Download or read book Power Ballads written by Will Boast and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Real musicians don’t sign autographs, date models, or fly in private jets. They spend their lives in practice rooms and basement clubs or toiling in the obscurity of coffee-shop gigs, casino jobs, and the European festival circuit. The ten linked stories in Power Ballads are devoted to this unheard virtuoso: the working musician. From the wings of sold-out arenas to hip-hop studios to polka bars, these stories are born out of a nocturnal world where music is often simply work, but also where it can, in rare moments, become a source of grace and transcendence, speaking about the things we never seem to say to each other. A skilled but snobby jazz drummer joins a costumed heavy metal band to pay his rent. A country singer tries to turn her brutal past into a successful career. A vengeful rock critic reenters the life of an emerging singer-songwriter, bent on wreaking havoc. The characters in Power Ballads—aging head-bangers, jobbers, techno DJs, groupies, and the occasional rock star (and those who have to live with them)—need music to survive, yet find themselves lost when the last note is played, the lights go up, and it’s time to return to regular life. By turns melancholy and hilarious, Power Ballads is not only a deeply felt look at the lives of musicians but also an exploration of the secret music that plays inside us all.
Download or read book The Ballad in American Popular Music written by David Metzer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to explore the ballad's history and emotional appeal, surveying seventy years of the genre in modern America.
Download or read book Power Ballads written by Garrett T. Caples and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of candid, surreal, and wickedly funny poems and prose.
Download or read book Ballad of the Bullet written by Forrest Stuart and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and over 150 interviews with gang-affiliated youth in the "Taylor Park" neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Ballad of the Bullet reveals that those coming of age in America's poorest neighborhoods are developing new, creative, and online strategies for making ends meet. Dislocated by the erosion of the crack economy and the splintering of corporatized gangs, these young people exploit the unique affordances of digital social media to capitalize on an emerging online market for urban violence (or, more accurately, a market for the representation of urban violence). In the past, violence functioned primarily as a means of social control, allowing urban youth to compete in illegal street markets and defend the social statuses otherwise denied to them by mainstream society. Today, with the rise of platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, violence has become a premier cultural commodity in and of itself. By amassing millions of clicks, views, and followers, these young people convert their online displays of violence into vital offline resources, including cash, housing, drugs, sex, and, for a very select few, a ticket out of poverty" --
Download or read book The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small written by Neil Jordan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Academy Award-winning film director Neil Jordan comes an artful reimagining of an extraordinary friendship spanning the revolutionary tumult of the eighteenth century. South Carolina, 1781: the American Revolution. An enslaved man escaping to his freedom saves the life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a British army officer and the younger son of one of Ireland's grandest families. The tale that unfolds is narrated by Tony Small, the formerly enslaved man who becomes Fitzgerald's companion—and best friend. While details of Lord Edward's life are well documented, little is known of Tony Small, who is at the heart of this moving novel. In this gripping narrative, his character considers the ironies of empire, captivity, and freedom, mapping Lord Edward's journey from being a loyal subject of the British Empire to becoming a leader of the disastrous Irish rebellion of 1798. This powerful new work of fiction brings Neil Jordan's inimitable storytelling ability to the revolutions that shaped the eighteenth century—in America, France, and, finally, in Ireland.
Download or read book Power Ballad written by Timothy Minneci and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-04-29 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Power Ballad: A Definitive Guide to Hard Rock's Softer Side Volume One revisits the decade of decadence like no other before, putting the big hair and spandex rockers' most significant pop culture contribution under the microscope. In Power Ballad, author Timothy D. Minneci dissects the history of the genre and the defining essential criteria before diving in track-by-track to determine the songs worthy of the title "Power Ballad." Born out of frustration with an internet culture that had allowed Celine Dion and other non-rock pop stars to be placed alongside Every Rose Has Its Thorn and When I See You Smile, Power Ballad seeks to reclaim the mantle for the worthy, deconstructing songwriting, influences and band histories with perceptive insight and biting humor. Because all Power Ballads were not created equal, even those who successfully survive the cut are not spared honest critiques, whether it's Aerosmith's heavy reliance on outside songwriters and Alicia Silverstone, Jon Bon Jovi's desire to write a Western concept album, or Great White's knack for writing cringe-inducing lyrics. Multi-platinum selling acts such as Def Leppard, Motley Crue and Whitesnake receive as much love (and scorn) as obscure lesser-knownand less successful bands like Craaft, Tyketto or Southgang, with every song getting a chance to prove its mettle. Fans of classic and hard rock can finally settle the age old debate of which songs are truly worthy of being called a Power Ballad.
