Kirjahaku

Easy Riders, Rolling Stones delves into the history of twentieth-century American popular music to explore the emergence of 'road music'. This music - blues, R'n'B and rock - took shape at pivotal moments in this history, and was made by artists and performers who were, in various ways, seekers after freedom. Whether journeying across the country, breaking free from real or imaginary confines, or in the throes of self-invention, these artists incorporated their experiences into scores of songs about travel and movement, as well as creating a new kind of road culture. Starting in the Mississippi Delta and tracking the emblematic routes and highways of road music, John Scanlan's fascinating new account explores the music and the life of movement it so often represented, identifying 'the road' as the key to an existence that was uncompromising. Scanlan explores how the image became an inspiration for musicians like Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan, and how these musicians also drew stimulus from a Beat movement that was equally enthralled with the possibilities of travel.The author goes on to relate how the quintessential American concepts of freedom and travel influenced English bands such as the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. These bands may have been foreigners in the us, but they also found their spiritual home there - of blues and rock'n'roll - and glimpsed the possibility of a new kind of existence, on the road.Easy Riders, Rolling Stones is an entertaining, rich account of a key strand of American music history, and will appeal to both road music fans and music scholars who want to 'head out on the highway'.

The explosive story of the Sex Pistols is now so familiar that the essence of what they represented has been lost in a fog of nostalgia and rock'n'roll cliche. In 1976 the rise of the Sex Pistols was regarded in apocalyptic terms, and the punks as visitors from an unwanted future bringing chaos and confusion. John Scanlan considers the Sex Pistols as the first successful art project of their manager, Malcolm McLaren, a vision born out of radical politics, boredom and his deep and unrelenting talent for perverse opportunism. McLaren deliberately set a collision course with establishments, both conservative and counter-cultural, and succeeded beyond his highest expectations. Scanlan tells the story of how McLaren's project - designed, in any case to fail - foundered on the development of the Pistols into a great rock band and the inconvenient artistic emergence of John Lydon. Moving between London and New York, and with a fascinating cast of delinquents, petty criminals and misfits, Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine is not just a book about a band. It is about the times, the ideas, the coincidences and the characters that made punk, that ended with the Sex Pistols - beaten, bloody and overdosed - sensationally self-destructing on stage in San Francisco in January 1978, and that transformed popular culture throughout the world.

When rock 'n' roll burst into life in the 1950s the shockwaves echoed around the world, amplified by images of untamed youth projected on cinema screens. But for the performers themselves showbusiness remained in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad. In this riveting cultural history, John Scanlan explores rock’s relationship with the moving image over seven decades in cinema, television, music videos, advertising and YouTube. Along the way he shows how rock was exploited, how it inspired film pioneers, and, not least, the transformations it caused over more than half a century. From Elvis Presley to David Bowie, and from Scorpio Rising to the films of Scorsese and DIY documentarists like Don Letts, this is a unique retelling of the story of rock – from birth to old age – through its onscreen life.

The Idea of Waste starts with the premise that waste is inevitable in human society. It explores how we have grappled with both the material reality and the spectre of this shape-shifting phenomenon throughout history – utilizing it, dreaming of overcoming it, yet never escaping it. John Scanlan investigates what waste is and why it seems to be intrinsic to human life, at every turn, in every age and epoch. He demonstrates how waste never disappears completely but rather only proliferates anew. The compelling narrative shows waste to be both an enduring material consequence of human activity and an idea or state of being.

This is the first work to examine the detritus of our culture in its full range; garbage in this sense is not only material waste and ruin, environmental degradation and so on, but also residual or ‘broken’ knowledge, useless concepts, the remainders of systems of intellectual and cultural thought. In this unique and original work (a kind of intellectual scavenging in its own right) the author shows why garbage is, perversely, the source of all that is valuable.The author considers how Western philosophy, science and technology attained mastery over nature through what can be seen as a prolonged act of cleansing, the disposal of incorrect, outmoded or superseded knowledge. By detailing the waste, ruin and nonsense that we have discarded, the author argues that we can learn new things about the accepted truths and basic building blocks of our culture; he throws new light on our modern condition by examining not what we have kept, but what we have thrown away.On Garbage shows that disposal causes not only the mountains of rubbish that we occasionally believe threatens to overwhelm us; it also creates a host of other ‘garbage’, particularly in the dead ends of useless knowledge and the often abject reality of our disposable lives. It turns out that we ourselves have become the garbage of our times.This bold and thought-provoking work will be of interest to readers in areas as diverse as cultural studies and social theory, the histories of philosophy, public health and the environment, as well as those interested in the aesthetics of contemporary art.

'I hate the word maturing,' singer David Lee Roth once said. 'I don't like the word evolving - or any of that bullshit. The point is to keep it as simplistic, as unassuming, and as stupid as possible.' As Roth would have wanted it, Van Halen follows the band's pursuit of the art of artlessness, and describes how they characterize what historian Kevin Starr terms 'Zen California' - a state of mind and way of being that above all celebrates 'the now'. In rock'n'roll terms it stands for the unregulated expenditure of energy; for a youthful exuberance that seems destined to extinguish itself. While many have attempted to discover the secrets of Van Halen through an analysis of their musical role models, John Scanlan looks instead at deeper aesthetic and philosophical influences, such as romanticism and the Beat movement. Through illuminating moments and impressions - decaying Hollywood in the 1970s; Ted Templeman and Sunset Sound Studios; Top Jimmy and the Zero Zero club; the building of Eddie Van Halen's Hollywood Hills studio in 1983 - the author shows how 1970s California was the only time and place that Van Halen could have emerged. Along the way, Scanlan explores other aspects of the band, such as the relationship between David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen; the unique climate of Southern California, and its relation to a sense of cultural exuberance; the echoes of Beat aesthetics in David Lee Roth's attitude to time and the moment; Eddie Van Halen's 'bebop' sensibility; and the real roots of the so-called 'Brown' sound. Van Halen is a groundbreaking account of an extraordinary band, caught in the events of a revolutionary time. The book will appeal to all fans of the group, as well as readers with an interest in the history and aesthetics of rock'n'roll, or the culture of California.

The arrival of the Sex Pistols in 1976 seemed less like that of a band than a warning from a nightmarish future. Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine examines the group’s explosive impact by placing Malcolm McLaren’s audacious, self-sabotaging art project at its centre – a scheme forged from radical politics, cultural fatigue and a genius for provocation. John Scanlan traces how this volatile experiment collided with the Pistols’ own musical force and John Lydon’s uncompromising originality, reshaping its purpose and accelerating the band’s implosion. Moving between London and New York, Scanlan reveals the personalities, pressures and accidents that gave punk its charge and altered popular culture far beyond its brief, chaotic lifespan.