Simon Reynolds

En su doble faceta de historiador y «observador participante», crítico musical y fan, intelectual y noctámbulo, Simon Reynolds ha escrito el que está considerado como el mejor libro sobre la cultura

En su doble faceta de historiador y "observador participante", crítico musical y fan, intelectual y noctámbulo, Simon Reynolds ha escrito el que está considerado como el mejor libro sobre la cultura de baile y la musica rave. En esta edicion ampliada de ENERGY FLASH, el autor de Retromania y Postpunk: Romper todo y empezar de nuevo entrega el que probablemente sea su mejor y mas ambicioso ensayo.Desde los origenes de la cultura de baile con el sofisticado techno de Detroit, el hedonismo toxicomano del house de Chicago y el fervor bacanaliano del garage de Nueva York, pasando por la eclosion del acid house y el rave en el Reino Unido a finales de los ochenta, que nacieron de la cultura balearic importada de Ibiza, de la proliferacion de pastillas de extasis y de las primeras fiestas ilegales en naves industriales, Reynolds da cuenta de la explosion de un nuevo tipo de cultura hedonista propulsada por las drogas que dara lugar a una de las grandes revoluciones de la historia de la musica. Con sus infinitas ramificaciones, generos y subgeneros, la cultura rave muta a la misma velocidad con la que las drogas que frecuentan cada escena lo hacen en el metabolismo de sus actores. Reynolds retrata con una intensidad y brillantez inusitadas algunos de los movimientos musicales mas locos y perturbadores de todos los tiempos: Madchester, el hardcore britanico, la escena de raves del entorno Spiral Tribe, las radios piratas, el advenimiento del jungle y su frenesi polirritmico, el particular y exacerbado rave estadounidense, el furor del gabba belga, el narcotizado trip hop, el trance hasta llegar a la dispersion generica del postrave, cuyas variantes estilisticas han estallado en infinitas y heteroclitas direcciones, como el dubstep o la EDM.A partir de entrevistas con algunos de los principales productores, DJ y personajes clave de cada escena Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Carl Craig, Paul Oakenfold, Richard D. James (Aphex Twin), Goldie, Tricky, Jeff Mills, Richie Hawtin, DJ Shadow, entre muchos otros, Reynolds revela y analiza con un estilo trepidante, conceptualmente exuberante y sazonado de algunos de los mejores pasajes de la literatura musical las claves creativas de la musica y la cultura rave, con especial enfasis en la faceta mas hardcore, hedonista y toxicomana.ENERGY FLASH es un libro sobre algunos de los sonidos mas radicales de la musica de los ultimos treinta años. Reynolds es un maestro cuando se trata de aprehender el espiritu y la intensidad de un track, y el libro es una mina inextinguible que nos descubre los tesoros mejor guardados del underground mas reciente.

En su doble faceta de historiador y «observador participante», crítico musical y fan, intelectual y noctámbulo, Simon Reynolds ha escrito el que está considerado como el mejor libro sobre la cultura

Twenty-five years since acid house and Ecstasy revolutionized pop culture, Simon Reynoldss landmark rave history Energy Flash has been expanded and updated to cover twenty-first-century developments like dubstep and EDMs recent takeover of America.Author of the acclaimed postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again, Reynolds became a rave convert in the early nineties. He experienced first-hand the scenes drug-fuelled rollercoaster of euphoria and darkness. He danced at Castlemorton, the illegal 1992 mega-rave that sent spasms of anxiety through the Establishment and resulted in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill. Mixing personal reminiscence with interviews and ultra-vivid description of the undergrounds ever-changing sounds as they mutated under the influence of MDMA and other drugs, Energy Flash is the definitive chronicle of electronic dance culture.From raves origins in Chicago house and Detroit techno, through Ibiza, Madchester and the anarchic free-party scene, to the pirate-radio underworld of jungle and UK garage, and then onto 2000s-shaping genres such as grime and electro, Reynolds documents with authority, insight and infectious enthusiasm the tracks, DJs, producers and promoters that soundtracked a generation. A substantial final section, added for this new Faber edition, brings the book right up to date, covering dubsteps explosive rise to mass popularity and Americas recent but ardent embrace of rave. Packed with interviews with participants and charismatic innovators like Derrick May, Goldie and Aphex Twin, Energy Flash is an infinitely entertaining and essential history of dance music.

