The Idea of Waste starts with the premise that waste is inevitable in human society. It explores how we have grappled with both the material reality and the spectre of this shape-shifting phenomenon throughout history – utilizing it, dreaming of overcoming it, yet never escaping it. John Scanlan investigates what waste is and why it seems to be intrinsic to human life, at every turn, in every age and epoch. He demonstrates how waste never disappears completely but rather only prol...

When rock 'n' roll burst into life in the 1950s the shockwaves echoed around the world, amplified by images of untamed youth projected on cinema screens. But for the performers themselves, showbusiness remained in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad.In this riveting cultural history, John Scanlan explores rock’s relationship with the moving image over seven decades of cinema, television, music videos, advertising and YouTube. Along the way h...

The explosive story of the Sex Pistols is now so familiar that the essence of what they represented has been lost in a fog of nostalgia and rock’n’roll cliché. In 1976 the rise of the Sex Pistols was regarded in apocalyptic terms, and the punks as visitors from an unwanted future bringing chaos and confusion.John Scanlan considers the Sex Pistols as the first successful art project of their manager, Malcolm McLaren, a vision born out of radical politics, boredom and his deep and un...

Easy Riders, Rolling Stones delves into the history of twentieth-century American popular music to explore the emergence of ‘road music’. This music – blues, RnB and rock – took shape at pivotal moments in this history, made by artists and performers who were, in various ways, seekers of freedom. Whether journeying across the country, breaking free from real or imaginary confines or in the throes of self-invention, they incorporated their experiences into scores of songs about tra...

We know that as we get older, we may slowly lose more and more of our memory, and that this can impair our sense of where we belong and how we connect to others. We might relax a little if we consider the improvements in computer data storage, which may lead us to a future in which the limits of our memories become less constricting. In this book, John Scanlan explores the nature of memory and how we have come to live both with and within it, as well as what it might mean for memory to bec...

‘I hate the word maturing,’ singer David Lee Roth once said. ‘I don't like the word evolving - or any of that bullshit. The point is to keep it as simplistic, as unassuming, and as stupid as possible.’ Examining Roth’s sentiment, Van Halen: Exuberant California, Zen Rock‘n’roll follows the band’s pursuit of the art of artlessness, and describes how they characterize what historian Kevin Starr terms 'Zen California' - a state of mind and way of being that above al...

This is the first work to examine the detritus of our culture in its full range; garbage in this sense is not only material waste and ruin, environmental degradation and so on, but also residual or ‘broken’ knowledge, useless concepts, the remainders of systems of intellectual and cultural thought. In this unique and original work (a kind of intellectual scavenging in its own right) the author shows why garbage is, perversely, the source of all that is valuable.The author considers...

Modern pop began in 1952 when the first British chart was published and the first 7" singles were released. It ended (perhaps) in 1995 when Robson and Jerome reached the top of the charts with the first number one not to be available on vinyl since 1953. The internet age ushered in the death rites of over 40 years of pop.A Complete History Pop describes the journey that leads from 'Rock Around the Clock' to 'Crazy in Love'. Raw, thrilling, surprising and sometimes downrigh...

An expansive biography of David Bowie, one of the twentieth century’s greatest music and cultural icons.From noted author and rock ’n’ roll journalist Marc Spitz comes a major David Bowie biography to rival any other. Following Bowie’s life from his start as David Jones, an R & B—loving kid from Bromley, England, to his rise to rock ’n’ roll aristocracy as David Bowie, Bowie recounts his career but also reveals how much his music has influenced other musicians and forever changed t...

In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak of "literature" at all? What do different literary theories tell us about what texts mean and do? In throwing new light on these and other questions he has raised in previous best-sellers, Eagleton offers a new theory of what we mean by literature. He also shows what it is that a great ...

Frank Zappa's reputation as one of rock's maverick geniuses has continued to grow since his death in 1993. Revised and updated, Electric Don Quixote is still the most comprehensive chronicle of his extraordinary life and career.Author, Neil Slaven, brings together the complex strands of Zappa's life and work in a book that will please not just Zappa fans but anyone interested in the history of rock music.Fully illustrated and includes a comprehensive discography.

Dylan's songs sound as if they have been part of the folk music tradition for centuries The Ballad of Bob Dylan examines the influences behind his songs. Through a combination of first hand accounts, reportage and a wealth of interviews with those who have known Dylan for decades The Ballad of Bob Dylan is the fullest picture yet of Dylan's work in the studio. The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a vivid portrait, nuanced and insightful, of the greatest songwriter of the twentieth-century.