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Fun, bright, and playful, power pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, power pop has meant many things to many people. In Go All the Way, today's best and brightest writers go deep on what certain power pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go All the Way is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

Everybody's Doin' It is the eye-opening story of popular music's 70-year rise in the brothels, dance halls, and dives of New York City. It traces the birth of popular music, including ragtime and jazz, to convivial meeting places for sex, drink, music, and dance. Whether coming from a single piano player or a small band, live music was a nightly feature in New York's spirited dives, where men and women, often black and white, mingled freely - to the horror of the elite.

The 1960s were a time of huge transformation, sustained and amplified by the music of that era: Rock and Roll. During the 19th and 20th centuries visionary and esoteric spiritual traditions influenced first literature, then film. In the 1960s they entered the realm of popular music, catalyzing the ecstatic experiences that empowered a generation. Exploring how 1960s rock and roll music became a school of visionary art, Christopher Hill shows how music raised consciousness on both the individual and collective levels to bring about a transformation of the planet.

Imagine a world where Beatlemania was against the law - recordings scratched onto medical X-rays, merchant sailors bringing home contraband LPs, spotty broadcasts taped from western AM radio late in the night. This was no fantasy world populated by Blue Meanies, but by the USSR, where a vast nation of music fans risked repression to hear the defining band of the British Invasion. The music of John, Paul, George, and Ringo played a part in waking up an entire generation of Soviet youth, opening their eyes to seventy years of bland official culture and rigid authoritarianism.

Award-winning civil rights historian Ray Arsenault describes the dramatic story behind Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial - an early milestone in civil rights history - on the 70th anniversary of her performance. On Easter Sunday 1939, the brilliant vocalist Marian Anderson sang before a throng of 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington - an electrifying moment and an underappreciated milestone in civil rights history.

Finally back in print - David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop." The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom.

There are few art forms as visceral and emotional as opera - and few that are as daunting for newcomers. A Mad Love offers a spirited and indispensable tour of opera's eclectic past and present, beginning with Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in 1607, generally considered the first successful opera, through classics like Carmen and La Boheme, and spanning to Brokeback Mountain and The Death of Klinghoffer in recent years.

From renowned diplomat and musician András Simonyi - whom Stephen Colbert calls "the only ambassador I know who can shred a mean guitar!" - comes a timely and revealing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain and longing for freedom while chasing the great power of rock and roll. In Rocking Toward a Free World, Simonyi charts the struggle of growing up in 1960s Hungary, a world in which listening to his favorite music was a powerful but furtive endeavor: records were black-market bootlegs, and concerts were held under strict control, even banned....

Real rock stars do truly insane thing and invite truly insane things to happen to them: murder, drug trafficking, rape, cannibalism and the occult. We allow this behavior. We are complicit because a rock star behaving badly is what's expected. It's baked into the cake. Deep down, way down, past all of our self-righteous notions of justice and right and wrong, when it comes down to it, we want our rock stars to be bad. We know the music industry is full of demons, ones that drove Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, and Sid Vicious and that consumed the Norwegian black metal scene.

This is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan '80s - when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives reenergized American rock with punk rock's do-it-yourself credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging, and immensely influential. This sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing, and faith has been recognized as an indie rock classic in its own right.

In It for the Long Run: A Musical Odyssey is Jim Rooney's kaleidoscopic firsthand account of more than five decades of success as a performer, concert promoter, songwriter, music publisher, engineer, and record producer. As witness to and participant in over half a century of music history, Rooney provides a sophisticated window into American vernacular music. Following his stint as a Hayloft Jamboree hillbilly singer in the mid-1950s, Rooney managed Cambridge's Club 47, a catalyst of the '60s folk music boom.

Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters is both a gonzo rush - capturing the bristling energy of the Rolling Stones and the times in which they lived - and a wide-eyed reflection on why the Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band in the World needed the world's greatest rock 'n' roll drummer. Across five decades, Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts has had the best seat in the house.

In this behind-the-scenes look at the making of Fleetwood Mac's epic, platinum-selling double album, Tusk, producers and engineers Ken Caillat and Hernan Rojas tell their stories of spending a year with the band in their new million-dollar studio trying to follow up Rumours, the biggest rock album of the time. Following their massive success, the band continued its infamous soap opera when its musical leader and guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham, threatened to quit if he didn't get things his way....

Now it can be told! The true, behind-the-scenes story of Casablanca Records, from an eyewitness to the excess and insanity. Casablanca was not a product of the 1970s, it was the 1970s. From 1974 to 1980, the landscape of American culture was a banquet of hedonism and self-indulgence, and no person or company in that era was more emblematic of the times than Casablanca Records and its magnetic founder, Neil Bogart.

February, 1940. After a decade of worldwide depression, World War II had begun in Europe and Asia. With Germany on the march and Japan at war with China, the global crisis was in a crescendo. America's top songwriter, Irving Berlin, had captured the nation's mood a little more than a year before with his patriotic hymn "God Bless America."

Jazz 101 is a fascinating entry into the world of jazz, for the beginner, novice, or jazz enthusiast. Szwed takes listeners on a tour of the varied and nonlinear history of jazz, exploring how it developed from an ethnic music to become America's most popular music and then part of the avant-garde in less than 50 years.

The national debate over popular music's effect on character is both furious and confused. Conservatives complain primarily about lyrics, appealing to public decency and safety. Liberals, swift to the defense of any self-expression, simultaneously celebrate rock's liberating ethos and deny its cultural influence.

With astounding access to all the key players of the time, including members of Green Day, The Offspring, NOFX, Rancid, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, and many others, renowned music writer Ian Winwood at last gives this significant, substantive, and compelling story its due. Punk rock bands were never truly successful or indeed truly famous, and that was that - until it wasn't. Smash! is the story of how the underdogs finally won and forever altered the landscape of mainstream music.

Music opinions bring out passionate debate in people, and Steven Hyden knows that firsthand. Each chapter in Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me focuses on a pop music rivalry, from the classic to the very recent, and draws connections to the larger forces surrounding the pairing.

Based on Chuck's long-running show on Rapstation.com, this massive compendium details the most iconic moments and influential songs in the genre's recorded history, from Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'" to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill to Kendrick Lamar's groundbreaking verse on "Control". Also included are key events in hip hop history, from Grandmaster Flash's first scratch through Tupac's holographic appearance at Coachella.