Here are 99 books that Lipstick Traces fans have personally recommended if you like
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My first interests in music were artists and bands that fell outside convenient genre pigeon-holing, and I wondered why conventional musical “histories” overlooked them. When I started to dig around, I discovered whole worlds of music that were far more compelling than anything that fit neatly into tidy narratives. It taught me to always look in the corners, between the cracks, beneath the floorboards, for the real weirdos and dreamers. With that healthy skepticism in hand, everything I did subsequently at my label ignored the pressures to conform to such silly and confining definitions. It was a way more fun, creative, and liberating way to run things.
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.
Finally in paperback, the story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan Eighties - when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations and other subversives re-energised American rock with punk rock's d-I-y credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging and immensely influential. OUR BAND COULD BE YOUR LIFE is a sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing and faith that is already being recognized as an indie rock classic in its own right.
Among the legendary bands featured are: Black Flag, the Minutement, Mission…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
My first interests in music were artists and bands that fell outside convenient genre pigeon-holing, and I wondered why conventional musical “histories” overlooked them. When I started to dig around, I discovered whole worlds of music that were far more compelling than anything that fit neatly into tidy narratives. It taught me to always look in the corners, between the cracks, beneath the floorboards, for the real weirdos and dreamers. With that healthy skepticism in hand, everything I did subsequently at my label ignored the pressures to conform to such silly and confining definitions. It was a way more fun, creative, and liberating way to run things.
Often written in the crude, frequently profane, street lingo of mid-century Chicago, I could smell the cigar smoke and cheap likker, and hear the crackling amps and heated arguments in the recording studios and street corner bars.
I was totally immersed in the Nelson Algren vibe as the book described the bare-knuckle, world-changing events surrounding one of the great American music labels EVER, as some of the greatest music—the linchpins of rock and roll—were being birthed in a figure-it-out-as-you-go Chicago way.
A tour-de-force history of Jews, blues, and the birth of a new industry. On the south side of Chicago in the late 1940s, two immigrants, one a Jew born in Russia, the other a black blues singer from Mississippi met and changed the course of musical history. Muddy Waters electrified the blues, and Leonard Chess recorded it. Soon Bo Diddly and Chuck Berry added a dose of pulsating rhythm, and Chess Records captured that, too. Rock & roll had arrived, and an industry was born. In a book as vibrantly and exuberantly written as the music and people it portrays,…
My first interests in music were artists and bands that fell outside convenient genre pigeon-holing, and I wondered why conventional musical “histories” overlooked them. When I started to dig around, I discovered whole worlds of music that were far more compelling than anything that fit neatly into tidy narratives. It taught me to always look in the corners, between the cracks, beneath the floorboards, for the real weirdos and dreamers. With that healthy skepticism in hand, everything I did subsequently at my label ignored the pressures to conform to such silly and confining definitions. It was a way more fun, creative, and liberating way to run things.
Like most people, I thought songs were songs. They were just there, as they always had been. I didn’t think much of their provenance or their context.
This book popped my brain wide open and hipped me that all those benign, been-there-forever items in the Great American Songbook were haunted by the ghosts of a country founded under some troubling circumstances. It is an endlessly fascinating and eerie dig through the graveyards of our shared musical heritage.
I will never hear the songs he shines a lantern light on in the same way again.
For twenty years, Nick Tosches searched for facts about the life of Emmett Miller, a yodelling blackface performer whose songs prefigured jazz, country, blues and much of the popular music of the twentieth century.
Beginning with a handful of 78 rpm records and ending at a tombstone in a Macon, Georgia graveyard, Tosches pieces together a life - and illuminates the spirit of musicmarkers from Homer to the Rolling Stones.This is a brilliant, inspired journey by one of the most original writers at work today.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
My first interests in music were artists and bands that fell outside convenient genre pigeon-holing, and I wondered why conventional musical “histories” overlooked them. When I started to dig around, I discovered whole worlds of music that were far more compelling than anything that fit neatly into tidy narratives. It taught me to always look in the corners, between the cracks, beneath the floorboards, for the real weirdos and dreamers. With that healthy skepticism in hand, everything I did subsequently at my label ignored the pressures to conform to such silly and confining definitions. It was a way more fun, creative, and liberating way to run things.
As a kid, I thought, because that is what I was taught by simplified historic revisionism, that Rock n Roll was invented one day when Bill Haley perfected his spit curl, or when Elvis went on the Ed Sullivan Show to shake his hips.
