The Importance of Music to Girls

Author: Lavinia Greenlaw
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466805838
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
The Importance of Music to Girls is the story of the adventures that music leads us into—how it forms and transforms us. As a soundtrack, it's there in the background while we go about the thrilling and mortifying business of growing up: raging, falling in love, wanting to change the world. Lavinia Greenlaw turns the volume up loud, and in prose of pure fury and beauty makes us remember how the music came first. For Greenlaw, music—from bubblegum pop to classical piano to the passionate catharsis of punk rock—is at first the key to being a girl and then the means of escape from all that, a way to talk to boys and a way to do without them. School reports and diary entries reveal the girl behind them searching for an identity through the sounds that compelled her generation. Crushing on Donny Osmond and his shiny teeth, disco dancing in four-inch wedge heels and sparkly eye shadow, being mesmerized by Joy Division's suicidally brilliant Ian Curtis—Greenlaw has written a razor-sharp remembrance of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the art that strikes us at the most visceral level of all.

Fangirls

Author: Hannah Ewens
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477322094
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
"To be a fan is to scream alone together." This is the discovery Hannah Ewens makes in Fangirls: how music fandom is at once a journey of self-definition and a conduit for connection and camaraderie; how it is both complicated and empowering; and how now, more than ever, fandoms composed of girls and young queer people create cultures that shape and change an entire industry. This book is about what it means to be a fangirl. Speaking to hundreds of fans from the UK, US, Europe, and Japan, Ewens tells the story of music fandom using its own voices, recounting previously untold or glossed-over scenes from modern pop and rock music history. In doing so, she uncovers the importance of fan devotion: how Ariana Grande represents both tragedy and resilience to her followers, or what it means to meet an artist like Lady Gaga in person. From One Directioners, to members of the Beyhive, to the author's own fandom experiences, this book reclaims the "fangirl" label for its young members, celebrating their purpose, their power, and, most of all, their passion for the music they love.

The Importance of Music to Girls

Author: Lavinia Greenlaw
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 057132617X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
The Importance of Music to Girls tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into - getting drunk, falling in love, cutting our hair, wanting to change the world - as well as the darker side of the adolescent years: loneliness, bullying, getting arrested. Lavinia Greenlaw remembers the music that inspired and accompanied her, and compelled her generation. From fancying Donny Osmond, to wanting to be Ian Curtis, this is a razor-sharp memoir, filtered through the medium of music.

The Nowhere Girls

Author: Amy Reed
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 1481481746
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
“A call-to-action to everyone out there who wants to fight back.” —Bustle “Scandal, justice, romance, sex positivity, subversive anti-sexism—just try to put it down.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Cuts straight to the core of rape culture—masterfully fierce, stirring, and deeply empowering.” —Amber Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Way I Used to Be Three misfits come together to avenge the rape of a fellow classmate and trigger a change in the misogynist culture at their high school transforming the lives of everyone around them in this searing and timely story. Who are the Nowhere Girls? They’re everygirl. But they start with just three: Grace Salter is the new girl in town, whose family was run out of their former community after her southern Baptist preacher mom turned into a radical liberal after falling off a horse and bumping her head. Rosina Suarez is the queer punk girl in a conservative Mexican immigrant family, who dreams of a life playing music instead of babysitting her gaggle of cousins and waitressing at her uncle’s restaurant. Erin Delillo is obsessed with two things: marine biology and Star Trek: The Next Generation, but they aren’t enough to distract her from her suspicion that she may in fact be an android. When Grace learns that Lucy Moynihan, the former occupant of her new home, was run out of town for having accused the popular guys at school of gang rape, she’s incensed that Lucy never had justice. For their own personal reasons, Rosina and Erin feel equally deeply about Lucy’s tragedy, so they form an anonymous group of girls at Prescott High to resist the sexist culture at their school, which includes boycotting sex of any kind with the male students. Told in alternating perspectives, this groundbreaking novel is an indictment of rape culture and explores with bold honesty the deepest questions about teen girls and sexuality.

