The Best Music Books of 2019
Consider this your annual reminder that there are music books worth reading besides whatever rock-star memoir has the biggest marketing budget this year. Our staff-curated list of musical biographies, cultural histories and, in one case, an artist’s erotic journal follows below, in alphabetical order by title.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2019 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
A Song for You: My Life With Whitney Houston
By Robyn Crawford
Look closely at candid photos of Whitney Houston in her prime and you may notice a woman named Robyn Crawford in the background. As the singer’s former assistant and creative director, Crawford was indispensable to Houston as she ascended to superstar status. But there was always tabloid gossip surrounding their relationship, especially once Crawford left the music industry in 2000: Were the two simply childhood friends, or was it something deeper than that? The truth, as revealed in Crawford’s stunning memoir A Song for You, is much more complicated. She pays homage to her best friend with fond, funny, sometimes-tragic anecdotes, from their initial romantic connection as camp counselors in New Jersey to blow-ups with Bobby Brown and Houston’s mother, Cissy, years later. Crawford writes with pathos, clarity, and tenderness while tracing the tragedies that rocked her family and the Houstons. –Eric Torres
Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Sound System Culture
By Joe Muggs and Brian David Stevens
“Bass is fundamental,” writes Joe Muggs in this book’s introduction. It’s physical, not cerebral, he says, “reaching through walls and floors, propagating outwards, marking out social (and antisocial) spaces.” Bass, Mids, Tops is an attempt to follow those shock waves back to their source—the sound-system culture of Britain’s Caribbean immigrant communities—and then trace their reverberations through lovers-rock reggae and post-punk, through hip-hop, jungle, grime, dubstep, and beyond. Muggs interviews multiple generations of players—people like Dennis Bovell, a Barbadian dub selector who ran one of London’s most influential sound systems before producing everyone from the Slits to Linton Kwesi Johnson; Storm, a drum’n’bass DJ who, along with her late partner Kemistry, co-founded the influential Metalheadz label in the ’90s; and Mala, whose ’00s dubstep duo Digital Mystikz was responsible for a sound “as pure and strange as anything in British electronic history.” Told entirely through candid interviews (accompanied by portraits from Brian David Stevens), Bass, Mids, Tops is an engrossing tale of sounds ricocheting around the world—and an instinctive allegiance to frequencies more felt than heard. –Philip Sherburne
Cruel to Be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe
By Will Birch
A natural-born raconteur and a perpetually underrated songwriter, Nick Lowe has stories for miles—he just had no inclination to put them down on the page. Enter writer Will Birch, a fellow survivor of Britain’s rough-and-tumble ’70s pub rock scene, who was not only a first-hand witness to Lowe’s misadventures but knew all the supporting players, too. As such, Cruel to Be Kind doesn’t shy away from Lowe’s excesses and mistakes, but the book also prefers to emphasize his charms while explaining, for example, why it took him a decade to finish “The Beast in Me” for his one-time father-in-law Johnny Cash, or how he electrocuted himself during one of his first concerts with his early band, Brinsley Schwarz. Taken all together, these stories make for a book that’s as warm, funny, and affecting as Lowe’s best songs. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul
By Leila Taylor
Early on in Darkly, writer and Brooklyn Public Library Creative Director Leila Taylor sums up her teenage fondness for all things goth: “I didn’t have to talk about my feelings; the poster for Joy Division’s Closer did it for me.” Taylor begins her cultural history by discussing the dark, distinctive aesthetics of Siouxsie and the Banshees and the self-created mythology of cult electronic duo Drexciya. From there, she ventures into Edgar Allan Poe’s racism, the intertwined legacies of slavery and horror stories, and the troubling appeal of “ruin porn.” By the time Taylor returns to music, analyzing the gothic elements of black performers like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (over-the-top vocals, coffins on stage) and M Lamar (operatic inflections, allusions to historical trauma), the reader will likely see the topic through a new sociopolitical lens. Darkly is a haunting reminder of how the horrific corners of American history have shaped generations of musicians. –Tobias Carroll
Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
By Hanif Abdurraqib
