The Best Music Books of 2022

Lush were rock stars back home in London. In the U.S., they were a Nineties dream-pop cult band, starring Miki Berenyi as the iconic chanteuse with the neon-scarlet hair. Fingers Crossed is her candid, often brutally hilarious memoir of the mid-level rock hustle in the shoegaze and Britpop scenes. But it’s also the story of a loud woman in a male world that plainly doesn’t want her there. She hits the Lollapalooza tour, flirts with fame, meets loads of misogynistic men, many of them in bands. Yes, she names a name or two. (Anthony Kiedis’ pickup technique gets high praise, though it doesn’t work on her.) But you don’t need to know a thing about Lush to love Fingers Crossed — Berenyi makes her story so relatable, so poignant, so emotionally intense, it’s an irresistible rush of a book. —R.S.

A fascinating deep dive into the cultural history of one song: “Hey Jude,” the Beatles’ biggest hit and in many ways their weirdest. It’s a seven-minute song, half of it giving up to the most indelible “na na na na” chant this side of “A Long December.” Paul McCartney wrote “Hey Jude” in a time of turmoil for both the world and the band, yet it’s been consoling and uplifting people ever since. Campion, who has written studies of Warren Zevon and Kiss, brings fresh insights to the question of why this one Fabs tune keeps resonating so widely over the years. You might have heard it so many times you can hum every “na na na na” in your sleep, but Take a Sad Song makes it feel brand-new — and makes it all sound better-better-better. —R.S.

“Music has the ability to penetrate all the fucked-up ways we have learned to cope with the world,” Nick Cave says to his friend the journalist Seán O’Hagan early on in Faith, Hope and Carnage. The same could be said of death. The book, a 304-page conversation conducted during the early days of Covid, is styled in a stark Q&A format, but it is incredibly moving, hopeful, and at times very funny. While Cave muses about the power of art and tells “fucked up” tales of rock-star shenanigans, the book’s power is its quiet but deep reflection on the obliteration of loss — particularly the death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015. Crushingly, in May, after the book was published, Cave’s son Jethro Lazenby, 31, died. “Each life is precious and some of us understand it and some don’t. But certainly everyone will understand it in time.” Cave has no pat answers, but in opening himself up to the questions, he and O’Hagan provide more solace then scores of bestselling self-help books. —L.T.

In Dilla Time, journalist and New York University professor Dan Charnas delivers an authoritative biography and a provocative thesis: The enigmatic producer James “Dilla” Yancey invented a new metric structure of rhythm before passing away in 2006 at the age of 32. While Charnas illustrates his analysis with musical notations and Detroit city maps, he constructs a portrait of a quiet, wildly creative man from Conant Gardens whose life, lusts, and health were centered around his love for hip-hop culture. Elegantly written and deeply sourced, Dilla Time offers a story of a brilliant artist whose influence persists long after his death. —M.R.

As the slinky, pervy poet of Pulp, Jarvis Cocker wiggled his way into rock history with Nineties Britpop classics like “Common People.” But with Good Pop Bad Pop, he gives a delightful symposium from one of pop culture’s wisest, funniest philosophers. Cocker spends the book clearing out clutter from his tiny attic loft — old clothes, photos, ticket stubs, his first guitar. It’s a clever way to walk through his life story as a gawky kid, an obsessive music fan, an intellectual indie poseur. But he keeps returning to the eternal mystery: Why does pop trash play such a crucial role in our lives? As Cocker writes, “The idea that a culture could reveal more of itself through its throwaway items than through its supposedly revered artefacts was fascinating to me. Still is.” —R.S.

New York Times reporter Joe Coscarelli‘s Rap Capital offers a vivid account how rap music in Atlanta rose from the city’s Black community and created an industry stronghold for a generation of Black entrepreneurs. Through vignettes with the eclectic cast of characters that make the scene tick — rappers and businesspeople alike — Coscarelli paints a vivid portrait of the city’s unique wealth of talent and the opposing tensions inherent to Black wealth in America. The book’s concern with 2013 until 2020 lands right as the forces of racism and capitalism confronted the dawn of the streaming era. Throughout the book, Coscarelli makes complex business realities of the rap world feel colloquial. Streaming figures and social media followings all coalesce with the impressively sourced account of key moments in Atlanta rap lore. An essential history of one of rap’s most dynamic and influential movements.–J.I.

