Music Therapy

Association Musique Et Sante. Photograph. Britannica ImageQuest, Encyclopædia Britannica, 25 May 2016.
quest.eb.com/search/181_763596/1/181_763596/cite. Accessed 1 Jun 2017.

Did you know, there have been proponents of music therapy in the United States since 1950? The American Music Therapy Associaton [AMTA] defines music therapy as "the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program. Music Therapy is an established health profession in which music is used within a therapeutic relationship to address physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs of individuals."  Music therapists must have a bachelor's degree or higher in music therapy and other credentials. Apparently music therapists contributed to helping Congresswoman Giffords to regain her speech after surviving a bullet wound to her brain. The AMTA differentiate music therapy from "therapeutic music," which includes a piano player player in the hospital lobby, nurses playing background music, artists in residence, an Alzheimer's patient listening to his or her favorite songs on an iPod, and the like - probably helpful, but not clinical music therapy.

We've compiled a list of items from the library catalog that will take you on a journey into the "transformative power of music." We hope this list of items focusing on the therapeutic power of music is balm to your soul, but if you are truly interested in music therapy, we recommend checking out the AMTA website for more information.

Waking the Spirit: A Musician's Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul by Andrew Schulman

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks

Fallen: A Trauma, A Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music by Kara Stanley

The Healing Touch of Music: An Exploration by Alana Woods 

Manage Your Stress and Pain Through Music by Suzanne B. Hanser and Susan E. Mandel 

Music and Cancer: A Prescription for Healing by Nimesh P. Nagarsheth

Essential Musical Intelligence: Using Music as Your Path to Healing, Creativity, and Radiant Wholeness by Louise Montello    

Self-Healing with Sound & Music: Revitalize Your Body & Mind with Proven Sound Healing Tools by Andrew Weil, Kimba Arem [eAudio]

Sacred Verses, Healing Sounds: The Bhagavad Gita and Hymns of the Rig Veda by Deepak Chopra [eAudio]  

Alive Inside [DVD]

Harp Music for Healing by Sarajane Williams [CD]
According to Amazon, "Williams' Vibroacoustic Harp Therapy® (VAHT) is now being used by hospitals and health practitioners to help patients relieve tension and physical pain, reduce stress and anxiety." 

For more titles, try a subject search of "Music therapy."

Top Circulating Music CDs

The Yellow Books, 1887 . Fine Art. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 18 May 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/108_303306/1/108_303306/cite

“Knowledge is like money: To be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man  

In the library, "circulation" means a lot of things.  What's sometimes called the "library card desk" is also known as "circulation".  When we look at a book's record, we count how many times it has checked out as its "circs". The library's collection floats (items checked out at one branch and returned at another stay at the branch at which they are returned), but its items circulate.

For this month's top circulating, we're looking at music CDs! Our staff orders new music monthly, with quarterly World Music orders. Is there a CD you think the library should have? Suggest a purchase. With your valid library card, you can also stream music on our eResources Freegal and hoopla, and we also feature the eResources National Jukebox (from the Library of Congress) and Naxos Music Library (classical and six other genres). This list is the top 25 circulating music CDs system-wide. Any surprises on the list for you?

Top Circulating Music CDs

1.  25 by Adele

2. The Very Best of Prince by Prince

3. Hunky Dory by David Bowie

4. Now That’s What I Call the ‘80s by Various Artists

5. Skeleton Tree by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

6. XXIVK Magic by Bruno Mars

7. “…It’s too late to stop now…” by Van Morrison

8. A Moon Shaped Pool by Radiohead

9. PTX (Vols. 1 & 2) by Pentatonix

10. Lemonade by Beyoncé

11. 20 All-Time Greatest Hits by James Brown

12. Artpop by Lady Gaga

13. Joanne by Lady Gaga

14. A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles

15. The Hamilton Mixtape by Various Artists

16. The Velvet Underground by the Velvet Underground

17. Chapter & Verse by Bruce Springsteen

18. Ash & Ice by the Kills

19. Cleopatra by the Lumineers

20. Dissociation by the Dillinger Escape Plan

21. Hardwired – To Self-Destruct by Metallica

22. Hotel California by the Eagles

23. Please Please Me by the Beatles

24 Dead Man by Neil Young

25. Cosmic Hallelujah by Kenny Chesney

 

The Multi-Faceted Nick Cave

"At the end of the 20th Century, I ceased to be a human being. I wake, I write, I eat, I watch TV...I'm a cannibal - looking for someone to cook in a pot."
~Nick Cave, 20,000 Days on Earth 

We'd like to put forth the claim that Australian musician Nick Cave is a polymath (he's been called "the renaissance man of the “postpunk” generation"); if not that, you have to admit, he's one of the harder-working men in show biz. He writes and plays music (with more than one band - 16 albums with the Bad Seeds, movie soundtracks with Warren Ellis, and is part of Grinderman), writes novels and screenplays, and has acted (as himself, sort of) in movies. "Commited Cave divers" (his fans have some wacky names) will not be disappointed by his prodigious output.

