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Rock Music: LGBTQIA+
"I'm Still Standing Better Than I Ever Did": LGBTQIA+ in Rock Music
Rock music has long been about the authentic expression of self, but its culture often imposes heteronormative structures. These readings center around queer studies as well as the rock music artists who have shared their point of view about their sexuality and gender identity.
Books
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Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out
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(Book). Popular music's queer DNA is inarguable, from Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" to David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, from cross-dressing Kurt Cobain to "female Elvis" k.d. lang. Regardless, gay and lesbian performers have preferred the safety of the closet for generations, mainly due to the tenuous legal status of homosexuality and the rife homophobia that lives on in spite of the victories of Gay Liberation. Only in 2014 did an 'out' gay pop star, Sam Smith, top the US chart. Bearing this in mind, it comes as no surprise that there has never been a comprehensive general history of LGBTQ+ personalities and influences in and around popular music until now. Martin Aston's Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out is the first book to convey the protracted and, at times, torturous tale of popular music's queer past, present, and future. Aston's book offers a definitive social and musical history spanning 100 years, starting in the British music halls and Harlem blues clubs of the early 20th century and continuing through the noughties of the 21st, and replete with insights on best-known stars and hidden pioneers alike. An exceptional first salvo in what's destined to be a field of inquiry for generations, Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache deserves a place of honor on library shelves, nightstands, and coffee tables perused by music fans of every gender and persuasion. Although there have been essay collections, magazine articles, and other media blips that touch on its LGBTQ+ roots, Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache is the first chronological narrative that presents music's coming-out story against a detailed backdrop of social and political change. At 540 pages, it's certainly the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Aston's sources include over ninety original interviews and an archive of other materials accumulated over his twenty-plus year career as a music commentator and journalist focused on LGBTQ+ life and culture; the book also features a full sixteen pages of photographs. And, unlike all other studies of LGBQT+ music culture currently available, this account gives as much attention to women as it does men. Moreover, many of the first performers to defy the laws and morals of their time have never been documented in print. Now, for the first time ever, Aston shares the stories of a 1950s lesbian rockabilly trio, a 1960s gay soul siren, the first gay country band, the only true gay glam rockers and punk rockers, the pioneering queer rappers, and the first trans musicians. His account concludes with the omnipresence of LGBTQ+ performers across all genres, but also regards with a wary eye the present status of LGBTQ+ persons in Russia and Africa, where the long, hard journey to personal freedom (and freedom of expression) is far from over.
Call Number: ML3470 .A88 2017ISBN: 9781617136528Publication Date: 2017-06-01 -
Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary
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Why has music so often served as an accomplice to transcendent expressions of gender? Why did the query "is he musical?" become code, in the twentieth century, for "is he gay?" Why is music so inherently queer? For Sasha Geffen, the answers lie, in part, in music's intrinsic quality of subliminal expression, which, through paradox and contradiction, allows rigid gender roles to fall away in a sensual and ambiguous exchange between performer and listener. Glitter Up the Dark traces the history of this gender fluidity in pop music from the early twentieth century to the present day. Starting with early blues and the Beatles and continuing with performers such as David Bowie, Prince, Missy Elliot, and Frank Ocean, Geffen explores how artists have used music, fashion, language, and technology to break out of the confines mandated by gender essentialism and establish the voice as the primary expression of gender transgression. From glam rock and punk to disco, techno, and hip-hop, music helped set the stage for today's conversations about trans rights and recognition of nonbinary and third-gender identities. Glitter Up the Dark takes a long look back at the path that led here.
