Overview

Bring the Noise weaves together interviews, reviews, essays, and features to create a critical history of the last twenty years of pop culture, juxtaposing the voices of many of rock and hip hop’s most provocative artists—Morrissey, Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, The Stone Roses, P.J. Harvey, Radiohead—with Reynolds’s own passionate analysis. With all the energy and insight you would expect from the author of Rip It Up and Start Again, Bring the Noise tracks the alternately fraught and fertile relationship between white bohemia and black street music. The selections transmit the immediacy of their moment while offering a running commentary on the broader enduring questions of race and resistance, multiculturalism, and division. From grunge to grime, from Madchester to the Dirty South, Bring the Noise chronicles hip hop and alternative rock’s competing claims to be the cutting edge of innovation and the voice of opposition in an era of conservative backlash. Alert to both the vivid detail and the big picture, Simon Reynolds has shaped a compelling narrative that cuts across a thrillingly turbulent two-decade period of pop music.

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9781593764012

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Praise for the U.K. edition of Bring the Noise <br>#4 Music Book of 2007 -- Uncut <br> If I had to choose just one commentator to guide me through the last quarter-century of popular (and not so popular) music it would have to be--on the basis of depth of knowledge, range of reference, soundness of judgment, and fluency of style--Simon Reynolds. --Geoff Dyer <br> His abilities as a forensic listener are acute and his comprehensive knowledge of the period enables brilliant expositions of the influences that link apparently separate styles . . . In this schema it is always hybridity and impurity that power the creation and renewal of the avant-garde. Reynolds's tireless support for that egalitarian and progressive agenda marks him out as the foremost popular music critic of this era. --Jon Garvie, The Times Literary Supplement <br> It has been claimed to the point of tedium that writing about music is akin to 'dancing about architecture.' Well, whatever's wrong with dancing? But the best critics reach for something deeper, a framework and a context that stimulates fresh ways of thinking about that music, of 'seeing' that architecture anew. This questing, restlessly thoughtful approach is favoured by Simon Reynolds . . . Discovering the community and the sound he was searching for in the late-Eighties rave explosion, Reynolds's subsequent writing on rock, rap and soul searches for communities and scenes of equal vividness, with a hungry vigour that rewards the reader . . . The sheer glee of his pursuit of new sound carries the reader through insightful scene reports on grime, dancehall and crunk with an infectious energy and inquisitiveness . . . You may not agree with all Reynolds has to say, but it's very clear that this isn't the point. These pieces are arguments to be concluded by the reader, they are stimulation for fresh thought. The result is one of the more gratifyingly thought-provoking pop tomes of recent years. Long may Reynolds so intrigu

Praise for the U.K. edition of Bring the Noise <br>#4 Music Book of 2007 -- Uncut <br> If I had to choose just one commentator to guide me through the last quarter-century of popular (and not so popular) music it would have to be--on the basis of depth of knowledge, range of reference, soundness of judgment, and fluency of style--Simon Reynolds. --Geoff Dyer <br> His abilities as a forensic listener are acute and his comprehensive knowledge of the period enables brilliant expositions of the influences that link apparently separate styles . . . In this schema it is always hybridity and impurity that power the creation and renewal of the avant-garde. Reynolds's tireless support for that egalitarian and progressive agenda marks him out as the foremost popular music critic of this era. --Jon Garvie, The Times Literary Supplement <br> It has been claimed to the point of tedium that writing about music is akin to 'dancing about architecture.' Well, whatever's wrong with da

Author Information

Simon Reynolds is a consulting editor at Spin magazine. He is also the author of Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock 'n' Roll, Totally Wired, Bring the Noise, and Energy Flash.

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