Cave's work is not for everyone - he's been called "too dark, too alternately demonic or densely romantic; too literate, strange and grandiose" as he writes about some of his favorite themes, "[l]ove, violence, death and America." We ourselves are latecomers to his oeuvre - he started out in The Boys Next Door in 1977 (later to morph into the Birthday Party in 1980), and started up the Bad Seeds in 1984 - but, apart from brief exposure to the song "Into My Arms" in the 1990s when Cave was dating PJ Harvey, we have to confess our interest was piqued first by the film 20,000 Days On Earth. Here's one of our favorite quotes from the film:

All of our days are numbered. We can not afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world; a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame, great things can be constructed around it; things that are massive and powerful and world changing. All held up by the tiniest of ideas.

The library catalog has a good sampling of Nick Cave's work, if you choose to give it a try. Whatever you do, don't miss "End Crawl" on the Lawless soundtrack! A lovely piece of instrumental music.


Albums

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

Murder Ballads

The Boatman's Call

Push The Sky Away

Skeleton Tree 

Grinderman


Screenplay

The Proposition


Soundtracks

Lawless [CD + DVD]

West of Memphis [DVD]

Hell or High Water [hoopla eMusic]

The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford  [CD + DVD]


Books

The Death of Bunny Munro

The Sick Bag Song


Film

cameo (with the Bad Seeds) in Wings of Desire

Johnny Suede [hoopla eVideo]

20,000 Days on Earth


For Children

one song, "Sweet Rosyanne," with Dan Zanes on Catch That Train!


Nick Cave is also participating in the "grown-up children's tales" charity book Stories for Ways and Means, and you can listen to The Wire's Andre Royo perform Cave's story "The Lonely Giant" online.

Featured Author: Simon Reynolds

Simon Reynolds is a British music critic, based in the United States, who was once a senior editor at Spin magazine and whose articles have been featured in the Guardian and Pitchfork. Both his parents were journalists, so he "got the idea rather early on that nothing could be better than seeing your byline in print." The A.V. Club's Steven Hyden called Reynolds "[o]ne of the most respected music critics working today...an expert chronicler of trends and movements in post-punk and electronic music since the ’80s;" AJ Ramirez at PopMatters calls Reynolds' writing "analytical, articulate, and occasionally quite humorous." Simon Reynolds himself described his first book as "an argument about noise."

Reynolds has written a lot about cultural issues in his criticism (he has coined a term called "liminal class" - the "lower-middle class/upper-working class zone. That area is where a lot of music energy comes from") and his earliest writings dealt more in critical theory, with nods to Barthes, Bataille, Nietzche, Foucault, Kristeva. He has since moved on to "coming up with [his] own theories and trusting [his] own perceptions without necessarily looking for some authority to back it up."

A lot of interviews by Reynolds online came out at the time of his book Retromania in 2011. Some of our favorite Reynolds quotes are from his interview with The Quietus:

 "I think it's better to have less [music] and really listen to it deeply. There's nothing better for me than getting stuck on a record I can't stop playing. It's a nice feeling, and it brings me back to a time when I had records in single figures, or, you know, 16 records and I'd play those records 20, 30, 40 times and knew them inside out."

"In a funny sort of way when I was buying records, collecting records in the past, I was aiming to reach this state of overload through my greed and the curiosity that I had, and just wanting to expand my horizons. But now anyone growing up into music is in the position that critics or whatever were in, in that they have this crazy abundance of music at their fingertips. So that's why I'm interested in these people who are trying to navigate that."

Simon Reynolds is also featured in the film Punk Revolution NYC  "representing the British view."  He also has a number of blogs - the main one is blissblog.

If you are looking for informed, diverse, encyclopedic opinions about music, look no further than the writings of Simon Reynolds.

Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 

Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews and Overviews [eBook] 

Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing About Hip Rock and Hip Hop [eBook] 

Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past 

Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture [eBook] 

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy From the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century  
 

Have a Hygge New Year

Winter is the most hygge time of year. It is candles, nubby woolens, shearling slippers, woven textiles, pastries, blond wood, sheepskin rugs, lattes with milk-foam hearts, and a warm fireplace. Hygge can be used as a noun, adjective, verb, or compound noun, like hyggebukser, otherwise known as that shlubby pair of pants you would never wear in public but secretly treasure. Hygge can be found in a bakery and in the dry heat of a sauna in winter, surrounded by your naked neighbors. It’s wholesome and nourishing, like porridge; Danish doctors recommend “tea and hygge” as a cure for the common cold. It’s possible to hygge alone, wrapped in a flannel blanket with a cup of tea, but the true expression of hygge is joining with loved ones in a relaxed and intimate atmosphere.
~Anna Altman, "The Year of Hygge, The Danish Obsession With Getting Cozy"

Lately, it's been cool to be Scandinavian. The past couple of years, we've heard a lot of talk about Norway's "slow TV" sensation, in which shows feature someone knitting a sweater, a 7-hour train journey, an evening's discussion of firewood, and the like. We've been reading books by Scandinavians that are not "Nordic noir", like Karl-Ove Knausgaard's multi-volume My Struggle and the works of Per Petterson and Fredrik Backman. And it's not the first time Scandinavian culture has crossed the pond - we have them to thank for some modern furniture design and saunas, for instance. Now, the Danish word hygge (pronounced "HOO-gah") was on the shortlist for Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year 2016.

"Danish winters are long and dark, and so the Danes fight the darkness with their best weapon: hygge, and the millions of candles that go with it," explains the website Visit Denmark. "Hygge is a philosophy; a way of life that has helped Danes understand the importance of simplicity, time to unwind and slowing down the pace of life." Hygge is usually summed up in English as "cozy," but many would argue that there's more layers to it than that.Why the sudden fascination with hygge? Well, Denmark is usually at the top of the World Happiness Report (the USA is usually #13), and hygge is considered to be a contributing factor, though the concept certainly has its detractors.

According to many pundits, hygge will be to 2017 what "tidying up" was to 2015. Are you ready to get hygge with it this winter? We've created a list of items from the library catalog to introduce you to hygge and other interesting slices of Scandinavian culture (for the purposes of this post, we're considering Finland and Iceland as members of Scandinavia, which is debatable) and bring a little Scandinavian flavor into your life. How do you hygge? Let us know in the comments!

Miscellaneous Culture

The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell 

The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People In the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids by Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Sandahl [eBook]

The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia by Michael Booth 

Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right - And How We Can, Too by George Lakey  

Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home In the Great White North by Blair Braverman

Tales From the Loop illustrations & texts by Simon Stålenhag

I Am Zlatan: My Story On and Off the Field by Zlatan Ibrahimović with David Lagercrantz 

Names For the Sea: Strangers in Iceland by Sarah Moss


The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life by Anu Partanen

Nordicana: 100 Icons of Scandi Culture & Nordic Cool by Nordicana with Kajsa Kinsella 
 
Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg

The Book of Hope by by Tommi Musturi ; translated by Pauliina Haasjoki


Food, Crafts, & Lifestyle

Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break, With Recipes For Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats by Anna Brones & Johanna Kindvall

Mind of a Chef: Season 3 - Magnus Nilsson

Scandinavian Home: A Comprehensive Guide to Mid-Century Modern Scandinavian Designers by Elizabeth Wilhide

Northern Delights: Scandinavian Homes, Interiors and Design edited by Emma Fexeus, Sven Ehmann, and Robert Klanten 

The Kinfolk Home: Interiors For Slow Living by Nathan Williams

Scandinavian Classics: Over 100 Traditional Recipes by Niklas Ekstedt

North: The New Nordic Cuisine of Iceland by Gunnar Karl Gíslason and Jody Eddy 

Scandinavian Stitches: 21 Playful Projects with Seasonal Flair by Kasja Wikman [eBook]

Scandinavian Feasts: Celebrating Traditions Throughout the Year by Beatrice Ojakangas [eBook]

Northern Knits Gifts: Thoughtful Projects Inspired by Folk Traditions by Lucinda Guy