Download or read book Damage Incorporated written by Glenn Pillsbury and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Damage Incorporated" is the first book about the legendary heavy metal band Metallica that provides a detailed exploration of the group’s music and its place within the wider popular music landscape. Written with a broad readership in mind, it offers an interdisciplinary study that incorporates a range of topics which intersect with the band’s music and cultural influence. For students of popular culture, mass media, and music, "Damage Incorporated" will be necessary reading, and sets a new standard for the study and exploration of metal within the field of popular music studies.
Download or read book The Last Ballad written by Wiley Cash and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Southern Book Prize for Literary Fiction Named a Best Book of 2017 by the Chicago Public Library and the American Library Association “Wiley Cash reveals the dignity and humanity of people asking for a fair shot in an unfair world.” - Christina Baker Kline, author of A Piece of the World and Orphan Train The New York Times bestselling author of the celebrated A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy returns with this eagerly awaited new novel, set in the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina in 1929 and inspired by actual events. The chronicle of an ordinary woman’s struggle for dignity and her rights in a textile mill, The Last Ballad is a moving tale of courage in the face of oppression and injustice, with the emotional power of Ron Rash’s Serena, Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day, and the unforgettable films Norma Rae and Silkwood. Twelve times a week, twenty-eight-year-old Ella May Wiggins makes the two-mile trek to and from her job on the night shift at American Mill No. 2 in Bessemer City, North Carolina. The insular community considers the mill’s owners—the newly arrived Goldberg brothers—white but not American and expects them to pay Ella May and other workers less because they toil alongside African Americans like Violet, Ella May’s best friend. While the dirty, hazardous job at the mill earns Ella May a paltry nine dollars for seventy-two hours of work each week, it’s the only opportunity she has. Her no-good husband, John, has run off again, and she must keep her four young children alive with whatever work she can find. When the union leaflets begin circulating, Ella May has a taste of hope, a yearning for the better life the organizers promise. But the mill owners, backed by other nefarious forces, claim the union is nothing but a front for the Bolshevik menace sweeping across Europe. To maintain their control, the owners will use every means in their power, including bloodshed, to prevent workers from banding together. On the night of the county’s biggest rally, Ella May, weighing the costs of her choice, makes up her mind to join the movement—a decision that will have lasting consequences for her children, her friends, her town—indeed all that she loves. Seventy-five years later, Ella May’s daughter Lilly, now an elderly woman, tells her nephew about his grandmother and the events that transformed their family. Illuminating the most painful corners of their history, she reveals, for the first time, the tragedy that befell Ella May after that fateful union meeting in 1929. Intertwining myriad voices, Wiley Cash brings to life the heartbreak and bravery of the now forgotten struggle of the labor movement in early twentieth-century America—and pays tribute to the thousands of heroic women and men who risked their lives to win basic rights for all workers. Lyrical, heartbreaking, and haunting, this eloquent novel confirms Wiley Cash’s place among our nation’s finest writers.
Download or read book Modoc A Murder Ballad written by Kevin Akstin and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcus Farner is a 25-year-old office worker living in Oakland, CA. Unbeknownst to most of his acquaintances, he comes from an abusive, impoverished rural upbringing which he tries his best to conceal. He and his long-time best friend, James "Jamie" Galvez, share a terrible secret: the murder of Amber Fiedler, a girl they had known all their lives, at the hands of their high school classmate Dominic Roberts. Neither the girl's body nor the murder weapon (most likely Dominic's shotgun) were ever found, and for that matter, the murderer himself seems to have disappeared into the wilderness. But now, however improbably, Dominic has resurfaced in a nearly unrecognizable guise, with little apparent memory of his crimes. Marcus, Jamie, and Jamie's girlfriend Erica Hoffmann - who until now has been kept in the dark regarding the two men's tragic past - must each navigate a treacherous psychological terrain of their own - which for Marcus, may mean committing an act just as irrevocable as Dominic's.
Download or read book The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes A Hunger Games Novel written by Suzanne Collins and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 747 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ambition will fuel him. Competition will drive him. But power has its price. It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined - every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute . . . and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.
Download or read book The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris written by Nicholas Hammond and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long and spectacular reign of Louis XIV of France is typically described in overwhelmingly visual terms. In this book, Nicholas Hammond takes a sonic approach to this remarkable age, opening our ears to the myriad ways in which sound revealed the complex acoustic dimensions of class, politics, and sexuality in seventeenth-century Paris. The discovery in the French archives of a four-line song from 1661 launched Hammond’s research into the lives of the two men referenced therein—Jacques Chausson and Guillaume de Guitaut. In retracing the lives of these two men (one sentenced to death by burning and the other appointed to the Ordre du Saint-Esprit), Hammond makes astonishing discoveries about each man and the ways in which their lives intersected, all in the context of the sounds and songs heard in the court of Louis XIV and on the streets and bridges of Paris. Hammond’s study shows how members of the elite and lower classes in Paris crossed paths in unexpected ways and, moreover, how noise in the ancien régime was central to questions of crime and punishment: street singing was considered a crime in itself, and yet street singers flourished, circulating information about crimes that others may have committed, while political and religious authorities wielded the powerful sounds of sermons and public executions to provide moral commentaries, to control crime, and to inflict punishment. This innovative study explores the theoretical, social, cultural, and historical contexts of the early modern Parisian soundscape. It will appeal to scholars interested in sound studies and the history of sexuality as well as those who study the culture, literature, and history of early modern France.
