Top 20 Rock Novels of All Time

The list, care of Art Edwards.

Tom Stoppard Writes Pink Floyd Play

In honor of the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd's classic album, Stoppard has written a short play for the BBC.

From a piece in the Guardian...

Stoppard's hour-long play, called Dark Side, will incorporate music from the album, which stayed in the charts for 741 weeks until 1988, and what is described as a "fantastical and psychedelic story that takes listeners on a journey through their imaginations".

Stoppard, a long-time Pink Floyd fan who was first approached with the idea of writing a play about the album by a friend in 1973, said: "This is more or less, I think, the first time anything like this has been done on radio.

"[I thought] 'Yes I definitely want to do that,' but had no idea for a long time what I would do. Finally, I found some time and sat down and listened to the album for the thousandth time and picked up from the beginning and kept going."

The lead roles will be taken by Iwan Rheon, best known for his portrayal of Simon Bellamy in E4's Misfits, and stage actor Amaka Okafor, with contributions from Nighy, Sewell and Adrian Scarborough.

Pink Floyd's David Gilmour said: "I have read the script of Tom's radio play and found it fascinating.

5 Best Rock-N-Roll Books

The list, care of the Daily Beast.

Five Best Books about the Fab Four

The list, care of the Telegraph.

M.I.A. - The Book

Is There Life Left in the Music Memoir?

That was the question recently posed by the AV Club.

From the story...

David Byrne's dazzling semi-memoir How Music Works stretches the form beyond its parameters, which is exactly what you’d expect a Byrne memoir to do. And Satan Is Real is a soulful, starkly poetic piece of writing worthy of Louvin’s underappreciated musical legacy. I find it interesting, though, that these two books—my favorite music memoirs of 2012—couldn’t be less alike. Byrne is a widely acknowledged icon who has dabbled in dozens of styles, and who uses his memoir to explore a vast array of philosophical and sociological topics. Louvin, on the other hand, played country and nothing but. And his memoir is full of hardscrabble anecdotes about a mostly obscure life and career that are wise, wry, violent, and heart-piercing.

There’s an even bigger difference between the two. Byrne wrote his book alone; Louvin did not. Satan Is Real’s credited ghostwriter is Benjamin Whitmer, a Colorado novelist whose mix of crime fiction and Americana is ideally suited to telling Louvin’s story. The fact that Whitmer completed the project after Louvin’s death in 2011 means that he may have had a larger hand in the manuscript than originally planned. Regardless of the way they came about, the book’s strengths are undeniable. There’s a unity and purity to its vision and voice that rings as true as any Louvin song.

Many of the memoirs I read this year could have used a ghostwriter as good as Whitmer.

Patti Smith Discusses "Just Kids" Movie

Entertainment Weekly chats with Patti Smith about turning her autobiography, Just Kids, into a movie.

From the article...

The iconic performer, who is steadily working with Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan (in between touring) on the script for a film adaptation of her 2010 bestselling memoir Just Kids, about her relationship with photographer Robbert Mapplethorpe when the two were starving young artists in New York City, voiced her appreciation of the Twilight stars to EW just before her small, private concert for Los Angeles radio station KCRW on Wednesday. She added that she could see the pair playing her and Mapplethorpe on screen … when they were lesser known.

“I remember the very first time I saw Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson together, when they were younger, and I thought, ‘Those two kids could have easily played us when they were first starting,” said Smith. “There’s something in his eyes. And Robert [Mapplethorpe] was also a bit shy, and a bit stoic. Kristen has a very special quality. She’s not conventionally beautiful, but very charismatic.”

10 Most Literature Obsessed Rock Stars

The list, care of Flavorwire.

The Best Books on the Beatles

The list, care of the Guardian.

New Novel Based on Classic Rush Album

Clockwork Angels - the Novel.

From a story on the Huffington Post...

I've known Rush's drummer and lyricist Neil Peart for more than 20 years (a friendship that began, appropriately, when I acknowledged that my first novel, Resurrection, Inc., was inspired by the Rush album Grace Under Pressure). Neil approached me as he was developing the overall story for Clockwork Angels. He had visions of a steampunk world and a grand adventure; I helped as a sounding board as he created some of the scenes, characters and plot twists. We had written a short story together years ago and were looking for a larger project to merge our different creative toolkits. Clockwork Angels seemed to be that project--we were off and running, as Neil finished writing the lyrics to the songs, and I fleshed out the characters and mapped the details of the plot. 

