NPR Great Read of 2016
From the acclaimed author of Rip It Up and Start Again and Retromania—“the foremost popular music critic of this era (Times Literary Supplement)—comes the definitive cultural history of glam and glitter rock, celebrating its outlandish fashion and outrageous stars, including David Bowie and Alice Cooper, and tracking its vibrant legacy in contemporary pop.
Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late Sixties, glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds takes you on a wild cultural tour through the early Seventies, a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up, thrilling music and larger-than-life personas.
Shock and Awe offers a fresh, in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon, placing it the wider Seventies context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genre’s major themes—stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse—Reynolds tracks glam’s legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from Eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to twenty-first century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga. Shock and Awe shows how the original glam artists’ obsessions with fame, extreme fashion, and theatrical excess continue to reverberate through contemporary pop culture.

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century

REYNOLDS, SIMON

Humor & Entertainment

Dey Street Books

Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdotes and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up and Start Again re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.

Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984

Arts & Photography

Music

Penguin??Books

Over the course of the past 25 years, a quiet but persistent revolution has been taking place in English cathedrals, in some larger churches in major towns and cities, as well as the chapels of university colleges. The numbers of people drawn by the distinctive musical character of their worship has risen significantly, with Choral Evensong becoming the locus of this persistent growth in the numbers of worshippers. A significant number of these people are under 40 years of age, and many others have, until now, lived their lives on the edges of the Church, if not completely beyond it. Simon Reynolds believes Evensong is providing a place of sanctuary for people seeking space for reflection in a frenetic world. It is becoming a significant part of the Church of England’s mission. Lighten Our Darkness provides the definitive guide to Choral Evensong, and will be a fascinating introduction for newcomers to this historic form of worship, and for clergy and students wishing to explore its roots.

Lighten Our Darkness: A Celebration of Choral Evensong

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Darton,Longman & Todd Ltd.

A collection of writing by Simon Reynolds, centered on music that seemed, in its moment, to prefigure the Future &nbsp; Simon Reynolds's first book in eight years is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music's future--the vanguard genres and heroic innovators whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience. But it's also about the way music can stir anticipation for a thrillingly transformed world just around the corner: a future that might be utopian or dystopian, but at least will be radically changed and exhilaratingly other.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; Starting with an extraordinary chapter on Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, taking in illuminating profiles of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Boards of Canada, Burial, and Daft Punk, and arguing for Auto-Tune as the defining sound of 21st century pop,&nbsp;Futuromania&nbsp;shapes over two dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. Reynolds explores the interface between pop music and science fiction's utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; A tapestry of the scenes and subcultures that have proliferated in that febrile, sexy, and contested space where man meets machine, Futuromania is an enthused listening guide that will propel readers towards adventures in sound. There is a lifetime of electronic listening here.

Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow's Music Today

Hachette Books

This work tells the story of rave culture and explores the origins of this dance music, chronicling the ways in which its reverberations have influenced 1990s pop. Examining the music as well as the drugs, the book traces how Chicago house and Detroit techno catalyzed the rave and "Madchester" ferment of 1988-90, then follows the music into the early-1990s. It surveys the confusion of post-rave styles and scenes: jungle, electronica, drum and bass, trance, trip hop, and Big Beat. The book also looks at the role of Ecstasy in the dance-and-drug culture. It includes interviews with Paul Oakenfold, Derrick May, 808 State, Stone Roses, A Guy Called Gerald, The KLF, Primal Scream, Orbital, The Prodigy, Goldie, 4 Hero, Aphex Twin, Tricky, Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, Richie Hawtin, DJ Shadow and many more. A CD is included, featuring 15 seminal dance tracks from ten years of rave.

Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Simon Reynolds (1998-08-21)

Picador

There is a growing (if not urgent) need for those being trained for ordained (and lay) ministry to be provided with a more solid grounding in liturgical principles, and Simon Reynolds seeks to address this by demonstrating how good liturgical leadership can be the foundation from which all other theological, historical, pastoral and missiological issues arise. Table Manners attempts to avoid being a â€˜partyâ€™ book and will consciously avoid issues of churchmanship (except in pointing to what is positive in the various Christian traditions). Rather, it is written from the conviction that (i) a proper understanding of the Eucharist, and a theologically-informed approach to celebrating it (even if this manifests itself in many different styles), should mean that worshippers can go to churches of an unfamiliar tradition and yet still be caught up in the action, because what is essential and enlarging about good liturgical celebration would be recognisable; and (ii) that the success of presidency also demands the liturgical education of the whole people of God, because until they know what to ask for, their expectations will remain constrained.

Table Manners: Liturgical Leadership for the Mission of the Church

SCM Press

Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture

In Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds takes the reader on a guided tour of this end-of-the-millenium phenomenon, telling the story of rave culture and techno music as an insider who has dosed up and blissed out. A celebration of rave's quest for the perfect beat definitive chronicle of rave culture and electronic dance music.

Generation Ecstasy

Routledge

Punk's raw power rejuvenated rock, but by the summer of 1977 the movement had become a parody of itself. RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN is a celebration of what happened next: post-punk bands like PiL, Joy Division, Talking Heads, The Fall and The Human League who dedicated themselves to fulfilling punk's unfinished musical revolution. The post-punk groups were fervent modernists. Experimenting with electronics and machine rhythm or adapting ideas from dub reggae and disco, they were totally confident they could invent a whole new future for music.

Rip It Up and Start Again

Faber&Faber

In this, the first book to take a big-picture view of the entire post punk period, acclaimed author and music journalist Simon Reynolds recreates a time of tremendous urgency and idealism in pop music. Full of anecdote and insight, and featuring the likes of Joy Division, The Fall, Pere Ubu, PiL and Talking Heads, Rip It Up And Start Again stands as one of the most inspired and inspiring books on popular music ever written.

Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984

Computers & Technology

Programming Languages

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