Books

Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music by Peter Doggett (Vintage, $24.99)

“The global heritage of popular music is the product of 125 years of artistic and scientific innovation. It represents a constant quest for modernity, which must be endlessly renewed. This is the story of that quest; of the musicians, the generations that they delighted and divided, and the technology which captured their music in the […]

Books

The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘N’ Roll by Ian S. Port (Scribner, $37)

“They must have amused each other – so similar were they, yet so different. If not for their overlapping fascination with amplification and musical instruments, they might not have become friends.” -from The Birth of Loud by Ian S. Port (page 34) For my fourteenth birthday my father drove me to a music store on […]