The songs Bob Dylan analyzes, from vintage country, blues, and R&B artists up through the Clash and Cher, aren’t remotely modern, and the philosophy is too male-centric. But in this idiosyncratic, sometimes maddening, and often wondrous and funny set of essays, he zeroes in on why certain songs and records work so well, and he sprinkles those observations with historical nuggets and even a few peeks behind the Dylan curtain (his views on divorce and touring). His riffs on the characters in the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” and Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider” are proudly uncouth, to say the least, and his takes on genuinely modern pop won’t make him any new fans. But the book adds up to a deeply personal tribute to the days when folk, country, and blues were the concrete-floor foundations of music, even if that era is now largely behind us. —D.B.

Starting in May 1979, when the British rock weekly Sounds coined the term in a headline for a piece about a triple bill of Iron Maiden, Samson, and Angel Witch, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, as the London-based author Michael Hann argues, was when “metal as it came to be understood was codified.” A former Guardian music editor, Hann’s generous oral history starts with that canonical May ’79 show and ends when flagship NWOBHM band Def Leppard issued the studio-buffed, deca-platinum Pyromania in 1983. Denim and Leather taps into an enormous store of goodwill. This was a fan’s subculture, built on fanzines and tape trading, and the biggest stars are often the biggest fans, from Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott extolling the glam canon to Metallica’s Lars Ulrich recounting his famous 1981 trip to the U.K. to see Diamond Head, where he realized: “I could go back to America and do this myself.” —M.M.

New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu met his best friend Ken in the 1990s when they were undergrads at UC Berkeley. It was a time when the music you liked was inextricably linked to your identity and personality, and Hsu sees it as a sign of “personal growth” that he can get along so easily with a Pearl Jam fan. “Yet the more we hung out, the less certain I was of these distinctions,” he writes. Ken was killed in a carjacking three years after meeting Hsu, and this gorgeous, generous-hearted memoir is both a fond remembrance of a pivotal friendship and a vivid reflection on coming of age in the Nineties. —M.M.

Steven Hyden is a brilliant rock chronicler, whether he’s writing about great bands or terrible ones. But with Long Road, as Eddie Vedder would say, he’s unleashed a lion. It’s a cultural/personal biography of Pearl Jam, the Nineties’ most popular rock heroes. What a weird story: Seattle punk dudes hit the big time, speak out about feminism and abortion rights, rebel against Ticketmaster, go in and out of style, yet refuse to die, with a Deadhead-level following. Hyden writes as a lifelong fan who’s listened to all 72 live albums from their 2000 tour. But Long Road is his opinionated account of why the music matters, how the music reflects the times, and how Pearl Jam’s story sums up all the ideals, dreams, and failures of Gen X. —R.S.

Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan is basically a sure thing, like Scorsese directing De Niro. Folk Music is The Irishman of this combination — elegiac, rough, languid, looking for new stories in the past, but finding old stories changing shape. The legendary music critic adds seven new essays to his Dylanology, which includes definitive studies like The Old Weird America and Like a Rolling Stone. In the finest and funniest chapter, Marcus discusses Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” revealing why it’s secretly the same song as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” Almost 50 years after the classic Mystery Train (which isn’t officially about Dylan, but argues with him on every page), Marcus keeps chasing America’s greatest songwriter down the highway. It’s cultural criticism as a long-running detective story — and a musical love story. —R.S.

The first book from Rolling Stone contributor Marissa R. Moss is a masterful mix of musical criticism, interventionist history, and in-depth reporting that illuminates profound new insights about 21st century country music and its ongoing and ever-present structural gender inequities. Particularly revelatory are the well-researched, narrative-upending accounts of the Texas backstories of its three protagonists: Mickey Guyton, Maren Morris, and Kacey Musgraves. “This book is the story of how country’s women fought back against systems designed to keep them down,” Moss writes in the book’s introduction. “About how women can and do belong in country music, even if their voices aren’t dominating the airwaves.” By interrogating country music’s recent history while pointing toward a possible brighter future for the genre, Her Country is an urgent and vital history that comes at a much-needed time for an industry searching for its identity. —J.B.

