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The Republic of Rock
- Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture
- Narrated by: Lance Axt
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
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The Republic of Rock
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Publisher's summary
In his 1967 megahit "San Francisco," Scott McKenzie sang of "people in motion" coming from all across the country to San Francisco, the white-hot center of rock music and anti-war protests. At the same time, another large group of young Americans was also in motion, less eagerly, heading for the jungles of Vietnam. Now, in The Republic of Rock, Michael Kramer draws on new archival sources and interviews to explore sixties music and politics through the lens of these two generation-changing places - San Francisco and Vietnam. From the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to hippie disc jockeys on strike, the military's use of rock music to "boost morale" in Vietnam, and the forgotten tale of a South Vietnamese rock band, The Republic of Rock shows how the musical connections between the City of the Summer of Love and war-torn Southeast Asia were crucial to the making of the sixties counterculture.
The audiobook also illustrates how and why the legacy of rock music in the sixties continues to matter to the meaning of citizenship in a global society today. Going beyond cliched narratives about sixties music, Kramer argues that rock became a way for participants in the counterculture to think about what it meant to be an American citizen, a world citizen, a citizen-consumer, or a citizen-soldier. The music became a resource for grappling with the nature of democracy in larger systems of American power both domestically and globally. For anyone interested in the 1960s, popular music, and American culture and counterculture, The Republic of Rock offers new insight into the many ways rock music has shaped our ideas of individual freedom and collective belonging.
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- A History of American Popular Culture since 1830
- By: LeRoy Ashby
- Narrated by: Kevin Pierce
- Length: 33 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 76
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4 out of 5 stars 65
With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States, covering everything from the penny press to Playboy, the NBA to NASCAR, big band to hip hop, and other topics including film, comics, television, sports, and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race, gender, class, economics, and politics, LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms American culture.
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5 out of 5 stars
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So Much Fun!
- By Paul on 11-28-13
By: LeRoy Ashby
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The Rest Is Noise
- Listening to the 20th Century
- By: Alex Ross
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 23 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 487
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 305
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Story4 out of 5 stars 301
The Rest Is Noise takes the listener inside the labyrinth of modern music, from turn-of-the-century Vienna to downtown New York in the '60s and '70s. We meet the maverick personalities and follow the rise of mass culture on this sweeping tour of 20th-century history through its music.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Learned so much!
- By Paula on 02-18-08
By: Alex Ross
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Dig If You Will the Picture
- Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince
- By: Ben Greenman
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 32
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 33
Ben Greenman, New York Times best-selling author, contributing writer to The New Yorker, and owner of thousands of recordings of Prince and Prince-related songs, knows intimately that there has never been a rock star as vibrant, mercurial, willfully contrary, experimental, or prolific as Prince. Uniting a diverse audience while remaining singularly himself, Prince was a tireless artist, a musical virtuoso and chameleon, and a pop-culture prophet.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Reads like a indepth career review & analysis
- By herb on 05-18-17
By: Ben Greenman
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Can't Stop Won't Stop
- A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
- By: Jeff Chang
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 19 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 147
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 123
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 125
Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's worldview and transformed American politics and culture. But that epic story has never been told with this kind of breadth, insight, and style.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Not About Hip Hop Music
- By A. Yerkes on 09-06-19
By: Jeff Chang
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Beatles '66
- The Revolutionary Year
- By: Steve Turner
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 365
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 309
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 309
The year that changed everything for the Beatles was 1966 - the year of their last concert and of Revolver, their first album created to be listened to rather than performed. This was the year the Beatles risked their popularity by retiring from live performances, recording songs that explored alternative states of consciousness, experimenting with avant-garde ideas, and speaking their minds on issues of politics, war, and religion. Music journalist and Beatles expert Steve Turner investigates the enormous changes that took place in the Beatles' lives and work during 1966.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great listen
- By Tad Davis on 07-28-18
By: Steve Turner
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Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?
- Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock
- By: Gregory Alan Thornbury
- Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 43
In 1969, in Capitol Records' Hollywood studio, a blonde-haired troubadour named Larry Norman laid track for an album that would launch a new genre of music and one of the strangest, most interesting careers in modern rock. Having spent the bulk of the 1960s playing on bills with acts like The Who, Janis Joplin, and The Doors, Norman decided that he wanted to sing about the most countercultural subject of all: Jesus.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Hagiography not Biography
- By Keith Howard on 10-29-18
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Stayin' Alive
- The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
- By: Jefferson R. Cowie
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, Stayin' Alive is prize-winning historian Jefferson Cowie's remarkable account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s. In this edgy and incisive book, Cowie, with "an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), reveals America's fascinating path from rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Couldn’t get past “rank and file”
- By A. Arena on 10-13-21
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All Shook Up
- How Rock ‘n’ Roll Changed America
- By: Glenn C. Altschuler
- Narrated by: Jack Garrett
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 74
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Story4 out of 5 stars 52
As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race.
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4 out of 5 stars
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50's Rock&Roll was more of a force than I thought
- By James on 10-19-11
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Never a Dull Moment
- 1971 - the Year That Rock Exploded
- By: David Hepworth
- Narrated by: David Hepworth
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 215
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 202
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 199
On New Year's Eve, 1970, Paul McCartney told his lawyers to issue the writ at the High Court in London, effectively ending The Beatles. You might say this was the last day of the pop era. The following day, which was a Friday, was 1971. You might say this was the first day of the rock era. And within the remaining 364 days of this monumental year, the world would hear Don McLean's "American Pie", The Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar", The Who's "Baba O'Riley", Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven", and more.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A blast from the past
- By Amazon Customer on 07-30-16
By: David Hepworth
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Uncommon People
- The Rise and Fall of The Rock Stars
- By: David Hepworth
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 57
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 51
The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations. What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had. What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also like us. To live out their songs. To stay young forever. No wonder many didn't stay the course.
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5 out of 5 stars
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INSIGHTFULL!
- By CLAUDIA R KENNEDY on 02-18-18
By: David Hepworth
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Bright lights dark shadows
- The real story of Abba
- By: Carl Palm
- Narrated by: Adrian Mulraney
- Length: 26 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 121
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 102
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Story4 out of 5 stars 100
An exploration of all aspects of the Abba member’s lives and careers. Amazingly detailed, it examines the group member’s family backgrounds, the pre-Abba days, the legendary 70s, the marriages, the divorces, the business ups and downs, and the post-Abba solo careers.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Awesome! -- All the Swedish words pronounced!
- By Howard_a on 06-18-12
By: Carl Palm
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The Invention of Russia
- From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War
- By: Arkady Ostrovsky
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 207
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 180
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 181
The end of Communism and breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of euphoria around the world, but Russia today is violently anti-American and dangerously nationalistic. So how did we go from the promise of those days to the autocratic police state of Putin's new Russia? The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the Cold War to tell the story of the fight for the soul of a nation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Sad Story of Russia's Abandonment of Liberalism
- By Amazon Customer on 10-03-16
By: Arkady Ostrovsky
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Cowboys and Indies
- The Epic History of the Record Industry
- By: Gareth Murphy
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 15 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
Cowboys and Indies is the definitive record-business bible, chronicling the pioneers who set the stylus on the most important labelsand musical discoveries of the last century. The narrative follows all the musical trends and developments from the phonograph to the Internet age as it delves behind the big business of corporate hit machines and the diligent industry of small, curated labels.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Epic, yet incomplete.
- By Rob G. on 10-14-14
By: Gareth Murphy
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Once in a Great City
- A Detroit Story
- By: David Maraniss
- Narrated by: David Maraniss
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 187
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 158
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 154
It's 1963, and Detroit is on top of the world. The city's leaders are among the most visionary in America. It was the American auto makers' best year; the revolution in music and politics was underway. Walter Reuther's UAW had helped lift the middle class. Once in a Great City shows that the shadows of collapse were evident even then. Yet so much of what Detroit gave America lasts.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great read
- By Jordanel on 01-02-16
By: David Maraniss
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1965
- The Most Revolutionary Year in Music
- By: Andrew Grant Jackson
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 41
During 12 unforgettable months in the middle of the turbulent '60s, America saw the rise of innovative new sounds that would change popular music as we knew it. In 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music, music historian Andrew Grant Jackson (Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of The Beatles' Solo Careers) chronicles a groundbreaking year of creativity fueled by rivalries between musicians and continents, sweeping social changes, and technological breakthroughs.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Seems like a good overview
- By wylie smith on 01-12-23