The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory

Author: John Seabrook
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393241939
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
"An utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music." —Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic There’s a reason today’s ubiquitous pop hits are so hard to ignore—they’re designed that way. The Song Machine goes behind the scenes to offer an insider’s look at the global hit factories manufacturing the songs that have everyone hooked. Full of vivid, unexpected characters—alongside industry heavy-hitters like Katy Perry, Rihanna, Max Martin, and Ester Dean—this fascinating journey into the strange world of pop music reveals how a new approach to crafting smash hits is transforming marketing, technology, and even listeners’ brains. You’ll never think about music the same way again. A Wall Street Journal Best Business Book

The Song of the Machine

Author: David Blot
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal
ISBN: 031652624X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
A pulsating graphic novel on the epic history of electronic music, from the heyday of disco in the 1970s to the rave culture of the 1990s and beyond. With a foreword from house music legends Daft Punk, The Song of the Machine is a celebration of a musical wave that swept across the world over decades, demographics, and dance styles. Originally published in 2000 in France, and updated through today for this first English edition, the electrifying narrative introduces readers to the harbingers of the genre, such as David Mancuso, Larry Levan, and Frankie Knuckles (known as the "Godfather of House Music"); the prototypes of modern-day nightclubs and dance venues, like The Loft and Studio 54 in New York City, the Palace in Paris, and the Hacienda in Manchester, England, and of course, the technology and machines that first produced and synthesized the records that galvanized a movement. Told through exciting illustrations that evolve with the era they describe, and complete with specially curated playlists for each and every decade, The Song of the Machine recounts the influences and inspirations, the people and epic parties that created and defined this revolutionary music.

The Billboard Guide to Writing and Producing Songs that Sell

Author: Eric Beall
Publisher: Billboard Books
ISBN: 0307875180
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
The Billboard Guide to Writing and Producing Songs that Sell unveils the secrets to climbing the charts and reaching success in today’s ultracompetitive music industry. Eric Beall supplies his firsthand knowledge of today’s record business, as well as interviews with successful writers, producers, and executives from the worlds of pop, hip-hop, country, adult contemporary, and R&B. The result: a proven approach to constructing songs that open doors, create careers, and communicate to listeners around the world. Key areas explored include: •How does a song become a hit? •What makes a song a single? •Is there a formula for creating a hit? Fun and practical exercises provide opportunities to hone skills and expose specific talents, helping songwriters combine their unique voices to the demands of the commercial marketplace. Filled with fresh ideas that will spark beginners and veterans alike, this book will lead the way toward the industry’s ultimate challenge: the creation of that chart-topping hit song.

A Machine Wrote this Song

Author: Jennifer Hayashida
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780998736273
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Poetry. Equal parts definition and destruction of language as material, Jennifer Hayashida's A MACHINE WROTE THIS SONG challenges us to examine what constitutes meaningful communication. In Hayashida's first collection of poems, we are invited to experience the loss of translation (between languages, generations, and geographies) with a tender scrupulousness. The speakers in A MACHINE WROTE THIS SONG are hooked on phenomenology in an attempt to understand competing scales of intimacy and violence, continuity and interruption. A MACHINE WROTE THIS SONG gives us the linguistic tools to examine our reality as an infinite series of connected concepts. Hayashida creates gentle tension by highlighting the synchronicities of experience, for example: motherhood / war, machination / art, memory / strategy, syntax / feeling. Throughout the collection, we are reminded to both revere and question our personal and collective relationship to the histories we embody through our languages: "This poem is / history without geography / You are / Interrupted Fern / This poem is / a dry-docked vessel / We are / a homemade dictionary."

Max the Brave

Author: Ed Vere
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1492616532
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
Max is a cute kitten who dreams of becoming a brave mouse-catcher. So he sets off in search of a mouse, and discovers that bravery perhaps is not so important after all.

Flash of Genius

Author: John Seabrook
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312535728
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Essays explore inspiration and entrepreneurship in everyday Americans, including the story of Bob Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper.

I Would Die 4 U

Author: Touré
Publisher: Atria Books
ISBN: 1476737401
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
An expansive and insightful exploration of one of the most iconic and electrifying artists ever, this book reveals the stunning, multi-generational influence and appeal of Prince and his revered music—from celebrated journalist, author, and host of the popular podcast The Touré Show. Infused with Touré’s unique pop-culture fluency, I Would Die 4 U is as passionate and radical as its subject matter. Building on his lifelong admiration for Prince’s oeuvre and interviews with those closest to the late artist, including band members, his tour manager, and music and Bible scholars, Touré deconstructs the life and work of the enigmatic icon who has been both a reflective mirror of and inspirational force for America. By defying traditional categories of race, gender, and sexuality, but also presenting a very conventional conception of religion and God, Prince was a man of profound contradictions. He spoke in the language of 60s pop and soul to a generation fearing Cold War apocalypse and the crack and AIDS epidemic, while simultaneously being both an MTV megastar and a religious evangelist. He creatively blended his songs with images of sex and profanity to invite us into a musical conversation about the healing power of God and religion. By demystifying Prince as a man, an artist, and a cultural force, I Would Die 4 U shows us how he impacted and defined a generation.

Switched on Pop

Author: Nate Sloan
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190056657
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Based on the critically acclaimed podcast that has broken down hundreds of Top 40 songs, Switched On Pop dives in into eighteen hit songs drawn from pop of the last twenty years--ranging from Britney to Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson to Kendrick Lamar--uncovering the musical explanations for why and how certain tracks climb to the top of the charts. In the process, authors Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan reveal the timeless techniques that animate music across time and space.

The Song Is You

Author: Bradley Rogers
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387325
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
Musicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion. Rogers shows how the musical’s episodes of burlesque and minstrelsy model the kinds of radical relationships that the genre works to create across the different bodies of its performers, spectators, and creators every time the musical bursts into song. These radical relationships—borne of the musical’s obsessions with “bad” performances of gender and race—are the root of the genre’s progressive play with identity, and thus the source of its subcultural power. However, this leads to an ethical dilemma: Are the musical’s progressive politics thus rooted in its embrace of regressive entertainments like burlesque and minstrelsy? The Song Is You shows how musicals return again and again to this question, and grapple with a guilt that its joyous pleasures are based on exploiting the laboring bodies of its performers. Rogers argues that the discourse of “integration”—which claims that songs should advance the plot—has functioned to deny the radical work that the musical undertakes every time it transitions into song and dance. Looking at musicals from The Black Crook to Hamilton, Rogers confronts the gendered and racial dynamics that have always under-girded the genre, and asks how we move forward.

The Twittering Machine

Author: Richard Seymour
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788739310
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?