Most musicians wait until their twilight years to tell their life story, but Margo Price has already lived many. Inspired by Patti Smith’s Just Kids, the 39-year-old country star’s memoir chronicles her tumultuous life pre-fame — you won’t find any rock & roll decadence here. Instead, you’ll get an account of a struggling musician and her partner encountering substance abuse, trauma, and poverty, with a relentless drive to survive and create music. It’s as heart-wrenching and unflinchingly honest as Price’s songs — you might rip through it in just one sitting. “I’m not proud of all of it,” Price tells us in an upcoming interview. “But the way I figure, we’re all going to die. I want to be real with people.” —A.M.

One of music’s long-running romances: the bond between British 1980s New Wave stars and their Latinx fans in the U.S. What is it about Adam Ant, Siouxsie, Boy George, or the Pet Shop Boys that inspires such devoción thousands of miles away? A Kiss Across the Ocean explores the question, with Rodríguez drawing on his own experience as a fan — growing up as a queer Latino teenager, in the hostility of Southern California, identifying with “these fabulously made-up creatures.” He examines why young fans keep hearing their own Latinidad in the glam weirdness of outsiders like Soft Cell, Bauhaus, Scritti Politti, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It’s an intriguing study of how music builds connections between different communities, and how pop desire translates over time and space. —R.S.

Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn started SST Records to put out his band’s music — because nobody else wanted it. Yet SST became the most legendary of American punk labels, the one every outlaw band wanted to be on. (Until they saw their royalty checks — or didn’t.) Jim Ruland tells the whole messy saga in his un-put-downable Corporate Rock Sucks. You might expect it to focus on the big names: Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, The Minutemen. But it covers every record by every obscure punk band in the story, upholding the legacy of Saccharine Trust and Würm. All these years, fans always wondered why the hell SST released so many Zoogz Rift albums, but it turns out most of the SST crew wondered the same thing. (“Sweet Nausea Lick” is still a banger, though.) A classic story: It begins with punk ideals, then ends with everyone hating each other and lawyering up. But in between, a heroic shitload of music. —R.S.

Danyel Smith — a writer, magazine editor, and host of the excellent podcast Black Girl Songbook — weaves together a unique memoir that mixes in the story of musical icons like Whitney Houston, Maria Carey, and Aretha Franklin, as well as less celebrated artists like Marilyn McCoo, the Dixie Cups, and Deniece Williams. “I weep because I want Black women who create music to be known and understood as I want to be known and understood,” Smith writes early on. For readers of Shine Bright, mission accomplished. —L.T. 

Chuck Berry did more than anyone to establish the lyrical and musical parameters of rock and roll. RJ Smith, author of the definitive James Brown biography The One, brings Berry to vivid life, doubly impressive given his subject’s legendary caginess. He lays the terrain so adroitly — from Berry’s St. Louis youth to his multiple imprisonments — that when tiny bombs go off, he doesn’t have to explain that they’re bombs; they resonate. Smith is also first-rate on the electric guitar’s galvanic effect on music and the culture at large. “You have to remember, we didn’t have anything to compare it to,” he quotes Phil Chess as saying of “Maybellene.” “This was an entirely different kind of music.” —M.M.

Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone as a 21-year-old Berkeley dropout in 1967 and conducted some of its most memorable interviews, including revelatory chats with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Bono. But most music fans knew little about his incredible life until this year, when he published Like a Rolling Stone. It’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes journey through five decades of American musical and political history, a frank look at the challenges all magazine publishers face in the age of the internet, and a chance for Wenner to confront some of his deepest regrets. “This book is about my own nine lives and about my failure to observe posted speed limits,” he writes. “Our readers often referred to Rolling Stone as a letter from home. This is my last letter to you.” —A.G.