Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music(University of Michigan Press) is a collection of in-depth essays approaching the subject matter with the best of intentions. Each explores characteristics of the music from thoughtful and well-researched perspectives. But most if not all leave no hint that they are investigating a musical idiom that possibly exists nowhere except in the minds of those for whom...

He does note that there is something special about the record, however, in that it was performed by a "vocal and instrumental quartet," and adds, "It's different." He is referring to it as being stylistically unique, but more specifically that it is performed by those who wrote it. A year later, on Feb. 9, 1964, millions watched the Beatles on CBS's "The Ed Sullivan Show" and rock 'n' roll stopped being singularly an American art form. In the United Kingdom, the famed Denmark Street (tantamount to America's Tin Pan Alley) commercial songwriting business was...

With a melancholy spirit, Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business (Gotham) reflects on a time when real artists had legitimate control and the chance for exposure in the music business. It is also the story of how critics define who is authentic, along with how and perhaps why this is not the way it ought to be. One realizes that the geniuses in the book-and all of them are geniuses, going by author Danny Goldberg's reasonable definition-would have little or no chance in today's music scene, which is not so much fickle as totally fractured. Goldberg knows of what he speaks as a veteran manager and publicist for some of the world's top bands...

  The tribute-album idiom has changed. It used to be the cover song: Pat Boone covering Little Richard, for a '50s example of white artists taking black artists' songs into middle-class homes; or Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs' "Little Darlin'" becoming a hit by the Diamonds while few even heard the first, utterly untamed version while the white cover hit the charts. And so it went, following a tradition that began much earlier, when the real thing was never the right one for charts and radio...

Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen all suffer from genius exhaustion. They are hip nostalgia. Neil Young's superb Greendale went into so many different idioms (album, film, novel, comic book) that our short-attention culture couldn't manage its complexity. It was lost in translation. The Stones, Police and other rock brands are on Viagra tours, artificially getting it up. Weather Report is bringing back fusion that never should have existed and still doesn't if you want to authentically get down with jazz or rock. Tom Waits jumps out in front of all of them by scuttling up from the subterranean nether culture that has permitted him to grow artistically without suffering the kind of fame that can force one to keep going when it is long past . . .

Zachary Lazar’s Sway: A Novel (Little, Brown) is a guide to self-involved characters slopping around in the sexual mud and quicksand of the ’60s. All of the characters are members of The Rolling Stones or were associated with them as the 1960s counterculture went the wrong way. Many had to scream “Gimme shelter!” for real. To reference another Stones song, there had been too much sympathy for the devil. The ’60s ran out of brilliant ideas midway through, and the end of it all is what this novel is about, with the Stones as cultural vortex.

The life of Blind Willie McTell

Johnny Cash is the ultimate American popular music enigma. Never considered hip during his career until the 1990s, when recording with Rick Rubin commenced, he fell short of rockabilly cool and could not quite make it to outlaw status within country music. He never got to rock ’n’ roll.