Call Number: ML3470 .G44 2020ISBN: 9781477318782Publication Date: 2020-04-07 -
David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music
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LGBT musicians have shaped the development of music over the last century, with a sexually progressive soundtrack in the background of the gay community's struggle for acceptance. With the advent of recording technology, LGBT messages were for the first time brought to the forefront of popular music. David Bowie Made Me Gay is the first book to cover the breadth of history of recorded music by and for the LGBT community and how those records influenced the evolution of the music we listen to today.David Bowie Made Me Gay uncovers the lives of the people who made these records, and offers a lively canter through the scarcely documented history of LGBT music-makers. Darryl W. Bullock discusses how gay, lesbian, and bisexual performers influenced Jazz and Blues; examines the almost forgotten Pansy Craze in the years between the two World Wars (when many LGBT performers were fêted by royalty and Hollywood alike); chronicles the dark years after the depression when gay life was driven deep underground; celebrates the re-emergence of LGBT performers in the post-Stonewall years; and highlights today's most legendary out-gay pop stars: Elton John, Boy George, Freddie Mercury, and George Michael. "Popular music is the great stealth art form, able to slip past our censors and explore all kinds of sexuality in ways closed to print or movies. Darryl Bullock's book is a wonderful encyclopedia of queer music, an encyclopedia with a plot: the history of one hundred years of social change. He not only connects the musical dots, but reveals dots I didn't know existed. Ambitious, wide-ranging, unpredictable, fast-paced, and highly informative, David Bowie Made Me Gay is also very entertaining."--Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters and Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America"From 'Ma' Rainey to Adam Lambert'with Janis Ian, the Village People, k.d. lang, and Pansy Division discussed along the way?David Bowie Made Me Gay is a whirlwind tour through how queer musicians have changed the rhythm and the beat of music and culture for almost one hundred years. Everyone knows that music is sexy, and sex is better with the right music'and LGBT people have been pushing the boundaries of music and sex for decades. The 'soundtrack' for cultural liberation over the decades has been written and performed by gay people'and this book does not miss a beat documenting who, how, and why that happened. A must read for anyone interested in, or fascinated by, music and popular culture."--Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States and Professor of Practice in Media and Activism, Harvard University"A fun and enlightening read, Darryl Bullock's David Bowie Made Me Gay is to popular music what William J. Mann's Behind the Screen is to Hollywood filmmaking: a convincing account of the hitherto ignored influence of LGBTQ people in a popular medium. Although there are other studies of some of these decades, Bullock's treatment of the past 100 years is an engaging 'one-stop' of many genres--[its] detailed coverage of women's music is welcome--and uniquely inclusive of both the US and UK. A valuable addition to the history of popular music as well as queer studies, and should appeal to general readers of all sexualities."--Vicki L. Eaklor, author of Queer America
Call Number: ML3470 .B85 2017ISBN: 9781468315592Publication Date: 2017-11-21 -
Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era
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Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post-civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.
Call Number: ML3918.P67 R69 2013ISBN: 9780472071791Publication Date: 2012-12-26 -
Homocore: The Loud and Raucous Rise of Queer Rock
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Music as a form of social activism dates back for centuries, but rarely has there been a movement as provocative, daring and exciting as homocore, the queer-oriented rock scene. Journalist David Ciminelli has been immersed in this scene since the early 90s and his book drops you right in the action as Brian Grillo leaps from the stage at the Viper Room to chase a homophobic heckler up Sunset Boulevard. It takes you backstage as Pansy Division recalls being pelted by coins when they supported Green Day. This is the fascinating story of using music as a powerful tool in gay activism.
Call Number: ML3534 .C54 2005ISBN: 1555838553Publication Date: 2005-08-01 -
Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History
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Through exclusive interviews, never-before-seen photographs and reprinted zines from the time, Queercore traces the history of a scene fabricated by a few young queer punks to its emergence as a real revolution. Queercore is a first-hand account of the movement explored through the people that lived it - from punk's early queer elements to the emergence of riot grrrl as a sister movement - as well as the clothes, zines, art, film, and music that made this movement an exciting in-your-face middle finger to complacent gay and straight society.
Call Number: HQ76.96 .Q49 2021ISBN: 9781629637969Publication Date: 2021-07-13 -
Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatrically in Popular Music
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" . . this book is excellent. Somebody has finally got 'me' right, and in fact, the entire genre of glam rock." -Suzi Quatro "Performing Glam Rock reminds us just how important music, and especially popular music, is as a site for understanding subjectivity and social movements through performance. . . . A useful book on an undertheorized but important genre of popular music-glam rock." -Susan Fast, author of In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music When it first appeared in the early 1970s, glam rock not only caused a stir among audiences and performers, it also stood counterculture and psychedelic rock on their heads. Glam rock was outrageous and overtly theatrical, and its unforgettable characters-adorned with flamboyant costumes and heavy makeup and accompanied by elaborately constructed sets-were personified by performers such as Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, and Suzi Quatro. A sea change in rock performance had occurred. Yet glam was as much about substance as style, and Performing Glam Rock delves into the many ways glam paved the way for new explorations of identity in terms of gender, sexuality, and performance. Philip Auslander positions glam historically and examines it as a set of performance strategies, exploring the ways in which glam rock-while celebrating the showmanship of 1950s rock and roll-began to undermine rock's adherence to the ideology of authenticity in the late 1960s. In this important study of a too-often-overlooked phenomenon, Auslander takes a fresh look at the genius of the glam movement and introduces glam to a new generation of performance enthusiasts and scholars alike. Philip Auslander is Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology and author of numerous books, including Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture and Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. He is editor of the major reference work Performance: Critical Concepts and coeditor, with Carrie Sandahl, of Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance.
