Whether he liked it or not, Kurt Cobain became the “voice of his generation” for many fans. His music meant a lot to them, as did his words. According to Nick Soulsby, editor of Cobain on Cobain: Interviews and Encounters (Chicago Review Press), the Nirvana frontman was shy yet eager to speak, courting attention from fanzines, college radio and the music press until the weight of stardom became just another trap—a gilded version of the mind-numbing life he once hoped to escape. Interviews and Encounters contains a sampling of articles on Nirvana, starting with a 1989 piece in the University of Washington student paper and ending in early 1994 with Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic fielding the questions for their absent leader.
Cobain was articulate and thoughtful. “Maybe rock has had its day,” he told an Italian rock critic. “Rock has been around for thirty years, and when you play with a four-four beat, you run out of ideas sooner or later.”
The Band Photographs: 1968-1969 (Backbeat Books), by Elliott Landy
No one called it Americana. The critics searched for words to describe The Band as they emerged from Bob Dylan’s shadow and set the foundation for a genre unnamed until years later. Elliott Landy, a photographer with backstage passes to the major musical events of the late 1960s, did his most distinctive work documenting The Band as they recorded their first two albums. The Band Photographs collects 200 photos from that era, many of them black and white and displayed across full pages. Wearing short-brimmed hats and old suit coats and posed against the murky hills of Woodstock, N.Y., The Band resemble a rock group that time-travelled from the Civil War. Landy also spent time inside their legendary Big Pink house, catching them in close-ups and working on their music like fine craftsmen.
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Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Ben Ratliff
Although the age of music sharing, iPods and streaming forms the context, Every Song Ever is actually a series of essays on the art of listening. New York Times critic Ben Ratliff writes about music in fresh ways with a vast if not entirely infallible grasp of music history. He “can’t think of an entire style or aesthetic movement in music favoring slowness for its own sake.” Gregorian chant? Certain tracks by Black Sabbath? And he doesn’t really get the importance of genre as a set of inspirational conventions. But there are so many good insights in Every Song Ever that it’s easy to overlook small oversights. As for speed, he observes that it conveys little emotion; in music as in life, it’s often just a way of showing off.
The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows are Built (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Sarah Crichton Books), by Jack Viertel
As the owner of Broadway theaters where Angels in America and The Producers debuted, Jack Viertel writes of musicals from an insider’s perspective. The Secret Life of the American Musical is neither history nor summary but, rather, an opinion of how stage productions that break into song work—or fail. He admits he has occasionally been wrong, as when he pressed for a logical climax to Hairspray rather than the spectacle that delighted audiences. “Musical theater,” he writes, is “the intersection of craftsmanship and the irrationally thrilling.”