A fantastic tribute to an amazingly creative musical period . . . An instant pop classic, worthy of a place on your shelves beside the handful of music books that really matter. John McTernan, Scotland on Sunday Punk revitalized rock in the mid-seventies, but the movement soon degenerated into self-parody. Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length celebration of what happened next: post-punk bands who dedicated themselves to fulfilling punks unfinished musical revolution. 1978 - 1984 rivals the sixties for the sheer amount of fabulous music created, the spirit of adventure and possibility that infused it, and the way the sounds felt inextricably connected to the political and social turbulence of the day. Simon Reynolds, acclaimed author of Energy Flash, recreates a time of tremendous urgency and idealism in pop music. Packed with anecdote and insight, populated by charismatic and maverick characters, Rip It Up and Start Again stands as one of the most inspired and inspiring books on popular music ever written. I had never expected there to be a book on this subject; had I done so, I would never have dared to hope it could be as good as this. Nicholas Lezard, Guardian Book of the Week This remarkable and perfectly timed cultural history is required reading.Q Magazine

UK Post-Punk is a selection of five essays that represents Simon Reynoldss astute and thought-provoking commentary on the musical fallout of the punk explosion. Diversity is the watchword, with groups as stylistically varied as PiL, Joy Division and the Specials tackling the new musical terrain that had opened up. Often highly political - both overtly and through challenging the prevailing conservatism of the times - these groups were the soundtrack to the last days of socialism, national recession and the arrival of an aggressive new form of politics: Thatcherism.

En su doble faceta de historiador y «observador participante», crítico musical y fan, intelectual y noctámbulo, Simon Reynolds ha escrito el que está considerado como el mejor libro sobre la cultura

From the author of the bestselling postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again comes Totally Wired, a companion book of conversations with the brilliant minds who made the late seventies and early eighties such a creative era for radical music and alternative culture. Totally Wired features thirty-two interviews with postpunks most innovative musicians and colourful personalities - Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David Byrne, Green Gartside, Lydia Lunch, Edwyn Collins - as well as other movers and shakers of the period: label bosses and managers like Anthony H. Wilson and Bill Drummond, record producers such as Trevor Horn and Martin Rushent, and influential DJs and journalists like John Peel and Paul Morley. Crackling with argument and anecdote, the conversations in Totally Wired bring a rich human dimension to the postpunk story chronicled in the critically acclaimed Rip It Up. We get to follow these exceptional (and often eccentric) characters from their earliest days through the glory and sometimes disaster of their musical adventures to what they went on to do after postpunk. We gain a vivid sense of individuals struggling against the odds to make their world as interesting as possible, in the process leaving a legacy of artistic ambition and provocation that reverberates to this day. Along with the interviews, Totally Wired also includes a bonus overviews section: further reflections by Simon Reynolds on postpunks key icons and crucial scenes, including John Lydon and Public Image Ltd, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, art school conceptualists and proto-postpunkers Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren, and the lineage of glam grotesquerie running from Siouxsie & The Banshees to the New Romantics to Leigh Bowery. Buzzing with ideas and insights, Totally Wired is an absolute mind rush.

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity - the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movements invocations of medievalism - never 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?

As the sixties dream faded, a new flamboyant movement electrified the world: GLAM! In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds explores this most decadent of genres on both sides of the Atlantic. Bolan, Bowie, Suzi Quatro, Alice Cooper, New York Dolls, Slade, Roxy Music, Iggy, Lou Reed, Be Bop Deluxe, David Essex -- all are represented here. Reynolds charts the retro future sounds, outrageous styles and gender-fluid sexual politics that came to define the first half of the seventies and brings it right up to date with a final chapter on glam in hip hop, Lady Gaga, and the aftershocks of David Bowies death.Shock and Awe is a defining work and another classic in the Faber Social rock n roll canon to stand alongside Rip it Up, Electric Eden and Yeah Yeah Yeah.