Music
  

Rough Guide to the Music of Scandinavia 

Polka V by Frigg 

Ice and Longboats: Ancient Music of Scandinavia  

Folk Songs by Trio Mediaeval

DVDs

Babette's Feast 

A Man Called Ove


For Kids

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson 

 

Community Picks:Checkout Suggestions From Our Customers

Many library branches offer Staff Picks to their customers, be they books, movies, or other media. We love to recommend the things we have discovered and enjoyed from the library catalog - you can find 1243 items labeled "staff pick" just by searching the catalog! But there is often a give and take to checkout suggestions - we have found out about some really interesting titles from talking with our customers! So, we thought we might turn the tables for a change, and publish some of our customers' recommendations. We've enlisted the help of some library users from the community for this post, but we are always looking for more - let us know your suggestions in the comments or email your name and recommendations to abcreads@gmail.com and we'll post them next time.



Keif from the Guild Cinema recommends some DVDs from the library catalog:

Pickpocket: un film de Robert Bresson

Theory of Obscurity: A Film About the Residents

También la lluvia

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Rumble Fish

Rebelle [War Witch]


Brandon, a deejay on KUNM's Afternoon Freeform, would like to put in a good word for some of our music CDs!

Camel's Back by Psapp

Feitiço Caboclo by Dona Onete

Metropolis: The Chase Suite by Janelle Monáe 

Sketches Of Ethiopia by Mulatu Astatqé

Black Power: Music Of A Revolution by Various Artists

Artemis by Moussu T et Les Jovents


And Neal from AMP Concerts, a seasoned library user, would like to share some of his favorite library items and services:

I have the pleasure of working in the libraries regularly, as AMP hosts free concerts at the libraries twice a month.  It’s always a fun adventure to get to visit different parts of town and play with the different spaces.  We have some music-loving regulars who follow us around the county, as well as some groups that sometimes come en masse, but the bulk of our attendees come from the local communities, which is a lot of what the program is about.

So I’m guaranteed at least two library visits a month, though I often find myself popping in to some of my regular library stops more often than that.  There are so many features to love in the libraries, and all of our libraries have so many different personalities (which is probably a blog post on its own).

Several years ago I reconnected to my youthful love of comics and started catching up on the book length volumes of GRAPHIC NOVELS that I had missed over the years.  The library has a great collection of graphic novels.  They are a great alternative to my regular reading and it seems like I regularly have a half dozen out at any time.

Every once in a while, I’ll find a hole in the series that I’m reading.  That’s how one of the librarians turned me on to the magic of the INTERLIBRARY LOAN.  For no extra charge, you can put in an ILL and usually in short order, some dedicated librarians somewhere else in the country have shipped the book off to Albuquerque for my enjoyment.  

I usually have my own plans for what I’m reading, but I’m in the libraries enough that I always have time to browse the STAFF PICKS, where I frequently find myself knocked onto a new reading course that’s always been interesting and rewarding.

I’m old fashioned and like books, but I’ve been traveling a lot lately and the books I’m reading are too bulky for long trips.  While I’m not won over, the fact that I can get EBOOKS from the library is a pretty cool thing (and even readers too!)

I also like the history that our libraries capture - from the historic ERNIE PYLE house to our beautiful first library, re-opened as the SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY (which even makes a star turn in "Better Call Saul”).  I’ve caught a few history lectures at the libraries too, which are a nice compliment to the buildings and collections.

Those are just a handful of the many great experiences I’ve had at our libraries.  I’m looking forward to my next visit!

 

Picture credit: The Striped Tablecloth. Fine Art. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/107_3349913/1/107_3349913/cite. Accessed 18 Oct 2016.

Music Instruction: Guitar, Banjo, Ukulele

One of the things we have never been able to do is learn how to play an instrument. Music teachers tried to teach us the recorder; because we were tall, they tried to interest us in playing the bass. Nothing stuck! But our lack of musical training should not affect our blogging! We enlisted the help of some of our customers to put together a list of recommended music instruction books, primarily for guitar.

We'd also like to mention that, in addition to these specific titles, we do offer a wide range of more generic titles - Complete Idiot's Guides, For Dummies, and Play ___ Today!, for instance.

Are there any music instruction books from the library catalog you'd like to recommend? Let us know in the comments!