Lost Highway fundamentally reshaped my understanding of the dynamics that shaped this music, and thus, ultimately, everything that followed.
By delving into headwaters that crossed race and genre, I learned of the elemental—and mythical—forces that had been percolating for decades (centuries?) beneath our feet, and unleashed an enormous cultural shift.
Winner of Ishmael Reed's Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award
This masterful explorationof American roots music--country, rockabilly, and the blues--spotlights the artists who created a distinctly American sound, including Ernest Tubb, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard, and Sleepy LaBeef. In incisive portraits based on searching interviews with these legendary performers, Peter Guralnick captures the boundless passion that drove these men to music-making and that kept them determinedly, and sometimes almost desperately, on the road.
After years as a London-based music journalist for publications such as Melody Maker, Q, and The Guardian, I turned to ghostwriting rock autobiographies and discovered how much more satisfying it is to tell someone’s full, unadulterated life story rather than to feed on carefully cultivated scraps gleaned from half-hour interviews. I never imagined anybody would be as lewdly transparent as my first memoir subject, Nikki Sixx, but many others have run him close—not least Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, in 2020’s appositely named Confess. Its follow-up, Biblical, is imminent. Does it go the extra mile? I don’t think it will disappoint…
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.
“Fellow rock stars, casual members of the public, lords and media magnates, countless thousands of people will talk of their encounters with this driven, talented, indomitable creature, a man who has plumbed the depths of depravity, yet emerged with an indisputable nobility. Each of them will share an admiration and appreciation of the contradictions and ironies of his incredible life. Even so, they are unlikely to fully comprehend both the heights and the depths of his experience, for the extremes are simply beyond the realms of most people’s understanding.”
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with pop music since I was a kid singing Britney Spear’s “Lucky” with my friends. Eventually, I evolved into a punk-ass cynical teenager who disavowed my love of pop, but the fascination remained. In college, I started a pop star romance that would–many, many years later–become my debut book Love in the Liner Notes. In the process, I read an obsessively large number of books touching on music, celebrities, musicians, and the entertainment industry. I hope you enjoy a selection of my favorites, mostly romances (what can I say, I have a type) that brought me the kind of joy only a pop star can.
Getting back to the fluffy–and the steamy–I’m not a huge holiday romance reader but this was delicious!
A plus-sized adult film star accidentally getting cast in a squeaky clean Christmas movie and her co-star is an ex-boy band bad boy trying to rehab his image? *chef’s kiss* Add in the fact that they're fans of each other’s work? Perfection.
I felt that the characters being huge fans of each other helped offset the sometimes parasocial power dynamic of a fan dating/banging a star they’ve idolized for years. That plus them both needing to keep Bee’s porn career a secret put them on even ground, which allowed me to really enjoy their delightful banter, chemistry, and hot sex scenes.
Cowritten by #1 New York Times bestselling author Julie Murphy and USA Today bestselling author Sierra Simone-a steamy plus-size holiday rom-com about an adult film star who is semi-accidentally cast as a lead in a family-friendly Christmas movie, and the former bad-boy pop star she falls in love with.
Bee Hobbes (aka Bianca Von Honey) has a successful career as a plus-size adult film star. With a huge following and two supportive moms, Bee couldn't ask for more. But when Bee's favorite producer casts her to star in a Christmas movie he's making for the squeaky-clean Hope Channel, Bee's career…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Let me tell you a little about myself. I was born in Dublin, and being the daughter of a diplomat afforded me to experience different cultures. Since childhood my fascination with the unknown caused me to gravitate towards stories related to hauntings. I shared this interest with my maternal grandparents, who contributed to my education by telling me ghost stories (some true whilst others are fictional). Tales of haunted castles were my favorite, which is reflected in my book. In later life, my own experiences with the paranormal cemented the notion of the unexplained and the thin veil between us and those departed.
A brilliant collection of horror stories, my favourite being Sometimes They Come Back.
I recommend this ghostly tale for its depiction of the fine line between the spirit realm and the world we live in. The narrative of earth-bound ghosts and their determination to exact revenge on the living bringing forth a fierce battle between good and evil. The latter played on my mind as I empathised with the main character’s psychological struggle with recapitulated past events, leaving those around him to question his sanity.