Go Ahead in the Rain isn’t just a love letter to one of the greatest hip-hop groups ever—it’s also a brilliant poet unpacking his formative connections to the beats, the wordplay, and the jazz that set Tribe apart. And Abdurraqib, to his credit, doesn’t ignore the group’s missteps either. “They made the album the genre wanted, not the album they wanted to see in the genre,” he says of 1996’s Beats, Rhymes and Life, the first time the group’s winning streak slipped. Writing on what was once Tribe’s final record, 1998’s spiritless The Love Movement, Abdurraqib notes, “It felt like the ease with which they approached their past efforts was out the window.” You can feel his heartbreak: the crew that soundtracked his life became a pop-culture footnote. A panoramic view of Tribe tucked inside a personal history, Go Ahead in the Rain examines how young fandom evolves into something more like true adoration. –Marcus J. Moore
Read Pitchfork’s full review of Go Ahead in the Rain
The Hard Times: The First 40 Years
By Matt Saincome, Bill Conway, and Krissy Howard
“Crust Punk Hops Train to Parents’ Lake House.” “Straight-Faced Guy With Arms Crossed Having Best Night of His Life.” “Supportive Girlfriend Shouldn’t Be.” For the past five years, The Hard Times has been churning out amusing, spot-on pieces satirizing the punk, hardcore, and indie worlds with a consistency that rivals The Onion in its prime. This book collects the website’s best writing but also adds a fictionalized history of The Hard Times that imagines its rise and fall from the 1970s through the mid-’00s, complete with era-appropriate content. (Sample ’80s headline: “Report: Sheena Is an Investment Banker Now.”) It is 250 pages of nonstop LOLs, even when the headlines hit just a liiittle too close to home (see: “Zine Editor Extends Submission Deadline for Eighth and Final Time,” “Aging Punk Loses Battle to Comfortable Clothes”). With its quick, single-page articles, The Hard Times: The First 40 Years could be considered a great punk-rock bathroom book—even if “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Morrissey’s Touring Band” didn’t make the cut. –Amy Phillips
High School
By Tegan and Sara Quin
From their very first battle of the bands in high school, Tegan and Sara Quin’s musical coming-of-age story was a great one—the tale of twin underdogs taking on the world. In their variously hilarious and devastating page-turner of a memoir, they take turns writing chapters about those germinal teenage years that inevitably shape your perspective on the whole world. Between the sleepovers, concerts, fights, and dreams, High School is a testament to the messiness and wisdom of youth and the psychological complexities of identical twindom. Tegan and Sara experiment with acid, sneak out to raves, navigate their earliest relationships with other young women, and along the way they find their sharp, honest voices—together and apart. –Jenn Pelly
Mechanical Fantasy Box: The Homoerotic Journal of Patrick Cowley
In addition to his queer dancefloor masterpieces, visionary producer Patrick Cowley made mind-blowing, body-pleasing soundtracks for ’70s gay porn flicks. He enacts those film’s scenarios in Mechanical Fantasy Box, a collection of his journals published with fabulous new illustrations by Gwenaël Rattke and a compilation of unreleased recordings. These brief-but-brilliant details are dispatched from the gay fantasia of late-’70s San Francisco, cruise rooms full of pot smoke and poppers and Vaseline and the kind of “menergy” Cowley would immortalize in song. At one point the producer recounts telling a buddy, “I know I’m going to be 50 yrs old and be able to look back and say, ‘I spent what I had to spend and used what was mine to use as it was intended.’ I loved it up.” Cowley died of AIDS-related causes at 32, but otherwise he was goddamn right. We’re lucky to still feel his love—and to read his diary. –Jesse Dorris
The Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division: The Oral History
By Jon Savage
In The Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else, longtime punk historian Jon Savage chronicles Joy Division’s four-year existence and eternal influence, as told by the group’s surviving members and extensive inner circle. Savage’s interviews reveal aspects of the post-punk band’s legend that even diehard fans may not know, including wonderfully detailed anecdotes of gigs both failed and spectacular. The story of Joy Division didn’t end with the death of frontman Ian Curtis, nor did it really even begin with him. The Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else shows how four young men channeled their working-class restlessness and the bleakness of industrial Manchester into something beautiful and crushing that endures to this day. –Noah Yoo
Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly
By Jim DeRogatis