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology written by Derek B. Scott and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 860 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The research presented in this volume is very recent, and the general approach is that of rethinking popular musicology: its purpose, its aims, and its methods. Contributors to the volume were asked to write something original and, at the same time, to provide an instructive example of a particular way of working and thinking. The essays have been written with a view to helping graduate students with research methodology and the application of relevant theoretical models. The team of contributors is an exceptionally strong one: it contains many of the pre-eminent academic figures involved in popular musicological research, and there is a spread of European, American, Asian, and Australasian scholars.
Download or read book Pop Goes the Decade written by Thomas Harrison and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-08-24 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating overview of popular culture in the 1980s describes the decade of excess that resulted from the social, political, and economic conditions of the time, documenting why so many milestones in entertainment, arts, and technology occurred the 80s. Popular culture in the United States in the 1980s—as reflected in film, television, music, technology, and art—serves to illustrate the general feeling of American citizens during this decade that the sky was the limit, and the only thing better than "big" was "bigger." This title provides readers with an engaging, in-depth study of the 1980s and supplies the larger historical and social context of popular culture in an era when the extraordinary seemed normal and all the rules were being rewritten. The book's wide scope includes the concepts, fashions, foods, sports, television, movies, and music that became popular in the 1980s. Readers will see how specific elements of the decade, such as visual art and architecture, reflect the sense of change in the 1980s, often through excessive displays of expression that helped further movements into the avant-garde. The technological advances, entertainment developments, and "game changers" that were essential to establishing the popular culture of the decade are highlighted, as is the trend of how personal expression in the 80s began to penetrate a wider segment of American culture, spanning across all ages. The book also calls attention to the standout events and individuals who influenced society in the 1980s, with emphasis on the figures who intentionally used pop culture as an avenue for change as well as the influences from the 1980s that are still felt today.
Download or read book Fargo Rock City written by Chuck Klosterman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empirically proving that—no matter where you are—kids wanna rock, this is Chuck Klosterman's hilrious memoir of growing up as a shameless metalhead in Wyndmere, North Dakotoa (population: 498). With a voice like Ace Frehley's guitar, Klosterman hacks his way through hair-band history, beginning with that fateful day in 1983 when his older brother brought home Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil. The fifth-grade Chuck wasn't quite ready to rock—his hair was too short and his farm was too quiet—but he still found a way to bang his nappy little head. Before the journey was over, he would slow-dance to Poison, sleep innocently beneath satanic pentagrams, lust for Lita Ford, and get ridiculously intellectual about Guns N' Roses. C'mon and feel his noize.
Download or read book Iron Maiden written by Martin Popoff and published by Voyageur Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Required reading for any metalhead, Iron Maiden is a compendium of in-depth, entertaining, and profusely illustrated conversations about all sixteen of the legendary metal band’s studio albums. This new book from prolific rock journalist Martin Popoff pays tribute to the Iron Maiden’s studio discography through a series of in-depth, frank, and entertaining conversations about all sixteen of the legendary heavy metal band’s studio albums. Inside, the author gathers together metal journalists, authors, and musicians, who offer insights, opinions, and anecdotes about every release. Together, the conversations comprise a unique historical overview of the band, covering everything from early albums with original lead singer Paul Di’Anno; the songwriting of founder and bassist Steve Harris; the impeccable talents of drummer Nicko McBrain and guitarists Dave Murray, Adrian Smith, and Janick Gers; mega tours undertaken in support of the LPs; fights within the band; and much more. Even their iconic mascot Eddie is sure to make an appearance or two! Popoff also includes loads of sidebars that provide complete track listings, details on album personnel, and information on where and when the albums were recorded. Every page is illustrated with thoughtfully curated performance and offstage photography, as well as rare memorabilia.
Download or read book Descriptive Catalogue of Selected Popular Music Compiled and Arranged for the Use of Teachers Dealers Amateurs Etc written by S. Brainard's Sons and published by . This book was released on 1872 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Broadside Ballads of Devonshire and Cornwall written by Thomas Nadauld Brushfield and published by . This book was released on 1887 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
