Bücher der Reihe Genre: A 33 1/3

Featuring exclusive interviews with key figures, from Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway to guitarist Bill Steer of Gentlemans Pistols, Carcass, and Napalm Death, this is your guide through the history of death metal.Guitars playing abrasive, discordant riffs, the thunderous double-kick of the drums acting like an accelerated heartbeat, and porcine, guttural vocals pummeling twisted lyrics. Courting controversy from inception to its modern day iteration, death metal presents a number of contradictions: Driven and adventurous musicians compete to make uncomfortable noises; it is crude and far beyond parody and yet consistently popular; and the music is pig-headedly uncommercial despite making a few labels, albeit briefly, wealthy. This book explores the history and methodology of the genre, charting its aims and intentions, its crossovers to the mainstream, successes and failures, and tracks how it developed from the bedrooms of Birmingham and Florida to the near-mainstream, to the murky cult status it enjoys today.

Krautrock is not a music genre. Krautrock is a way of life. Its sonic diversity and global reach belie the common culture from where it emerged. This is a band-by-band history. In May 1945, the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, putting an end to the European front of World War II and the Third Reich. In the immediate aftermath, German youth were tasked to create their own culture. Krautrock is this unlikely success story, as hundreds of bands-including Kraftwerk and Can-seemed to sprout overnight in the early 1970s, forging a unique and experimental sound that was different than American or British rock. The major innovation of krautrock is not only its motorik beat, the steady click-click of Can's Jaki Liebezeit or monolithic stomp-stomp of Neu!'s Klaus Dinger, but also how the musicians relate to each other. In krautrock, no musician is given more focus than any other, and listening to these bands is to witness interplay common in jazz music. Thus, krautrock represents German politics reflected in music: a dictatorship replaced by democracy. Krautrock explores the history and methodology of the genre, charting its influences and innovations, its more mainstream acts (like Faust, Kraftwerk, and Can) as well as the less universally known (including Harmonia, Popol Vuh, Embryo, and Ash Ra Tempel), and how the genre developed in post-war Germany and what it means to today's listeners.

Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), or "German New Wave," was made extraordinarily popular in the 1970s and 1980s by the likes of Nena's "99 Luftballoons" and Trio's "Da Da Da"-and then left as quickly as it came. Conventional wisdom among artists dictates that it's better to burn out than fade away, but this doesn't tell the full story of NDW-the reason for its rapid rise and fall, the historical context that necessitated the genre, and where the energy of the NDW movement went after its end. The genre has international influences but still demonstrates a uniquely German desire to build a new, sanitized identity in the aftermath of World War II. Originally quite subversive and underground, NDW became exponentially more mainstream until it could no longer sustain itself creatively. And rather than disappearing, it helped give rise to the post-Cold War rave craze and is still an important touchstone in music history.

Folk music of the 1960s and 1970s was a genre that was always shifting and expanding, yet somehow never found room for so many. In the sounds of soul-folk, Black artists like Terry Callier and Linda Lewis began to reclaim their space in the genre, and use it to bring their own traditions to light- the jazz, the blues, the field hollers, the spirituals- and creating something wholly new, wholly theirs, wholly ours. This book traces the growing imprints of soul-folk and how it made its way from folk tradition to subgenre. Along the way, it explores the musicians, albums, and histories that made the genre what it is.