Hip-Hop, Hard Rock, Grunge and Spaghetti Westerns

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Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (Oxford University Press), edited by Alessandro De Rosa

Ennio Morricone will forever be associated with the music he wrote for Italian director Sergio Leone’s trio of “spaghetti westerns” in the 1960s. Morricone’s lonesome yet dramatic themes, imaginatively arranged for instruments such as electric guitar, Jews harp and whistle, are among the best-known film scores in cinema history. However, as he insists in In His Own Words, music for westerns constitute a small percentage of his output and his output is enormous.

Built around interviews with a young Italian composer, Alessandro De Rosa, Morricone talks about composing and arranging in great technical detail. Music staffs illustrate several pages. The takeaway for non-musicians has to do with the careful line he maintains between composing for himself and writing within constraints, of not losing touch with the post-Webern values of his education without losing the audience. Deftly, in Morricone’s music atonality meets classical music verities and the timbres associated with rock in a Mexican stand-off where every side wins.

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press), by Hanif Abdurraqib

For Hanif Abdurraqib, A Tribe Called Quest bridged the gap between the jazz he grew up with in his parents’ home and the hip-hop of his own generation. “This was the jazz I had been looking for,” he writes in Go Ahead in the Rain. A Tribe Called Quest seemed to him like old souls in ‘90s bodies, interpreters of “past grooves, layering samples from every corner of the crates and pulling out only the useful parts of the music.” Go Ahead in the Rain transcends the usual fan book for its poetic prose as well as its insights into the wider context of the music.

Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography (Da Capo), by Chris Salewicz

The stars were bright in those days, the 1970s, and few lights in rock’s firmament shone brighter than Jimmy Page. In The Definitive Biography, Chris Salewicz tells tales—and there were plenty in Led Zeppelin’s wake—but places the narrative within the context of the era’s pop culture. Page debuted on television at age 13 as a skiffle musician and went on to become the go-to session guitarist in ‘60s Swinging London. Next step, The Yardbirds and from there, Led Zeppelin, whose heavy-metallic-blues rock was always contrasted with acoustic balladry.

Leading a lush bohemian life even in early days, Page was intellectually curious, even erudite but given over to unhealthy appetites aroused by the cavalier culture of ‘70s rock stardom. Some of his exploits could merit prison nowadays, but then, he might have shared a cell with David Bowie and host of other hedonists. “The paradoxically puritanical United States of America is endlessly attracted to prestige: the excess that Zeppelin purveyed,” Salewicz writes. The Definitive Biography is a perceptive look back at a great musician, a troubled man and a checkered era.

Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain (Ecco) by Danny Goldberg

Danny Goldberg admits that some of his stories about Kurt Cobain have become “semi-mythical after years of retelling.” Goldberg’s memoir focuses on the last four years of Cobain’s life, the period when he worked as Nirvana’s manager. He admits to “a largely romantic” view, presenting Cobain in almost paradoxical terms—a slacker with a sophisticated intellect, a humorous depressive, sometimes sarcastic and unpleasant yet capable of “a graciousness rare in geniuses or stars.” In many ways, Goldberg, already a middle-aged businessman when he encountered Cobain, was an odd partner for a musician who rose meteorically from the backwaters of a subculture. Goldberg gets at the fissures within Cobain as underground hero and celebrity face, a chasm he couldn’t bridge through music that married popular melodicism with punk attitude and metallic roar.