Radiohead: A Step-By-Step Breakdown of the Band's Guitar Styles and Techniques by Chad Johnson 

Play Like Eric Clapton: The Ultimate Guitar Lesson by Chad Johnson

Blues Guitar Technique: In the Style of B.B. King, Albert Collins, T-Bone Walker and Other Blues Guitar Masters by Michael Williams 

Flamenco Guitar Method For Beginners by Anita Sheer and Harry Berlow

Ultimate Guitar Chord Decoder: The Most Essential Chords for All Guitar Styles by Joe Charupakorn

The Ukulele Handbook by Gavin Pretor-Pinney & Tom Hodgkinson 

Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd with music arrangements by Matt Cowe

Ukulele Aerobics by Chad Johnson 

First Pieces For Classical Guitar: 45 Easy Solo Pieces compiled and edited by Mark Phillips

Acoustic Artistry: Tapping, Slapping, and Percussion Techniques For Classical & Fingerstyle Guitar by Evan Hirschelman

Keola Beamer Teaches Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar: Fingerstyle Arrangements and Techniques.by Keola Beamer

How to Play the 5-String Banjo: A Manual For Beginners by Peter Seeger

Literary Links: Book & Music Pairings

Fairy wren song, wavelet graph. Photography. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/132_1322646/1/132_1322646/cite. Accessed 10 Sep 2016.

The art of pairing seems to be on everyone's mind recently. We keep going into restaurants and finding our menu suggesting a particular beer or wine to go with our entrée. A cursory search of pairing in the library catalog brings up books about wine and cheese, tea, plants,  Bobby Brown (because, until recently, "pairing" was more often used to describe an interpersonal relationship), and musical rivalries. Which brings us to the point of our post - in honor of our favorite local music festival, ¡Globalquerque! (itself a music and film festival including a global fiesta, September 23-24), we're considering how does music intersect with with other cultural activities? For instance, what books do people like to pair with music? How about Sigur Rós with The Martian? High Fidelity with LCD Soundsystem? The Shining with Béla Bartók? Marissa Nadler with Flannery O'Connor's short stories? Have you ever read a book while listening to a movie score? It's been said that "listening to music while reading can enhance the literary experience, adding another dimension to our beloved words on the printed or digital page." Author Steve Almond might have put it best, though: "What songs do — and what great books do — is bring us to unbearable feelings. They access our emotional life in a way nothing else can."

We've scoured the internet to find some articles about book and music pairings for your perusal. Do you like to listen to music while reading? Have you heard some really successful pairings? Let us know in the comments!

The best books-and-music pairings [Guardian]

For Your Pleasure: 10 Inspired Book and Album Pairings [Flavorwire]

The soundtrack to your favorite book: Pairing novels and music [MPR]

Scoring Your Reading: Pairing Books with Music [Book Riot]

10 Cold Weather Book and Music Pairings for Deep Thinkers [Flavorwire]


Related Links

Ten Musicians Who Could Be Novelists [Literary Hub]

Read 'Em and Steep: Tea and Book Pairing Recommendations [Book Riot]

Is music a miracle drug? [Headspace]

Girls to the Front: Female Music Critics

...men writing songs about women is practically the definition of rock 'n' roll. And as a woman, as a music critic, as someone who lives and dies for music, there is a rift within, a struggle of how much deference you can afford, and how much you are willing to ignore what happens in these songs simply because you like the music.
~Jessica Hopper, "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't"

We've always had an interest in music. As teenagers, we read Rolling Stone and Spin; we've checked out Mojo's playlists and NME's Albums of the Year; we pay for Spotify, stream Pandora (and Freegal, with our valid library card), read reviews on Pitchfork, watch Tiny Desk Concerts on NPR. We still want the albums so we can read the liner notes. We remember when MTV played videos. And, while now that we're older and probably never going to make it to Coachella or Glastonbury (though we've watched movies about both, and we've been to SXSW twice), we'd still consider staying up late on a "school night" if there's a good show in town, and driving to Denver to to catch Florence & the Machine this May is a distinct possibility.

So, of course we've heard about music journalists like Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Peter Guralnick, Stanley Crouch, Nat Hentoff, Chuck Klosterman, Rob Sheffield, Alex Ross, Robert Christgau, and Legs McNeil. A keyword search of "Music history and criticism" in the catalog (to search by subject you would need to add a specific era, music, instrument, or location, such as "Rock music -- California, Southern -- History and criticism", "Musicals -- United States -- History and criticism", or "Piano music -- History and criticism") brings up 674 titles - in the first 3 pages, there are 8 books written by women; in the next three pages, there are only 3. Yet there are plenty of female music journalists out there, including Stacey Anderson, Daphne Carr, Dream Hampton, Nekesa Mumbi Moody, Julie Burchill, and others.