Call Number: ML3534 .A9 2006ISBN: 0472098683Publication Date: 2006-02-01 -
Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent
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While the growing field of scholarship on heavy metal music and its subcultures has produced excellent work on the sounds, scenes, and histories of heavy metal around the world, few works have included a study of gender and sexuality. This cutting-edge volume focuses on queer fans, performers, and spaces within the heavy metal sphere, and demonstrates the importance, pervasiveness, and subcultural significance of queerness to the heavy metal ethos. Heavy metal scholarship has until recently focused almost solely on the roles of heterosexual hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity in fans and performers. The dependence on that narrow dichotomy has limited heavy metal scholarship, resulting in poorly critiqued discussions of gender and sexuality that serve only to underpin the popular imagining of heavy metal as violent, homophobic and inherently masculine. This book queers heavy metal studies, bringing discussions of gender and sexuality in heavy metal out of that poorly theorized dichotomy. In this interdisciplinary work, the author connects new and existing scholarship with a strong ethnographic study of heavy metal's self-identified queer performers and fans in their own words, thus giving them a voice and offering an original and ground-breaking addition to scholarship on popular music, rock, and queer studies.
Call Number: ML3838 .C55 2015ISBN: 9780415728317Publication Date: 2015-04-01 -
Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance
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Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success. In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage. Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre's beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces, demonstrating that queer and trans rappers draw on Ballroom and other cultural expressions particular to queer and trans communities of color in their work in order to articulate their subject positions. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of hip hop's queer roots.
Call Number: OnlineISBN: 9780472903016Publication Date: 2022-11-02 -
I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity
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As someone who feels the emotional power of rock and who writes about it as an art form, Theodore Gracyk has been praised for launching arguments destined to change the future of rock and roll. In I Wanna Be Me, his second book about the music he cares so much about, Gracyk grapples with the ways that rock shapes - limits and expands - our notions of who we can be in the world.
Call Number: ML3534 .G69 2001ISBN: 1566399025Publication Date: 2001-12-01
Articles
- "Rock and Sexuality" by Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, 1990
- "Queer Punk Fanzines: Identity, Community, and the Articulation of Homosexuality and Hardcore" by Mark Fenster, Journal of Communication Inquiry, January 1993
- "The Social Organization of Sexuality and Gender in Alternative Hard Rock: An Analysis of Intersectionality" by Mimi Schippers, Gender & Society, December 2000
- "All Rock and Roll Is Homosocial: The Representation of Women in the British Rock Music Press" by Helen Davies, Popular Music, 07 March 2002
- "I Wanna Be Your Man: Suzi Quatro's Musical Androgyny" by Philip Auslander, Popular Music, 28 January 2004
- "Beyond Blood Brothers: Queer Bruce Springsteen" by Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel, Popular Music, October 2013
- "TransAmericana: Gender, Genre, and Journey" by Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, New Literary History, Autumn 2015
- "Big Mama Thornton, Little Richard, and the Queer Roots of Rock 'n' Roll" by Tyina Steptoe, American Quarterly, 2018
- "Let's Flip It! Quare Emancipations: Black Queer Traditions, Afrofuturisms, Janelle Monáe to Labelle" by Gayle Murchinson, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 2018
- "Queer(ing) Popular Music Culture" by Doris Leibetseder, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 18 July 2022
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Articles PlusIndex to hundreds of millions electronic resources, including journal and newspaper articles, e-books, dissertations, and media in campus library collections.
Suggested Subject Headings
"Homosexuality and popular music"
"Gender identity in music"
"Lesbian musicians"
"Gay musicians"
"Transgender musicians"
"LGBT musicians"
"Gender non-conforming people"
Recommended Memoirs and Biographies
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Shout, Sister, Shout!
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Long before "women in rock" became a media catchphrase, Rosetta Tharpe proved in spectacular fashion that women could rock. Born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in 1915, she was gospel's first superstar and the preeminent crossover figure of its "golden age" (1945-1965). Everyone who saw her perform said she could "make that guitar talk." Shout, Sister, Shout! is the first biography of this trailblazing performer who influenced scores of popular musicians, from Elvis Presley and Little Richard to Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt. An African American guitar virtuoso, Tharpe defied categorization. Blues singer, gospel singer, folk artist, and rock-and-roller, she "went electric" in the late 1930s, amazing northern and southern, U.S. and international, and white and black audiences with her charisma and skill. Ambitious and relentlessly public, Tharpe even staged her own wedding as a gospel concert-in a stadium holding 20,000 people! Wald's eye-opening biography, which draws on the memories of over 150 people who knew or worked with Tharpe, introduces us to this intriguing and forgotten musical heavyweight, forever altering our understanding of both women in rock and U.S. popular music.
