Highlights
Rock Music, Up-Close and Accessible
What’s That Sound? consistently emphasizes rock’s musical significance while touching on essential social and cultural contexts. The text’s rich pedagogy reinforces this emphasis.
- Provided for over 70 major works and including timings and lyric signposts, the text’s listening guides help students thoroughly engage the music without overwhelming them with theoretical jargon or musical notation.
- Interludes in the text highlight central but often neglected aspects of rock music: Musical Form, Rock Instrumentation, and Recording Techniques. Each interlude includes listening guides and examples, as well as figures that illuminate crucial musical elements.
- An accessible elements of music section introduces the text and lays out the basic groundwork students need to listen critically and respond to the music covered in the book.
Visually Compelling Art Program
Acknowledging the importance of visual culture in rock music, What’s That Sound? integrates a diverse array of unique photographs and art, including album covers, screen grabs from important films and music videos, and photographs from historically significant live performances.
Balanced, Inclusive Coverage
Professor Covach’s measured approach to rock history incorporates both sides of rock’s great debates—musical covers and race, popularity versus musical innovation, race and the music of Motown and Stax—and covers an array of often neglected musicians. Essential cultural and historical context is provided in decade-by-decade overviews that highlight important developments, including the growth of suburbia, the civil rights movement, Napster, the Los Angeles riots, and the Columbine High School shootings.
Copyright © 2005, W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.
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