Time Out 1000 Songs to Change Your Life (Time Out Guides) (Paperback)

by Editors of Time Out (Author)
Key Phrases: white stripes, pilgrim travelers, most recent album, Time Out, New York, Getting It Wrong (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Music can shock and soothe, amuse and appall, but above all move the listener. In more than 30 essays and features, a variety of writers, critics, and musicians explore those songs that made a difference to their lives, to society, and to music history itself. Illustrated throughout with full-color posters, album covers, and photographs, the book is organized by theme and features informative sidebars. Sampling everything from folk songs to fugues, hip-hop to hymns, Time Out 1000 Songs to Change Your Life includes musician interviews and complete discographical details.

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Product Details Paperback: 280 pages Publisher: Time Out (June 28, 2008) Language: English ISBN-10: 1846700825 ISBN-13: 978-1846700828 Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews) Amazon.com Sales Rank: #410,294 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books) Popular in this category: (What's this?) #80 in  Books > Reference > Publishing & Books > Bibliographies & Indexes > Music

Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
white stripes, pilgrim travelers, most recent album, comedy song

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Time Out, New York, Getting It Wrong, African American, Little Richard, James Brown, Public Enemy, Johnny Cash, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Led Zeppelin, Ray Charles, Steely Dan, David Bowie, Paul Simon, Miles Davis, John Lewis, Pete Waterman, Brill Building, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Bruce Springsteen, San Francisco, Missy Elliott, Beach Boys

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

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3 Reviews 5 star:  (2) 4 star:  (1) 3 star:    (0) 2 star:    (0) 1 star:    (0)           Average Customer Review 4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews 3 of 3 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Rollicking, readable and fascinating, October 27, 2008 By  R. Darden - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    The Time Out guides are all first-rate. This is one of the best of the proliferation of "Best of..." books that are out there. Some of the very best music journalists available contributed to this stellar collection. 1 of 2 people found the following review helpful: 4.0 out of 5 stars Softcore phonography, January 12, 2009 By  Roochak - See all my reviews In their marvelous book, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, authors Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor argue that our arbitrary preferences for certain musical styles over others are rooted in our equally arbitrary convictions about musical "authenticity". The music we like is "real"; the music we dislike is "fake", therefore artistically and perhaps even morally unworthy of our attention. (The meaning of the word "artificial" has taken a 180 degree turn since the sixteenth century.) It's our instinctive association of "realness" with artistic value that manifests itself in the armed camps we tend to make of the various music fandoms. The futility of objective judgment in aesthetic matters aside, isn't it possible that our musical distastes stem from a lack of imagination? When we can't imagine what other listeners could possibly enjoy about hip hop, or metal, or opera, or jazz, mightn't that say less about our insight into artistic integrity than it does about our musical parochialism? It's hard to like what's unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is always suspect. 1000 SONGS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE (yes, the title overstates the case) isn't a consumer guide or a best-of list: it's a collection of 36 new essays about music and its relation to the emotions, to culture, and technology. That is, it's about music as we use it to alter our consciousness in various, not necessarily pharmaceutical, ways. Those uses are endless. Electronic music from Cage to Kraftwerk (the real sound of the city) celebrates not a humanist but a post-humanist aesthetic; techno and gospel provoke ecstatic reactions in listeners high on drugs or religion, respectively; hard rock channels our anger into cathartic release; Schubert's expansive song cycle "Winterreise" anticipates Samuel Beckett's cosmically morose protagonists by a century. Even Barker and Taylor weigh in with a piece on the paradox of great songwriting as unpremeditated art. Why is it that the best pop songs always seem to be the ones that were written in twenty minutes, sometimes when the songwriter was stoned? The fundamental problem with writing about music is, in the words of Sir Thomas Beecham, that most people "don't really understand music -- they just like the noise it makes." (I've lifted that quotation from Jack Massarik's article on the ABCs of jazz improvisation.) If anything about music is more important than what the listener makes of it, I don't know; but when even listeners who have a wider than average frame of aesthetic reference have little trouble reducing music to sonic wallpaper, then what's the most useful thing someone writing about music can try to do? Perhaps that would be to persuade readers/listeners to engage with music's ways of meaning, assuming that music is something more than a private conversation between musicians, and especially assuming that the writer does more than cherish recordings as commodity fetish-objects, to the exclusion of the music itself. I'm always on the lookout for a great book about phonography; this is a pretty good one, a modest collection of brief but intelligent conversations between reader and writer. Unlike a consumer guide, the focus here isn't on what to listen to next, but what to make of what we've heard so far. 4 of 40 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars =3, August 14, 2008 By  jinx_1107 - See all my reviews The book got here by the date it said would get here. It's not that great of a book, but the condition and delivery was all perfect.		Ad feedback   Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Time Out (June 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1846700825
• ISBN-13: 978-1846700828
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #410,294 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #80 in