2019 was the year that finally took R. Kelly down. In January, dream hampton’s docuseries Surviving R. Kelly inspired investigations and, eventually, charges against Kelly from law enforcement in multiple states. Then, in June, Jim DeRogatis published Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly, a book born out of decades of close reporting on Kelly’s life and crimes. It is significant not only for its detailed investigative work but for its masterful exploration of journalism as a fundamental component of justice. DeRogatis maps Kelly’s escalating behavior in private alongside his rising star in public and, in doing so, offers an indictment of the criminal justice system, the press, and the music industry for facilitating Kelly’s abuse. Soulless is a book as much about one man’s violence as it is about a society’s cowardly complicity. –Rawiya Kameir
Read Pitchfork’s full review of Soulless
Time Flowing Backwards: A Memoir
By Graeme Jefferies
If you’re already interested in the vital indie rock of New Zealand during the 1980s and ’90s, then Graeme Jefferies’ memoir is a must-read. But even if you’ve never heard of Jefferies’ intense post-punk bands Nocturnal Projections, This Kind of Punishment, and the Cakekitchen, Time Flowing Backwards is a compelling tale of one musician’s decades-long attempts to scrape by. Opening in 1990, when he bought a one-way ticket to London, Jefferies chronicles all the squatting, busking, and odd jobs he cobbled together around Europe before landing back in New Zealand, all while constantly reinventing the Cakekitchen. He also details the creation of specific songs on a fascinatingly granular level, but Time Flowing Backwards is most absorbing whenever Jefferies has lost a gig or an apartment or a relationship and has to figure out what to do next. “I came very close to disaster several times,” he admits. “But I never quite fell down the hole to a point where I couldn’t crawl back out again.” –Marc Masters
Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song that Changed American Music Forever
By Geoff Edgers
How did a washed-up sleaze-rock band help bring hip-hop to the MTV masses? That story, told in precise detail by Washington Post arts reporter Geoff Edgers, is also the story of Run-DMC and their producer Rick Rubin, an ambitious NYU kid with wild ideas about fusing rap and rock. (It was Rubin who convinced a skeptical Run-DMC to collaborate with a strung-out Aerosmith in the first place, though there’s plenty of contradictory lore about who implanted that idea in the producer’s head.) The book’s scope spans a decade, but its focus zeroes in on just five minutes and 17 seconds—the runtime of Run-DMC’s genre-busting 1986 “Walk This Way” cover—in order to reveal how the song transformed pop culture for good: by solidifying rap’s mainstream appeal and knocking down white-dominated programming formats. If you buy into Edgers’ thesis, this moment represented for rap “the kind of historic marker that rock experienced when Elvis thrust his pelvis on The Milton Berle Show.” And even if you don’t, it’s hard not to be sucked in by the author’s eye for incidental details, like Steven Tyler snorting coke in the studio bathroom while history was being made. –Zach Schonfeld
Why Karen Carpenter Matters
By Karen Tongson
Why Karen Carpenter Matters is about the kind of chart-topping suburban pop that lies at the core of white capitalist mythology—sunny and sentimental, meticulously calibrated for Nixon-era FM radio. But the book centers those at the margins of American society, revealing how the Carpenters’ music resonated with immigrants, LGBTQ folks, and people of color who craved the idyllic normalcy that the siblings embodied. Tongson would know: She is, in her own words, a butch lesbian, and her Filipino musician parents named her after Karen Carpenter. In this exploration of her namesake’s legacy, she deftly weaves memoir, history, and cultural criticism to highlight the dynamic relationship between artists and listeners—all the while avoiding the militant “yasss girl” identity politics that have come to define modern fandom. Music seeps into our lives in confounding ways, Tongson appears to say; even the most seemingly banal pop can surprise us. –Cat Zhang
Year of the Monkey
By Patti Smith
Patti Smith’s latest memoir, Year of the Monkey, feels like the next logical step following the liminal fantasy of 2015’s M Train—or a more focused continuation of Smith’s spontaneous onstage freestyling. The book’s vignettes are vivid and arresting; Smith expertly navigates the edges around our willful suspension of disbelief, pushing at the corners, expanding the spaces in our imaginations so they’re expansive enough to ride along with her. But what grounds this work is the mundane, whether it’s forgetting her phone charger on the road, or the comfort she takes in her long-standing friendships, even as they fade. It’s a slim volume that’s easy to inhale, but when you finish, you might find yourself slightly off-kilter, and sad that it’s over so soon. –Caryn Rose
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