Stephen King’s first collection of short stories, originally published in 1978, showcases the darkest depths of his brilliant imagination and will "chill the cockles of many a heart" (Chicago Tribune). Night Shift is the inspiration for over a dozen acclaimed horror movies and television series, including Children of the Corn , Chapelwaite, and Lawnmower Man.
Here we see mutated rats gone bad (“Graveyard Shift”); a cataclysmic virus that threatens humanity (“Night Surf,” the basis for The Stand); a possessed, evil lawnmower (“The Lawnmower Man”); unsettling children from the heartland (“Children of the Corn”); a smoker who will try anything to…
I am an art school dropout and recovering rock critic who, since 1981, has published a dozen books on Australian music and popular culture, plus worked extensively in television and as a freelance journalist. I'm too old to be called an enfant terrible, but with the way I still seem to be able to court controversy, I must remain some sort of loose cannon! Sydney’s Sun-Herald has called me "our best chronicler of Australian grass-roots culture," and that’s a tag I’m flattered by but which does get at what I’ve always been interested in. I consider myself a historian who finds resonances where most don’t even bother to look, in our own backyard, yesterday, and the fact that so much of my backlist including Inner City Sound, Highway to Hell, Buried Country, Golden Miles, History is Made at Night, and Stranded are still in print, I take as vindication I’m on the right track…
Every Sunday night for nearly a decade between the mid-70s and early 80s, most young Australians could be found in one place – in front of the TV, watching Countdown. Countdown was the most powerful force in the local pop/rock scene, the maker and breaker of hits. Published in 1993 in the afterglow of the show’s long run, Glad All Over, by former Age journalist Peter Wilmoth, is an appropriately loving tribute, which includes acknowledging the many (like me!) who loved to hate the show but still always watched it! As mostly oral history, it’s a sparkling story, and if the Countdown phenomenon still begs harder analysis – because as much as it was a great booster for Australian music, it actually blocked just as much – that’s the nature of a new historiography: the field has to get opened up first, and then is subject to increasingly…
A couple who have been claimed by Korea—Bruce as a US Peace Corps volunteer there and Ju-Chan as a native Korean and an English teacher—and its culture, society, history, and especially literary heritage. We have been translating modern Korean fiction into English since 1980. Bruce was fated to become involved with Korean literature by virtue of being born on October 9, the day in 1446 when Great King Sejong promulgated (officially announced) the creation of the Korean alphabet, hangŭl, to the people of Korea.
At a time when academics tend to look down their noses at Korean popular culture (Hallyu, literally “the Korean wave”), which in recent years is driving popular culture worldwide, The Birth of Korean Cool is a refreshing analysis based on the supposition that Korea is finally “getting even” with the rest of the world for being underappreciated for thousands of years.
A FRESH, FUNNY, UP-CLOSE LOOK AT HOW SOUTH KOREA REMADE ITSELF AS THE WORLD'S POP CULTURE POWERHOUSE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
By now, everyone in the world knows the song "Gangnam Style" and Psy, an instantly recognizable star. But the song's international popularity is no passing fad. "Gangnam Style" is only one tool in South Korea's extraordinarily elaborate and effective strategy to become a major world superpower by first becoming the world's number one pop culture exporter.
As a child, Euny Hong moved from America to the Gangnam neighbourhood in Seoul. She was a witness to the most accelerated part…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m a romance novelist who writes about otherwise smart people who deal badly with their feelings. Love, sorrow, jealousy, anger, hopelessness, and grief make appearances in my books because I write in a genre that centers the emotional lives of its characters. When I’m not wreaking havoc on fictional people, I take long walks and eavesdrop on conversations. I’m a recent transplant to Toronto, Canada, after having lived in New York City for more than 20 years.
Jackson’s novel shuttles between present-day Oakland and the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival as music journalist Alonzo Reid remembers and recounts to his grown children how he met his now-deceased photographer wife, Ada. What I love about this book is the fact that although the family is grieving, so much joy infuses Ada’s memory. And while Back in the Day mourns a death and the end of one love story, it ends on a hopeful note and marks the beginning of a new chapter.
Helping pack up his childhood home was going much easier than Amir expected. The only sticking point is the record collection his father Alonzo refuses to put in storage. When Amir asked his father why he needs to keep all those records with him, Alonzo offers to tell him a story instead. -- Monterey Pop Festival
In 1967, Alonzo was a baby music reporter at the Village Voice on his first big assignment. By his side is photographer Ada Carr who is all brown skin, big afro and sharp tongue. He should be worried about his story, but all…
