprehensive, uniquely informed and wholly fresh account of the songwriter, artist, filmmaker, and Nobel Laureate whose unique voice has permanently reshaped our cultural landscape.
Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
An award-winning Black feminist music critic takes us on an epic journey through radical sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé. Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures--a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monae's liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as cultural historians. With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music--and who should rightly tell it--Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.
Not For You: Pearl Jam and the Present Tense
Contents - Introduction. A Personal Preface -- The Cast -- A Dozen Moments in the Prehistory of Pearl Jam -- The Bacchanal, San Diego (November 21, 1989) -- The Off Ramp, Seattle (October 22, 1990) -- "Jeremy," "Garden," "Yellow Ledbetter" (1991) -- J.C. Dobbs, Philadelphia (July 12, 1991) -- The Palladium, Hollywood (October 6, 1991) -- Cow Palace, San Francisco (December 31, 1991) -- MTV Unplugged (March 16, 1992) -- Pinkpop Festival, Holland (June 8, 1992) -- The Singles Soundtrack (1992) -- Stadio Flaminio, Rome (July 6, 1993) -- Lakefront Arena, New Orleans (November 16, 1993) -- Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid (1993) -- Civic Center, Pensacola (March 9, 1994) -- Bayfront Amphitheater, Miami (March 28, 1994) -- Patriot Center, Fairfax (April 8, 1994) -- Rayburn House Office Building, Washington DC (June 30, 1994) -- Dave (1994) -- Self-Pollution Radio (January 8, 1995) -- Soldier Field, Chicago (July 11, 1995) -- 38th Annual Grammy Awards (February 28, 1996) -- Cox Arena, San Diego (July 10, 1998) -- Binaural and the Battle of Seattle (1999) -- Roskilde Festival, Denmark (June 30, 2000) -- Madison Square Garden (October 15, 2000) -- Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale (April 30, 2003) -- Thin Air (2006-2013) -- Tomas Young and Body of War (2005-2014) -- Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia (April 29, 2016) -- Altice Arena, Lisbon (June 20, 2019) -- Afterword (For Chris Cornell) -- In Memoriam -- Acknowledgments.
Americanaland: Where Country & Western Met Rock & Roll
A musical genre forever outside the lines With a claim on artists from Jimmie Rodgers to Jason Isbell, Americana can be hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. John Milward's Americanaland is filled with the enduring performers and vivid stories that are at the heart of Americana. At base a hybrid of rock and country, Americana is also infused with folk, blues, R&B, bluegrass, and other types of roots music. Performers like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Gram Parsons used these ingredients to create influential music that took well-established genres down exciting new roads. The name Americana was coined in the 1990s to describe similarly inclined artists like Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Wilco. Today, Brandi Carlile and I'm With Her are among the musicians carrying the genre into the twenty-first century. Essential and engaging, Americanaland chronicles the evolution and resonance of this ever-changing amalgam of American music. Margie Greve's hand-embroidered color portraits offer a portfolio of the pioneers and contemporary practitioners of Americana.
Atomic Tunes: The Cold War in American and British Popular Music
What is the soundtrack for a nuclear war? During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions. Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.
Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll
African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll--from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.
We're not here to entertain : punk rock, Ronald Reagan, and the real culture war of 1980s America
Contents - Preface: From Memory . . . to History -- Prelude (1979-1980) : When Punk Broke . . . and Opened -- 1 Teeny Punks : Pioneer Your Own Culture! (1980-1981) -- 2 It Can and Will Happen Everywhere (1982-1983) -- 3 It's 1984! (1984) -- 4 Marching toward the "Alternative" (1985-?) -- Epilogue: Punk Breaks Again.
The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present
A second edition of the classic introduction to arts in social movements, fully updated and now including Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and new digital and social media forms of cultural resistance The Art of Protest, first published in 2006, was hailed as an "essential" introduction to progressive social movements in the United States and praised for its "fluid writing style" and "well-informed and insightful" contribution (Choice Magazine). Now thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of T. V. Reed's acclaimed work offers engaging accounts of ten key progressive movements in postwar America, from the African American struggle for civil rights beginning in the 1950s to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century. Reed focuses on the artistic activities of these movements as a lively way to frame progressive social change and its cultural legacies: civil rights freedom songs, the street drama of the Black Panthers, revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, poetry in women's movements, the American Indian Movement's use of film and video, anti-apartheid rock music, ACT UP's visual art, digital arts in #Occupy, Black Lives Matter rap videos, and more. Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic expression, Reed reveals how activism profoundly shapes popular cultural forms. For students and scholars of social change and those seeking to counter reactionary efforts to turn back the clock on social equality and justice, the new edition of The Art of Protest will be both informative and inspiring.