Like young Owen Hardy, the main character in Clockwork Angels, I grew up in a very small town (mine was in Wisconsin, while Owen's is in the imaginary land of Albion). I was surrounded by cabbage farms that serviced the local sauerkraut factory; Owen is an assistant apple orchard manager--but we both had dreams of grand adventures and imaginary lands. To quote the lyrics of "Caravan," the album's first track: "In a world where I feel so small, I can't stop thinking big."

It Was Written - Books By Rappers

N+1 takes a look at the recent proliferation of rapper memoirs.

From the piece...

The last few years have been good for hip hop nerds, bringing along with the usual mixtapes and albums an unexpected load of books. It began with Jay-Z’s deluxe coffee-table memoir Decoded. Then there was My Infamous Life by Albert Johnson, otherwise known as Prodigy of Mobb Deep, and an autobiography by Common. Ice-T has added to the pile, and Fifty Cent has released a young adult story about bullying. (He’s against it.) Nas is apparently at work on something, as well as Lil Wayne, Cee-Lo, and Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. It may seem predictable that rappers would sooner or later capitalize on our memoir-happy times—can’t knock the hustle now—but the amount of ink being spilled suggests that more is at play.

Also relevant here is Yale’s The Anthology of Rap. For the unfamiliar, the book is just what it sounds like: a hefty collection of rap lyrics. It’s the first of its kind, so it’s been enjoyable and salutary to see the literary world come to terms with it. Hip hop has long been written about, of course, but it’s not everyday you see it treated in the New York Review of Books, or hear people, Sam Lipsyte in this case, praising the “lush Keatsian soundplay” of Jay-Z. That said, responses to the book have been mixed. The editorial writing is informative and the contents are, for the most part, inclusive. There may be nothing by Redman, and The Pharcyde are relegated to the perfunctory “Lyrics for Further Study” section, but why quibble? After all, here’s Ultramagnetic MCs, Freestyle Fellowship, and Devin the Dude. The lyrics themselves, however, often so memorable in their natural  element, can look lifeless or painfully silly on the page. And though hip hop has been an object of academic study for years now, institutionalization seems to jar with its spirit.

Whatever you make of it, the anthology was going to happen, and is a sign that hip hop is reaching a place of wider legitimacy.

10 Books to Impress Any Music Snob

The list, care of Flavorwire.

The Latest on the Inuit Rapping Scene

Yes, there's an Inuit rapping scene.

From a piece in Orion...

THERE’S A YOUTUBE VIDEO of an Inuit rapper you got to check out. Two Inuit women wearing miniskirts and sealskin fur vests are throat singing on a stage lit with sherbet-colored light. From the darkness emerges an Inuit teenager in a flashy red coat and a black top hat. At first we only see his back, then he spins around, a large mic to his lips, and produces the craziest string of beats you’ve ever heard. Not words, just sounds, a quick catchy rap riff, like you might hear at a dance club, overlaid by a dim growl, like a man rapping with a monster stuck in his throat. His name is Nelson Tagoona, and the video he stars in was shot at Toonik Tyme, a spring music festival in the Canadian Arctic.

You may not know it, but the Arctic has developed something of a rap scene. Head north to Nunavut, Canada’s vast Inuit territory, and you can hear the likes of DJ Mad Eskimo, who mixes rap with traditional beats; Tumivut, a hip-hop/rock ensemble fronted by throat singers; or Eskimocentricity, whose feverish beats call to mind Eminem, although his lyrics are more likely to involve harpoons than guns. But the hottest new Nunavut rapper of all is Tagoona, who is eighteen years old and hails from a small community in the central Arctic called Baker Lake. The music in the Toonik Tyme video is known as “throat boxing,” a style Tagoona invented. It’s a mix between traditional Inuit throat singing and beatboxing, a U.S.-born form of vocal percussion in which rappers use their voices to generate beats and musical sounds.

Fallen Rock Stars in Contemporary Fiction

The New York Times takes a look at how rock and roll music is currently being translated to the pages of novels.

From the article...

Invariably, however, I would run into friends from the rock universe who would inquire, as pasty-skinned record collectors will do, about the bands I was currently digging. Over time, I learned to mumble something about Wild Flag or Tune-Yards just to move the conversation along. But in truth, there were four recently discovered artists I could not shake from my brain yet whose names I was reluctant to share: the cultish singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe; the newly unearthed punk weirdo Scotty Hausmann; the outsider artist Nik Worth; and Richard Katz, a nihilistic rogue. 

