Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist Liz Pelly (Hodder & Stoughton) Enraging, thoroughly depressing, but entirely necessary, Mood Music offers a timely, forensically researched demolition of Spotify. In Pelly’s account, the music streaming giant views music as a kind of nondescript sonic wallpaper, artists as an unnecessary encumbrance to the business of making more money and its target market not as music fans, but mindless drones who don’t really care what they’re listening to, ripe for manipulation by its algorithm. Sharp business practices and evidence of its deleterious effect on the quality and variety …
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist Liz Pelly (Hodder & Stoughton) Enraging, thoroughly depressing, but entirely necessary, Mood Music offers a timely, forensically researched demolition of Spotify. In Pelly’s account, the music streaming giant views music as a kind of nondescript sonic wallpaper, artists as an unnecessary encumbrance to the business of making more money and its target market not as music fans, but mindless drones who don’t really care what they’re listening to, ripe for manipulation by its algorithm. Sharp business practices and evidence of its deleterious effect on the quality and variety of new music abound: the worst thing is that Pelly can’t really come up with a viable alternative in a world where convenience trumps all.
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Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty Kate Mossman* (Bonnier)* There’s no doubt that Men of a Certain Age is a hard sell, a semi-autobiographical book in which the New Statesman’s arts editor traces her obsession with often wildly unfashionable, ageing male artists – Queen’s Roger Taylor, Bruce Hornsby, Steve Perry of Journey, Jon Bon Jovi among them – through a series of interviews variously absurd, insightful, hair-raising and weirdly touching. But it’s elevated to unmissable status by Mossman’s writing, which is so sparkling, witty and shrewd that your personal feelings about her subjects are rendered irrelevant amid the cocktail of self-awareness, affection and sharp analysis she brings to every encounter. In a world of music books retelling tired legends, Men of a Certain Age offers that rare thing: an entirely original take on rock history.
Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur Jeff Pearlman* (HarperCollins)* Some posthumous accounts of rapper Tupac Shakur’s life have tended towards the hagiographic: better known as a writer on sport than music, Jeff Pearlman has written an incisive biography that reveals someone infinitely more complicated and contradictory than either the “thug” he was wont to portray himself as, or the saintly figure of the 2003 documentary Tupac: Resurrection. It suggests the persona he projected was carefully constructed: the young Shakur was actually a sensitive, geeky ballet student, albeit one from a very turbulent background. But his aspirations to a career in hip-hop coincided with the dominance of gangsta rap and he altered his approach accordingly: the saga of the mask gradually eating the face makes for grimly compelling reading.
The Tremolo Diaries ** Justin Currie (Simon & Schuster) The Tremolo Diaries opens with Del Amitri’s frontman in a dark place: diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, his partner in a care home following a stroke, his band bottom of the bill on a tour of the US – a country they once looked set to break – alongside an artist whose music he loathes. What follows is an extraordinarily frank exploration of illness, depression and life in a band whose members know that, while hardly struggling, their commercial heyday has long passed. Currie is perceptive, funny, winningly cantankerous company, disinclined to pull punches or graft a happy-ever-after narrative on to his story; you don’t have to know a note of his music to find The Tremolo Diaries richly rewarding.
*Love and Fury: The Extraordinary Life, Death and Legacy of Joe Meek ** Darryl W Bullock (Omnibus) *Darryl Bullock died at the end of last year: the book he had just completed underlines what an authoritative chronicler of pop’s LGBTQ+ history he was. His biography of groundbreaking producer Joe Meek returns him to the territory of 2021’s fascinating The Velvet Mafia: The Gay Men Who Ran the Swinging Sixties, in which Meek featured heavily. The tragic figure behind the Tornados’ transatlantic chart-topper Telstar warrants deeper exploration not merely because he was a sonic genius but because he was so profoundly singular: openly gay, mentally unstable, mixed up with the Krays, obsessed with the occult and the extraterrestrial. Love and Fury proves that exhaustive research doesn’t preclude page-turning drama.