When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone and the Struggle Between Jazz and Rock
When Genres Collide is a provocative history that rethinks the relationship between jazz and rock through the lens of the two oldest surviving and most influential American popular music periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. Writing in 1955, Duke Ellington argued that the new music called rock 'n' roll "is the most raucous form of jazz, beyond a doubt." So why did jazz and rock subsequently become treated as separate genres? The rift between jazz and rock (and jazz and rock scholarship) is based on a set of received assumptions about their fundamental differences, but there are other ways popular music history could have been written. By offering a fresh examination of key historical moments when the trajectories and meanings of jazz and rock intersected, overlapped, or collided, it reveals how music critics constructed an ideological divide between jazz and rock that would be replicated in American musical discourse for decades to follow.
Tear down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock
From the earliest days of rock and roll, white artists regularly achieved fame, wealth, and success that eluded the Black artists whose work had preceded and inspired them. This dynamic continued into the 1960s, even as the music and its fans grew to be more engaged with political issues regarding race. In Tear Down the Walls, Patrick Burke tells the story of white American and British rock musicians' engagement with Black Power politics and African American music during the volatile years of 1968 and 1969. The book sheds new light on a significant but overlooked facet of 1960s rock--white musicians and audiences casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting a romanticized vision of African American identity. These artists' attempts to cast themselves as revolutionary were often naïve, misguided, or arrogant, but they could also reflect genuine interest in African American music and culture and sincere investment in anti-racist politics. White musicians such as those in popular rock groups Jefferson Airplane, the Rolling Stones, and the MC5, fascinated with Black performance and rhetoric, simultaneously perpetuated a long history of racial appropriation and misrepresentation and made thoughtful, self-aware attempts to respectfully present African American music in forms that white leftists found politically relevant. In Tear Down the Walls Patrick Burke neither condemns white rock musicians as inauthentic nor elevates them as revolutionary. The result is a fresh look at 1960s rock that provides new insight into how popular music both reflects and informs our ideas about race and how white musicians and activists can engage meaningfully with Black political movements.
Small Town, Big Music
Relying on oral histories, hundreds of rare photographs, and original music reviews, this book explores the countercultural fringes of Kent, Ohio, over four decades. Firsthand reminiscences from musicians, promoters, friends, and fans recount arena shows featuring actslike Pink Floyd, The Clash, and Paul Simon as well as the grungy corners of town where Joe Walsh, Patrick Carney, Chrissie Hynde, and DEVO refined their crafts. From back stages, hotel rooms, and the saloons of Kent, readers will travel back in time to the great rockin' nights hosted in this small town. More than just a retrospective on performances that occurred in one midwestern college town, Prufer's book illuminates a fascinating phenomenon: both up-and-coming and major artists knew Kent was a place to play--fertile ground for creativity, spontaneity, and innovation. From the formation of Joe Walsh's first band, The Measles, and the creation of DEVO in Kent State University's art department to original performances of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and serendipitous collaborations like Emmylou Harris and Good Company in the Water Street Saloon, the influence of Kent's music scene has been powerful. Previously overshadowed by our attention to Cleveland as a true music epicenter, Prufer's book is an excellent and corrective addition. Extensively researched for eight years and lavishly illustrated, Small Town, Big Music is the most comprehensive telling of any of these stories in one place. Rock historians and fans alike will want to own this book.
Pick up the Pieces: Excursion in Seventies Music
Unless you lived through the 1970s, it seems impossible to understand it at all. Drug delirium, groovy fashion, religious cults, mega corporations, glitzy glam, hard rock, global unrest--from our 2018 perspective, the seventies are often remembered as a bizarre blur of bohemianism and disco. With Pick Up the Pieces, John Corbett transports us back in time to this thrillingly tumultuous era through a playful exploration of its music. Song by song, album by album, he draws our imaginations back into one of the wildest decades in history. Rock. Disco. Pop. Soul. Jazz. Folk. Funk. The music scene of the 1970s was as varied as it was exhilarating, but the decade's diversity of sound has never been captured in one book before now. Pick Up the Pieces gives a panoramic view of the era's music and culture through seventy-eight essays that allow readers to dip in and out of the decade at random or immerse themselves completely in Corbett's chronological journey. An inviting mix of skilled music criticism and cultural observation, Pick Up the Pieces is also a coming-of-age story, tracking the author's absorption in music as he grows from age seven to seventeen. Along with entertaining personal observations and stories, Corbett includes little-known insights into musicians from Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, James Brown, and Fleetwood Mac to the Residents, Devo, Gal Costa, and Julius Hemphill. A master DJ on the page, Corbett takes us through the curated playlist that is Pick Up the Pieces with captivating melody of language and powerful enthusiasm for the era. This funny, energetic book will have readers longing nostalgically for a decade long past.