All were vivid, unique singers, ambivalent toward fame yet too gifted to avoid flirting with it. All had taken their share of lumps from the roller-coaster ride that comes with a rich, torturous music career. And of course, all four men — my favorite new rock singers — did not actually exist. They were characters gracing the centers or fringes of recent novels by Nick Hornby (“Juliet, Naked”), Jennifer Egan (“A Visit From the Goon Squad”), Dana Spiotta (“Stone Arabia”) and Jonathan Franzen (“Freedom”). 

I didn’t have any kind of rock ’n’ roll agenda when I went into these books. Really. In fact, I inherited the Hornby from my wife, purchased “Stone Arabia” out of admiration for Spiotta’s previous novel and was lent both “Goon Squad” and “Freedom” by my mother, who had showered each with what, for her, amounts to high praise: “Eh — could’ve been better.” 

Nevertheless, falling for these characters in such accidental succession made me wonder whether rock music, long rumored to be deceased, was functioning better on the page than in the recording.

A Fleet Foxes-Related Literary Journal to Be Published

It'll be called Unified Field Collective.

From a piece in the L Magazine...

In the case of the inaugural issue, we can expect a 10'' transparent vinyl pressing of rare tracks from the aforementioned Pecknold, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Amen Dunes, Grizzly Bear spin-off Department of Eagles and more, while its 60 pages will work off the theme of "transition" (each issue will carry a theme, natch). Round one features a journal entry penned by recently freed West Memphis 3 member Damien Echols on adjusting to life after 18 years on death row, an excerpt from Gloria Steinem's forthcoming book, a photo essay on adolescence by noted rock photographer Autumn de Wilde, a contribution from SPIN's Charles Aaron, and another from Animal Collective sister/visual collaborator Abby Portner, among 30-plus other pieces. Also worth mentioning: Both Beach House and Sub Pop are listed among the collective's roster. Perhaps a hint of what future issues will hold?

Kurt Cobain...

The sticker book?

Elvis Lit - A Survey

The Millions puts on some blue suede shoes and tramps around the ever growing library of Elvis Presley books.

From the piece... 

Elvis Presley disappeared 35 years ago today.

I choose the verb disappeared for a reason. Not because I’m a big believer in conspiracy theories or Elvis sightings — I am not — but because in a very real sense Elvis Presley didn’t actually die on Aug. 16, 1977, he simply moved on to a different level in the ether of superstardom. When asked what he planned to do once Elvis was in the ground, his evil genius of a manager, Col. Tom Parker, said it all: “Why, I’ll just go right on managing him!” As Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick put it, “RCA (records) would discover that Elvis was as great a sales phenomenon in death as in life.”

Even more phenomenal than the unquenchable hunger for Elvis music, Elvis impersonators, and Elvis memorabilia (black velvet paintings, ashtrays, liquor bottles, etc.) is the relentless outpouring of books about Elvis. I call it ElvisLit — a river of words that gives every indication, year after year after year, that it will never run dry. Guralnick described it as “the cacophony of voices that have joined together to create a chorus of informed opinion, uninformed speculation, hagiography, symbolism, and blame.”

A Collection of Vintage Punk Magazine Covers

Enjoy!

Capturing the Immortals of Rock

Rock Novels That Got it Right

The list, care of Three Guys One Book.

From the intro of said list...

It usually goes like this:

1. Rockstar is born not a rockstar, but to a dismal family of chicken farmers or garbage pickers or libertarians.
2. Rockstar buys guitar and struggles. Suspiciously, Rockstar is surrounded by naysayers recommending more lucrative careers in livestock breeding or politics.
3. Rockstar gets really freakin’ good in a suspiciously short amount of time. Rockstar wins lots of fans. Naysayers turn to yaysayers.
4. Rockstar meets drugs. Drugs meet rockstar. It’s a match made in heaven until it’s not anymore. Suddenly, the simple life of trash picking seems like a step up from this gutter.
5. Suspiciously, Rockstar finds redemption in the form of a woman, an estranged child, or Ron Paul.

This story arc is so easy. That ease is why there are a million rock ‘n’ roll novels. It’s also why there are tons of forgettable rock novels.