Located alongside the Tennessee River, Muscle Shoals, Alabama has helped create some of the most important and resonant songs of all time. Overcoming crushing poverty and staggering tragedies, Rick Hall brought black and white together to create music for the generations. He is responsible for creating the "Muscle Shoals sound" and The Swampers, the house band at FAME Studios.

"Pop music would be a different beast without the B-Side. Music history is riven with songs deemed throwaway that revolted against their lowly status and refused to be denied. Be it rock'n'roll's national anthem ('Rock Around The Clock'), disco's enduring game-changer ('I Feel Love') or hip-hop's most notorious dis track ('Hit 'Em Up'), all three started life as the so-called 'lesser' track on releases primed for maximum chart impact. But the B-side...

"In just over a decade, Janelle Monáe has become a formidable figure in global media culture. Her Afrofuturist concept albums and "emotion pictures" established Monáe as an ambitious innovator who draws on science fiction to rewire our understanding of race and gender. As an actor, her performances have explored these same vectors across other media, while her music provides the soundtrack for socially engaged media productions, from Us to David...

"Lanza defines and shows how psychedelic pop opened up new and strange sound vistas that took listeners through a mind-bending time-travel journey back to vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, British music hall, and the melodic traditions that made songs hits before your grandmother was born. Delving into the songs along with the international roster of composers, arrangers, and conductors who recorded them, Easy-listening acid trip celebrates the trippy paradox...

Its rhythms have influenced how we walk down the street, how we face ourselves in the mirror, and how we handle the world around us. It has influenced our morals and social mores; it has transformed our attitudes towards race and gender, religion and politics. Ambitious and groundbreaking, Electric Shock tells the story of popular music, from the first recording in the 1890s to the early pop superstars of the twentieth century and the omnipresence...

Western pop music draws heavily upon music from other cultures, bringing music and musicians from outside the west to a wide audience. The author surveys this phenomenon to provide the reader with a timely account of its impact on modern culture.

"Peter Guralnick's remarkable work... covers old ground from new perspectives, offering deeply felt, masterful, and strikingly personal portraits of creative artists, both musicians and writers, at the height of their powers. "You put the book down feeling that its sweep is vast, that you have read of giants who walked among us," rock critic Lester Bangs wrote of Guralnick's earlier work in words that could just as easily be applied to this new one....