Win a Faber music book bundle! [closed]
The generous folks at Faber have given three musically-inclined Bookhugger readers the chance to win three shiny and, er, banging, titles!
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Lipstick Traces, by Greil Marcus
This book is about a single, serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called ‘Anarchy in the UK’ was issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. Made by a four-man rock ‘n’ roll band called the Sex Pistols, and written by singer Johnny Rotten, the song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris-based intellectuals.
First organised in 1952 as the Lettrist International, and refounded in 1957 at a conference of European avant-garde artists as the Situationist International, the group gained its greatest notoriety during the French revolt of May 1968, when its slogans were spray-painted across the walls of Paris, after which their critique was given up to history and the group disappeared. The group looked back to the surrealists of the 1920s, the Dadaists who made their names during and just after the First World War, the young Karl Marx, Saint-Just, various medieval heretics, and the Knights of the Round Table.
‘My conviction is that such circumstances are primarily odd. For a gnomic, gnostic critique dreamed up by a handful of Left Bank cafe prophets to reappear a quarter-century later, to make the charts, and then to come to life as a whole new set of demands on culture – this is almost transcendently odd.’ Greil Marcus
‘Some people say a record or a film changed their life. In my case, it was a book. Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces did that back in 1990. It really was that important.’ Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers.
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Retromania, by Simon Reynolds
We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band reformations and reunion tours, revivals and reissues, remakes and mash-ups … Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival resources of rock history have been exhausted? What happens when we run out of past?
Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have reached a tipping point. Earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity, but never before has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.
Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own era?
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33 Revolutions Per Minute, by Dorian Lynskey
A thrilling and moving history, told via 33 songs, of the music that inspired and soundtracked social change.
When pop music meets politics, the results are often thrilling, sometimes life-changing and never simple. 33 Revolutions Per Minute tracks this turbulent relationship across 33 pivotal songs that span seven decades and four continents, from Billie Holiday crooning Strange Fruit to Green Day raging against the Iraq war.
Dorian Lynskey explores the individuals, ideas and events behind each song, showing how protest songs have soundtracked and informed social change since the 1930s, making their presence felt from the streets to the corridors of power. Through the work of such artists as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Fela Kuti, the Clash, U2, R.E.M., Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine, this expansive survey examines how music has engaged with racial unrest, nuclear paranoia, apartheid, war, poverty and oppression, offering hope, stirring anger, inciting action, and producing songs which continue to resonate years down the line, sometimes at great cost to the musicians involved.
Packed with anecdote, argument and exclusive new interviews, 33 Revolutions Per Minute is an absorbing and moving document of the songs that made history.
The Questions:
To win, answer one simple question, the answer to which can be found in a recent Bookhugger article…
- Question 1: On what date did Nicky Wire’s fellow Manic members give him Lipstick Traces?
Terms and conditions
- Closing date for entries: 12th August 2011.
- Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
- Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
- The winners will be selected from those correct entries received before the closing date. Our decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
- Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger.
- The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
- The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.
July 29th, 2011 at 1:32 pm
I enjoy all kinds of music literature & this bundle looks terrific.
July 29th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
As a massive Manics fan I’ve got to read the Lipstick Traces book!
July 29th, 2011 at 8:16 pm
a great prize!
July 31st, 2011 at 11:39 pm
My late nephew was in a Sex Pistols tribute band ,I would love this book (Lipstick Traces) which I would treasure, in memory of him ,and his great talent .