An anthology of writings spanning Simon Reynoldss extraordinary career as a music writer, Bring the Noise weaves together interviews, reviews, essays, and features to create a critical history of the last twenty years of pop culture. Bring the Noise juxtaposes the voices of many of rock and raps most provocative artists - Morrissey, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, The Stone Roses, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, The Streets - with Reynoldss 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 rocks 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.

From Morrissey and Nick Cave to The Streets and Kanye West, this is the book that explores the links between hip-hop and rock. Reynolds has focused on two strands: white alternative rock and black street music. He''s identified the strange dance of white bohemian rock and black culture, how they come together at various points and then go their own way. Through interviews he has carried out as a top music journalist for the last twenty years, Reynolds is here able to tell a story of musical rivalry which noone has told before. The approach is similar to "Rip It Up and Start Again": a cultural history told through the music we love and the stars and movements that have shaped the world we live in.

¿Algo mejor que el chocolate? ¿Es posible que exista gran cosa? Sí, existe algo aún mejor que el chocolate y este libro lo descubre para ti: la posibilidad real de ser más feliz.Respaldado por extensas y modernas investigaciones, Simon Reynolds, que ha pasado veinte años investigando la felicidad, explora el nuevo campo de la psicologia positivista, que demuestra que cualquier persona puede ser mas feliz si sigue una serie de pasos sencillos y concretos.EWxisten cincuenta tecnicas probadas y eficaces para aumentar tu felicidad y ayudarte a obtener lo mejor de la vida. ¿Por que conformarte con el chocolate cuando puedes experimentar la verdadera felicidad?

Como resultado de un intenso trabajo de investigación, el autor expone en este libro 365 formas para vivir más y mejor. Algunas de ellas se relacionan con hábitos de vida adoptados por muchas personas, como seguir una alimentacion vegetariana, tomar acido folico diariamente, hacer una siesta corta o llevar gafas de sol. Otras, requieren un cambio de actitud y esquemas mentales, aunque el autor sostiene que las soluciones son mas simples de lo que la mayoria supone y estan al alcance de quien se lo proponga.

Como resultado de un intenso trabajo de investigación, el autor expone en este libro 365 formas para vivir más y mejor. Algunas de ellas se relacionan con hábitos de vida adoptados por muchas personas, como seguir una alimentacion vegetariana o tomar acido folico diariamente. Otras, requieren un cambio de actitud y esquemas mentales, aunque el autor sostiene que las soluciones son mas simples de lo que la mayoria supone y estan al alcance de quien se lo proponga.

l igual que en su influyente libro sobre postpunk, en Como un golpe de rayo Simon Reynolds hace algo más que recorrer de manera exhaustiva la historia de un género. Al abordar el glam en tanto celebración del artificio y culto a la imagen, revela de qué manera supuso una ruptura con los valores propios de rock hippie de fines de los años sesenta -la autenticidad y el compromiso político- y un primer ensayo del tipo de sensibilidad que más tarde llegaría a ser conocida como posmoderna. Estrellas como David Bowie (cuya trayectoria funciona como columna vertebral del libro), Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music, New York Dolls y T. Rex dejaron en evidencia con su despliegue teatral, su maquillaje andrógino y su vestuario alienígena, que el pop antes que un reflejo de la realidad es una vía de escape a través de la fantasía y el fanatismo.

Tras ocho años sin novedades editoriales, Simon Reynolds vuelve con una celebración de la música que parece anticipar el futuro. Estableciendo un contrapunto con su propio "Retromanía. La adicción del pop a su propio pasado" (2011) y con "Los fantasmas de mi vida. Escritos sobre depresion, hauntologia y futuros perdidos" (2013) de su camarada bloguero Mark Fisher, en esta compilacion de articulos Reynolds insiste en librar una guerra contra la cultura retro. Solo que al desesperanzado diagnostico vinculado a la desaceleracion de la innovacion en la primera decada del siglo XXI opone una mirada actualizada y mas optimista sobre la capacidad de la musica popular para continuar reinventandose. "Si bien lo retro sigue siendo prominente, ya no es dominante", dice, y esto permite que su ingenio critico pueda detectar aqui y alla nuevos territorios acusticos en los que adentrarnos con perplejidad.