We've been thinking about this a lot, since we recently read two books by female rock critics Ellen Willis and Jessica Hopper. Ellen Willis was, notably, the first popular music critic for The New Yorker, between 1968 and 1975, though she wore many other hats; until last year, Jessica Hopper was a senior editor for the Pitchfork website and editor in chief of the print quarterly The Pitchfork Review.

The First Collection of Criticism By a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper

When the chasm of human experience feels unbridgeable, and the past is keeping you like the stocks, and there is no absolution to be had, no forgiveness to salve you, and the world feels too much in its infinite newness and it's midnight and people are screaming and feeding babies ranch-flavor chicken fingers from a bucket, when all you see is difference and a long string of your own unqualified failures, there is Van singing, "Lay me down...to be born again." There is so much  wanting in "Astral Weeks." but it's not desperation, it's all vessel; it's faith enough to cover us all.

Whether Jessica Hopper is talking about Van Morrison, Lana del Rey, Bruce Springsteen, Superchunk, or Kendrick Lamar, you will want to listen to their music to feel the emotions her writing evokes; trips to Coachella, L.A.'s all-ages venue The Smell, and Michael Jackson's hometown after his death will move and entertain you; "How Selling Out Saved Indie Rock" showed us how the music industry works today.  The pieces in Hopper's First Collection range from "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" for Punk Planet in 2003 to "You Will Ache Like I Ache: The Oral History of Hole's Live Through This" for Spin in April 2014, and are split into sections such as "Real/Fake", "Nostalgia", and "Bad Reviews". At 201 pages, it's a slender tome, and one we highly recommend.

 Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music

Ellen Willis' book was a bit of a harder sell for us, probably because (the horror!) we are not fans of Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones, and both these artists get extensive coverage by Willis. Her book, just a bit longer than Hopper's, is separated into sections such as "The Adoring Fan", "The Navigator", and "The Sixties Child", gathered by content rather than chronology. Most are short pieces, although the collection includes the 20-page essay on Bob Dylan that got Willis noticed by the New Yorker in the first place. Willis' Rock, Etc. columns for that magazine make up the bulk of the collection.

Willis' voice is serious and scholarly for the most part; there is a review of Dylan's Love and Theft that describes the tensions in his music as "never...about electric versus acoustic but about personal and idiosyncratic versus collective and generic; topical and profane versus primordial and sacred; transcendence as excess versus transcendence as purgation..." Yet, in "The Decade in Rock Lyrics", she wittily uses lyrics from some of the decade's most popular tunes to sum up its history on topics like celebrities, style, the Battle of the Sexes, and economics; and the pictures of Willis in the book include one of her in typical music nerd posture, in front of a large vinyl collection, plugged into giant headphones and taking notes on her latest record, and one of her wearing a T-shirt that says "Anarchy in Queens". Interestingly, having just recently read a lot of adulation of David Bowie in the press since his death, Out of the Vinyl Deeps contains an essay about "Bowie's Limitations", written in 1972. There are also essays about Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grand Funk Railroad, and others.

The library catalog features more of Willis' essays in The Essential Ellen Willis, which is a broader collection of her writings. These essays are "...both deeply engaged with the times in which they were first published and yet remain fresh and relevant amid today's seemingly intractable political and cultural battles". There are a few pieces on Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, but far more about politics and women's rights. Like Out of the Vinyl Deeps, this collection was edited posthumously by Willis' daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz.

We hope these books will pique your interest in reading music journalism by female writers, or perhaps to start writing your own. In focusing on female critics, we are trying to do for their work what Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill did for female audience members too put off by all the all-male mosh pit to approach the stage when she would tell the crowd,“All girls to the front! I’m not kidding. All girls to the front. All the boys be cool, for once in your lives. Go back! Back! Back!” [quoted in the film The Punk Singer] 

If you would like to read more music journalism by women, try: Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock'n'Roll edited by Kandia Crazy Horse; Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus; Record Collecting For Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time by Courtney E. Smith; Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology by Deena Weinstein; A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man by Holly George-Warren; and Madonna: Like An Icon by Lucy O'Brien.

Links

The World Needs Female Rock Critics [New Yorker]

33 Women Music Critics You Need to Read [Flavorwire]

The Good Listener: How Do You Break Into Music Journalism? [NPR]