The Best Books About Music

Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it in 2007, and it took the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism that year. Chapter one opens in Graz in 1906 at the Austrian premiere of Strauss's Salome, with Mahler and his wife Alma in the hall, Puccini, Schoenberg and six of his students, and possibly a seventeen-year-old Adolf Hitler. Twentieth-century music told as one continuous argument rather than a syllabus.

Picador put it out in 2005 with an introduction by DJ Kool Herc, and it won an American Book Award the same year. Hip-hop starts here not with a record but with the Hoe Avenue peace meeting of 8 December 1971, where Ghetto Brothers leader Benjamin Melendez got a room of Bronx gangs to sign a truce six days after Black Benjie was beaten to death. Politics first, beats second.

Simon & Schuster published this in 1989 and it won an American Book Award the year after. Troupe transcribed and shaped, but the voice is unmistakable — profane, score-settling, generous in short bursts. It returns again and again to August 1959, when a policeman clubbed him outside Birdland, the club he was headlining, and he left with five stitches: the night he says made him bitter for good.

Published under the name LeRoi Jones by William Morrow in 1963, and every later music history has had to answer it. Jones runs a line from work songs to bebop and insists the music records a people's changing position in America rather than a sequence of styles — the chapter titled The Negro as Property does the heavy lifting. Sixty years on, it still stings.

Grove Press brought it out in 1996, and there is no narrator anywhere in it: every line is somebody's own recollection, spliced against the next person's flat contradiction of it. Punk from the Velvet Underground through the Ramones, assembled from hundreds of interviews. The form carries the argument — nobody gets the last word, and the people who were there agree about almost nothing.

Originally published in Brazil in 1990 as Chega de Saudade, translated by Lysa Salsbury for A Cappella in November 2000; the Chicago Review Press paperback of 2003 carries a foreword by Julian Dibbell. Its best-known scene has João Gilberto shut in his sister's tiled bathroom in Diamantina, using the acoustics to work out the batida — the guitar beat that folds a whole samba percussion section into one right hand. Gossipy, exact, unsentimental.

University of Texas Press published it in 2019; it was longlisted for that year's National Book Award for Nonfiction and entered the New York Times paperback nonfiction list at number 13. Much of it is written as letters to members of A Tribe Called Quest, including one to Phife Dawg's mother, the poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, at the moment of her son's death from diabetes complications on 22 March 2016.

Harper & Row published it in 1986, subtitled Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, and the claim is that Southern soul came out of integrated rooms in Memphis and Muscle Shoals at the exact moment the South was tearing itself apart. Portraits of Solomon Burke, James Carr and Booker T. and the MG's carry it. Otis Redding's plane goes into Lake Monona on 10 December 1967 and an era closes.

Viking published it in 2000; Grove Press reissued it in America a year later under a different name, This Is Reggae Music, running 592 pages. Jamaican music is told through the sound systems rather than the stars, so Prince Buster and King Tubby get more room than Bob Marley, and the case made is that the dance decided what got recorded. Best companion there is to a reggae playlist.

Continuum published it in 2007 in the 33 1/3 series of single-album books, and Bloomsbury reissued an expanded version in 2014 with essays bolted on by Nick Hornby, Krist Novoselic and Ann Powers. Setting out to explain why he cannot stand an album adored by millions, Wilson ends up taking his own taste apart with Bourdieu's Distinction. Funniest book here, and the least comfortable.

Temple University Press published it in May 2000 at 352 pages, and the author is not a distant observer: he played guest saxophone with Egypt 80 before writing it. Afrobeat gets taken apart bar by bar alongside the politics — the 1977 army raid on the Kalakuta Republic compound, when soldiers threw Fela's mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti from a second-floor window; she never recovered, lapsed into a coma and died fourteen months later, on 13 April 1978.

Faber and Faber published it in 2005, subtitled Postpunk 1978-1984, and Reynolds followed it in 2009 with Totally Wired, a companion volume of the raw interviews. His case is that the interesting part arrived after punk burnt out, when art students with cheap synthesisers rebuilt the form. Sheffield gets the same seriousness as New York, and bands nobody else defends get defended.

Named a best music book of 2018 by the Guardian, the Observer, Pitchfork and NPR among others, and published by William Collins that year. Grime is told as a housing story: pirate radio rigs on east London council blocks, an economy of white labels and clashes, and Dizzee Rascal taking the 2003 Mercury Prize for Boy in da Corner. Hancox is unusually good on what the music cost the people who made it.

Penguin Press published it in 2021 in America and Canongate in Britain, and its structure is the argument: seven chapters, one per genre — rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance and pop — each written as though that genre's listeners were the only audience who mattered. Nothing is ranked against anything else, which after thirteen ranked entries is a decent joke to end on.