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Somebody to Love
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For the first time, the final years of one of the world's most captivating rock showman are laid bare. Including interviews from Freddie Mercury's closest friends in the last years of his life, along with personal photographs, Somebody to Love is an authoritative biography of the great man. Here are previously unknown and startling facts about the singer and his life, moving detail on his lifelong search for love and personal fulfilment, and of course his tragic contraction of a then killer disease in the mid-1980s. Woven throughout Freddie's life is the shocking story of how the HIV virus came to hold the world in its grip, was cruelly labelled 'The Gay Plague' and the unwitting few who indirectly infected thousands of men, women and children - Freddie Mercury himself being one of the most famous. The death of this vibrant and spectacularly talented rock star, shook the world of medicine as well as the world of music. Somebody to Love finally puts the record straight and pays detailed tribute to the man himself.
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George Michael
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George Michael's death on Christmas Day 2016 inspired a new appreciation of his talent and generosity. This new biography is a riveting examination of his extraordinary musical career and legacy that explores his complicated life on-and off-stage, including his sexual insecurity, the loss of his first lover to AIDS, his mother's untimely death, and his drug addiction. Filled with George Michael's own frank opinions, reflections, and observations, this book succeeds in reminding us of why he meant so much to so many. Emily Herbert is the author ofRobin Williams: When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 andLady Gaga: Behind the Fame.
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Tranny
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ONE OF BILLBOARD'S "100 GREATEST MUSIC BOOKS OF ALL TIME": The provocative transgender advocate and lead singer of the punk rock band Against Me! provides a searing account of her search for identity and her true self. It began in a bedroom in Naples, Florida, when a misbehaving punk teenager named Tom Gabel, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a headful of anarchist politics, landed on a riff. Gabel formed Against Me! and rocketed the band from its scrappy beginnings-banging on a drum kit made of pickle buckets-to a major-label powerhouse that critics have called this generation's The Clash. Since its inception in 1997, Against Me! has been one of punk's most influential modern bands, but also one of its most divisive. With every notch the four-piece climbed in their career, they gained new fans while infuriating their old ones. They suffered legal woes, a revolving door of drummers, and a horde of angry, militant punks who called them "sellouts" and tried to sabotage their shows at every turn. But underneath the public turmoil, something much greater occupied Gabel-a secret kept for 30 years, only acknowledged in the scrawled-out pages of personal journals and hidden in lyrics. Through a troubled childhood, delinquency, and struggles with drugs, Gabel was on a punishing search for identity. Not until May of 2012 did a Rolling Stone profile finally reveal it: Gabel is a transsexual, and would from then on be living as a woman under the name Laura Jane Grace. Tranny is the intimate story of Against Me!'s enigmatic founder, weaving the narrative of the band's history, as well as Grace's, with dozens of never-before-seen entries from the piles of journals Grace kept. More than a typical music memoir about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll-although it certainly has plenty of that-Tranny is an inside look at one of the most remarkable stories in the history of rock.
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The Life and Times of Little Richard
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"James Brown called him his idol. Mick Jagger called him the king, Elvis Presley called him the greatest. Otis Redding called him his inspiration. Muhammad Ali called him his favorite singer. Jimi Hend"
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Sticky Fingers
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A delicious romp through the heyday of rock and roll and a revealing portrait of the man at the helm of the iconic magazine that made it all possible, with candid look backs at the era from Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Elton John, Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, and others. The story of Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's founder, editor, and publisher, and the pioneering era he helped curate, is told here for the first time in glittering, glorious detail. Joe Hagan provides readers with a backstage pass to storied concert venues and rock-star hotel rooms; he tells never before heard stories about the lives of rock stars and their handlers; he details the daring journalism (Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O'Rourke) and internecine office politics that accompanied the start-up; he animates the drug and sexual appetites of the era; and he reports on the politics of the last fifty years that were often chronicled in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine. Supplemented by a cache of extraordinary documents and letters from Wenner's personal archives, Sticky Fingers depicts an ambitious, mercurial, wide-eyed rock and roll fan of who exalts in youth and beauty and learns how to package it, marketing late sixties counterculture as a testament to the power of American youth. The result is a fascinating and complex portrait of man and era, and an irresistible biography of popular culture, celebrity, music, and politics in America.
