The Third Bardo’s 1967 song “Five Years Ahead of My Time,” a musical gem by the psychedelic garage band from New York is the eponym for this book, as the many garage bands of the 1960s laid the foundations for American Rock music. The word “garage” in this context actually describes their foremost place of […]
You are browsing archives for
Tag: 1950s United States
Music Wars: Money, Politics, and Race in the Construction of Rock and Roll Culture, 1940-1960 by Joh...
“One way to interpret American society in the second half of the twentieth century, for good or ill, is to see it as the triumph of rock and roll culture,” argues John C. Hajduk, professor of history at the University of Montana Western in the book at hand. This peculiar culture was a compelling force […]
America Goes Hawaiian. The Influence of Pacific Island Culture on the Mainland by Geoff Alexander (2...
What began on the America mainland in the 1850s when the first hula dancers were presented to the public and what was promoted by Hawaiian music only a few years later – the promise of paradise on earth, an Eden in endless summer – the Hawaiian way of life, for the vast majority of American […]
Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History by Ronald D. Cohen and David Bonner (2018)
This title was designed to portray the various setups, styles, collages, and the cover art of both scores, books, festival ads, piano rolls, and vinyl that was marketed and sold in packages that related to the musical content of “folk music” in the United States at a certain period. So there is not too much […]
Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, And Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction … by Iain Mcintyre and Andrew Nette (eds.)
The development and the origins of pulp fiction books are both well-documented and naturally before there was a market for those products, there was a demand for it. Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, however, starts not at the beginning of this genre, but dives deep into the phenomenon of the pulp books that dealt with subcultures […]
Dark City. The Real Los Angeles Noir by Jim Heimann (2018)
With Dark City a very unusual portrait of an American city is now available. It impresses with many pictures of the city of angels that show the really shadowy sides, the ones that inhabitants from the early 1910s until the 1950s experienced, and that provided the soil and inspiration for many novels and movies. As […]
Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s by Alan Nadel (2017)
Alan Nadel, probably best known for his expert writings on the Atomic Age and American everyday life in the 1950s, has come up with another study of that period. A time when not just the permanent fears of a hot war or Soviet invasion were present, but also strange (or possibly communist) activities from your […]
Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America … by Steffen Hantke
The 1950s and 1960s were the decades when science-fiction movies boomed and during that time not so much technology, but disgust, shock, fear, basically all aspects of horror and horror movies, were used instead to give science fiction movies a certain direction by presenting miniature or giant creatures, mutants and every kind or harrowing creature […]
Phil Spector: Sound of the Sixties by Sean MacLeod (2017)
Pop music gave birth to countless numbers of singers, bands, one-hit-wonders and music producers. Until the early 1960s, however, there were very few important producers the size of Phil Spector; who, to use author Tom Woolfe’s phrase, was the “fist tycoon of teen.” His many pop “projects” that often left a lasting impression in the […]