50 Books Like Is It My Body?

If Andrew Hunt’s book covers swaths of American popular culture to reveal levels of public dissent, Martin’s book takes a similar approach, but with a particular focus on grassroots activism. Across the U.S., activism took many forms. The Nuclear Freeze campaign, with its simple call to halt the arms race, inspired (in June 1982) the largest public protest in American history. Others rebelled against Reagan’s painfully slow response to even recognize the AIDS epidemic, while on college campuses students rallied against Reagan’s policies towards apartheid-era South Africa. Martin’s examination of how various strands of feminism reacted to the conservative backlash of the Reagan Era is an especially welcome addition to the decade’s historiography.

From Martin’s expansive look at things, let’s move onto a more granular approach – Fournier’s Double Nickels. Fournier focuses on just one band and an album (albeit a double record album and one of the best to come out of punk in the 1980s). The Minutemen played a fast, discordant music that sounded like jazz as much as hardcore thrash music. Fournier’s examination turns up something few people consider, that punk wasn’t all about blistering music but rather sophisticated in its nature. Fournier documents how the bassist in the band, Mike Watt, had extended conversations with one of the most important artists associated with 1980s punk – Raymond Pettibon (who as of now has made his way into accomplished art museums and galleries). They talked about everything from Ludwig Wittgenstein to James Joyce. Band members supposedly got into heated debates about history and would stop at public libraries while… show more.

Albeit about Britain more than America, the authors collected together here show how easy it was for young punks to move from just listening to music to political engagement. Most of it being direct action: squatting abandoned buildings or civil disobedience against the nuclear arms race. The most accomplished band here was Crass who had an immense impact in the United States and who drew from different sources, including, I quote, “Ghandian principles, radical philosophy, the aesthetic of the Beat and Bohemian poets, and the words of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, as much as… the formal anarchist tradition.” It’s unfair that many believe punk just to be nihilistic and violent – and the authors here show why (it should be pointed out that Worley has his own book on this, which is also quite good: No Future)

DIY. Do-it-yourself. An ethos that seems simple enough now, but it was a revolution that started in underground music and eventually changed popular culture.

These in-the-trenches perspectives by bands that were immensely influential spoke directly to the eco-system of clubs, stores, bands, labels, and artists that I later tapped into with my label.

An almost inadvertent “How-To” primer for someone like me, who was disinterested in what the arbiters of popular culture were trying to sell.

The phrase “girl in a band” in the title got me to pick this book up off a table in the bookstore. I am the kind of guy who will pick up five or so books at a bookstore, take them over to the most comfortable spot I can find, and read the first few pages to see if I want to buy any of them.

The writer Kim Gordon was in an indie post-punk band called Sonic Youth, and I had just barely heard of them. After three years in Sonic Youth, Kim marries one of her fellow band members, and they stay married for 29 years. This book starts when the two of them take the stage together for the last time as they head for divorce and the band's breakup.

“They say when a marriage ends,” Gordon writes on the first pages, “that little things you never… show more.

If you’ve ever found yourself commuting by bicycle across a city on a wet winter’s night, or wondered about riding across the country, there are nuggets of raw truth and solidarity in the essays, interviews, stories, artwork, and poetry that compromise The Best of Boneshaker.

Ten years in the making, this throwback, almanac-inspired collection features contributors that range from Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth) to writer Kjerstin Johnson, poets Michael Bazzett and Susan Moore, and Colorado Book Award-winning author and journalist Jonathan Waldman.

It’s been called a delightful companion for you and your bike, and for good reason. If you’re looking for inspiration to get out on your bike more often, it lies within these pocket-sized pages.  

I found this an essential book on rock album cover art. I love to flip through the pages, noting the albums I own and the ones I would like to own. As a record collector, this book has inspired me, and as an author, it has challenged me to think about the art of album cover design.

It’s not an easy task to convey the carnal intensity and animal abandon of a performer whose default mode has always been unadulterated excess, but Paul Trynka’s masterful study of Iggy Pop hit the motherlode. Trynka went the extra mile and then some, tracking down hundreds of key witnesses to, and victims of, Pop’s creative chaos, and even attending his high school reunion (which is more than Iggy did). Jaw-dropping anecdotes were legion (taking a mid-gig dump behind the speakers, anyone?) and Trynka captured the driven essence of this brittle soul, perennially fighting the world while never even knowing why.

I reread this book recently and was fascinated to see how accurate (if perhaps overly optimistic) Egan was about the rise of social media and its role in our lives.

Egan resisted calling this book either a novel or a short story collection; in a June 2010 interview in Salon, she said, “You might say that discontinuity is the book’s organizing principle.” One of the book’s most commented-on chapters, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake,” is presented as slides in a PowerPoint presentation.

Though Alison Blake’s mother, Sasha, and her record company executive boss Bennie Salazar appear at various points in the book, the chapters, or stories, stand alone, moving back and forth in time from the 1970s to a near future.

Marky's drinking almost managed to do what even the hate-love-hate triangle between Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee couldn't do, namely derail the band.

But what makes his book truly special for me is not so much his account of what he calls his "dog days" but his life before becoming a Ramone. He was in a hard rock band called Dust, he played in Richard Hell's Voidoids and he auditioned for the New York Dolls. If he had gotten this job, and he came very close, he would have been in no less than three seminal and legendary New York bands.