Things Hoped For

Author: Andrew Clements
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780142410738
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Seventeen-year-old Gwen is preparing to audition for New York City’s top music schools when her grandfather mysteriously disappears, leaving Gwen only a phone message telling her not to worry. But there’s nothing more stressful than practicing for her auditions, not knowing where her grandfather is, and being forced to lie about his whereabouts when her insistent great-uncle demands an audience with him. Then Gwen meets Robert, also in town for music auditions, and the two pair up to brave the city without supervision. As auditions approach and her great-uncle becomes more aggressive, Gwen and Robert make a startling discovery. Suddenly Gwen’s hopes are turned upside down, and she and Robert are united in ways neither of them could have foretold. . . .

Yes I Can!

Author: Kendra J. Barrett
Publisher: Magination Press
ISBN: 9781433828690
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description
"Carolyn is in a wheelchair, but she doesn't let that stop her! She can do almost everything the other kids can, even if sometimes she has to do it a little differently"--

Musicophilia

Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307373495
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
What goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music? What is it about music, what gives it such peculiar power over us, power delectable and beneficent for the most part, but also capable of uncontrollable and sometimes destructive force? Music has no concepts, it lacks images; it has no power of representation, it has no relation to the world. And yet it is evident in all of us–we tap our feet, we keep time, hum, sing, conduct music, mirror the melodic contours and feelings of what we hear in our movements and expressions. In this book, Oliver Sacks explores the power music wields over us–a power that sometimes we control and at other times don’t. He explores, in his inimitable fashion, how it can provide access to otherwise unreachable emotional states, how it can revivify neurological avenues that have been frozen, evoke memories of earlier, lost events or states or bring those with neurological disorders back to a time when the world was much richer. This is a book that explores, like no other, the myriad dimensions of our experience of and with music.

Beautiful Music for Ugly Children

Author: Kirstin Cronn-Mills
Publisher: North Star Editions, Inc.
ISBN: 0738732656
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
Gabe has always identified as a boy, but he was born with a girl’s body. With his new public access radio show gaining popularity, Gabe struggles with romance, friendships, and parents. His entire future is threatened when several violent guys find out that Gabe the DJ is also Elizabeth from school.

Performing Glam Rock

Author: Philip Auslander
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472068685
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Explores the many ways glam rock paved the way for new explorations of identity in terms of gender, sexuality, and performance

Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music

Author: Jacqueline Warwick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317424603
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume explores the girl’s voice and the construction of girlhood in contemporary popular music, visiting girls as musicians, activists, and performers through topics that range from female vocal development during adolescence to girls’ online media culture. While girls’ voices are more prominent than ever in popular music culture, the specific sonic character of the young female voice is routinely denied authority. Decades old clichés of girls as frivolous, silly, and deserving of contempt prevail in mainstream popular image and sound. Nevertheless, girls find ways to raise their voices and make themselves heard. This volume explores the contemporary girl’s voice to illuminate the way ideals of girlhood are historically specific, and the way adults frame and construct girlhood to both valorize and vilify girls and women. Interrogating popular music, childhood, and gender, it analyzes the history of the all-girl band from the Runaways to the present; the changing anatomy of a girl’s voice throughout adolescence; girl’s participatory culture via youtube and rock camps, and representations of the girl’s voice in other media like audiobooks, film, and television. Essays consider girl performers like Jackie Evancho and Lorde, and all-girl bands like Sleater Kinney, The Slits and Warpaint, as well as performative 'girlishness' in the voices of female vocalists like Joni Mitchell, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Kathleen Hanna, and Rebecca Black. Participating in girl studies within and beyond the field of music, this book unites scholarly perspectives from disciplines such as musicology, ethnomusicology, comparative literature, women’s and gender studies, media studies, and education to investigate the importance of girls’ voices in popular music, and to help unravel the complexities bound up in music and girlhood in the contemporary contexts of North America and the United Kingdom.