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Me
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INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life, from his rollercoaster lifestyle as shown in the film Rocketman, to becoming a living legend. Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed of becoming a pop star. By the age of twenty-three he was performing his first gig in America, facing an astonished audience in his bright yellow dungarees, a star-spangled T-shirt, and boots with wings. Elton John had arrived and the music world would never be the same again. His life has been full of drama, from the early rejection of his work with song-writing partner Bernie Taupin to spinning out of control as a chart-topping superstar; from half-heartedly trying to drown himself in his LA swimming pool to disco-dancing with Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth; from friendships with John Lennon, Freddie Mercury, and George Michael to setting up his AIDS Foundation to conquering Broadway with Aida, The Lion King, and Billy Elliot the Musical. All the while Elton was hiding a drug addiction that would grip him for over a decade. In Me, Elton also writes powerfully about getting clean and changing his life, about finding love with David Furnish and becoming a father. In a voice that is warm, humble, and open, this is Elton on his music and his relationships, his passions and his mistakes. This is a story that will stay with you by a living legend.
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Dancing with Demons
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Dusty Springfield made her name in the 60s with a string of top ten hits, including 'You Don't Have to Say You Love Me' and 'The Look of Love' . Her unique singing style and distinctive bouffant look made her famous throughout the world. Despite a period in the wilderness during the 70s and 80s, she was back at the top in the 90s until her death from cancer in March l999. She was born in London in l939 - an Irish Catholic, convent-educated girl. It was a background which was to set her almost schizophrenically at odds with herself as she realised her sexuality and moved further into the rock world. Both Penny Valentine and Vicki Wickham knew Dusty well - Vicki was Dusty's friend and manager for much of her career - and together with the cooperation of Dusty's closest family and friends they tell her true story for the first time.
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Man Enough to Be a Woman
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Remember Wayne County and the Electric Chairs? Long before drag queens dominated the media, before gender-bending, before punk, even before Stonewall, there was W/Jayne County. From the 60?s to the 90?s she's been the craziest, the most extreme queen ever to hit a rock ?n? roll stage. She's known and worked with Warhol, Bowie and Derek Jarman, been an actress, a singer and a prostitute. She's the world's original and only rock ?n? roll transsexual, crossing the genders in the full glare of publicity. Man Enough to be a Woman is the wild, hilarious and shameless account of Jayne's life from her cissy-boy childhood in Georgia to her current 90s renaissance, as a new wave of superstars claim her as their inspiration.
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The Soundtrack of My Life
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In The Soundtrack of My Life, music legend Clive Davis recounts an extraordinary five-decade career in the music business, while also telling a remarkable personal story of triumphs, disappointments, and encounters with some of the greatest musical artists of our time, from Bob Dylan and Paul Simon to Whitney Houston and Alicia Keys. Orphaned and impoverished in his teens, Davis overcame early hardships, earning a full scholarship to New York University and then one to Harvard Law School. As general counsel at Columbia Records, Davis quickly distinguished himself and capitalized on a lucky break to catapult to the presidency of the company. More surprisingly, he was to learn he had “ears,” a rare ability to spot talent and create hit records. Those ears contributed to the fabled success of three companies—Columbia, Arista, and J—where Davis discovered and developed more unique artists than anyone in the history of the music industry. What began on the grass at the Monterey Pop Festival with the signing of Janis Joplin has evolved into a lifelong passion and calling, spanning the years and genres, including rock, pop, R&B, country, jazz fusion, and hip-hop. Through it all, Davis has discovered a pantheon of all-time greats: Bruce Springsteen; Billy Joel; Aerosmith; Carlos Santana; Blood, Sweat & Tears; Chicago; Earth, Wind and Fire; Barry Manilow; Patti Smith; Whitney Houston; Kenny G.; and Alicia Keys. In addition, he has championed and played a vital part in the careers of Simon and Garfunkel, Miles Davis, the Kinks, the Grateful Dead, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross, Annie Lennox, Carly Simon, Alan Jackson, Brooks and Dunn, Jennifer Hudson, and Rod Stewart. His is the imprimatur that has helped shape contemporary music and our popular culture for the past forty-five years. The Soundtrack of My Life is an essential book for anyone interested in the story of popular music, the workings of the music business, the alchemy of hits, and the dramatic life of a brilliant leader . . . and listener.