  Books > Reference > Publishing & Books > Bibliographies & Indexes > Music

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rollicking, readable and fascinating, October 27, 2008

By	R. Darden - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Time Out guides are all first-rate. This is one of the best of the proliferation of "Best of..." books that are out there. Some of the very best music journalists available contributed to this stellar collection.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Softcore phonography, January 12, 2009

By	Roochak - See all my reviews

In their marvelous book, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, authors Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor argue that our arbitrary preferences for certain musical styles over others are rooted in our equally arbitrary convictions about musical "authenticity". The music we like is "real"; the music we dislike is "fake", therefore artistically and perhaps even morally unworthy of our attention. (The meaning of the word "artificial" has taken a 180 degree turn since the sixteenth century.) It's our instinctive association of "realness" with artistic value that manifests itself in the armed camps we tend to make of the various music fandoms.

The futility of objective judgment in aesthetic matters aside, isn't it possible that our musical distastes stem from a lack of imagination? When we can't imagine what other listeners could possibly enjoy about hip hop, or metal, or opera, or jazz, mightn't that say less about our insight into artistic integrity than it does about our musical parochialism? It's hard to like what's unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is always suspect.

1000 SONGS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE (yes, the title overstates the case) isn't a consumer guide or a best-of list: it's a collection of 36 new essays about music and its relation to the emotions, to culture, and technology. That is, it's about music as we use it to alter our consciousness in various, not necessarily pharmaceutical, ways. Those uses are endless. Electronic music from Cage to Kraftwerk (the real sound of the city) celebrates not a humanist but a post-humanist aesthetic; techno and gospel provoke ecstatic reactions in listeners high on drugs or religion, respectively; hard rock channels our anger into cathartic release; Schubert's expansive song cycle "Winterreise" anticipates Samuel Beckett's cosmically morose protagonists by a century. Even Barker and Taylor weigh in with a piece on the paradox of great songwriting as unpremeditated art. Why is it that the best pop songs always seem to be the ones that were written in twenty minutes, sometimes when the songwriter was stoned?

The fundamental problem with writing about music is, in the words of Sir Thomas Beecham, that most people "don't really understand music -- they just like the noise it makes." (I've lifted that quotation from Jack Massarik's article on the ABCs of jazz improvisation.) If anything about music is more important than what the listener makes of it, I don't know; but when even listeners who have a wider than average frame of aesthetic reference have little trouble reducing music to sonic wallpaper, then what's the most useful thing someone writing about music can try to do? Perhaps that would be to persuade readers/listeners to engage with music's ways of meaning, assuming that music is something more than a private conversation between musicians, and especially assuming that the writer does more than cherish recordings as commodity fetish-objects, to the exclusion of the music itself.

I'm always on the lookout for a great book about phonography; this is a pretty good one, a modest collection of brief but intelligent conversations between reader and writer. Unlike a consumer guide, the focus here isn't on what to listen to next, but what to make of what we've heard so far.

4 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars =3, August 14, 2008

By	jinx_1107 - See all my reviews

The book got here by the date it said would get here. It's not that great of a book, but the condition and delivery was all perfect.