Gina Arnold

Explores mainstream society's embrace of alternative rock, chronicles the postpunk years, and interviews such musicians as Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, and Paul Westerberg of the Replacements

On the Road to Nirvana

Route 666

A passionate re-assessment of one of the most original, groundbreaking, and controversial albums of the 1990s.

Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville

This is a true-crime story of the murder of an art form: punk rock. Gina Arnold has been witness to this gradual annihilation, and she's not shy about pointing out the perpetrators: Tipper Gore, Rolling Stone, Geffen Records, Miller beer, and even the progenitors of punk themselves, the Sex Pistols, are all implicated in the demise of independent music. In Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana, Gina Arnold gave us a road map to the defiant fury that shaped punk's harsh, musical bloodletting. But now Kurt Cobain is dead. And Courtney Love is playing shows sponsored by beer companies, MasterCard is financing the Monsters of Rock tour, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are sporting free Airwalk sneakers. Arnold knows something has gone terribly wrong. Bad Religion, Metallica, Rancid, Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Pearl Jam, the Fastbacks, Beastie Boys, Nine Inch Nails--find out who sold out, who stayed real, and what independent music must do now to regain its lost edge. In 1978 Sid Vicious mocked a Sinatra classic with his version of "My Way." Well, it's 1997, and punk has lost its way. In Kiss This Gina Arnold just may show it the way home.

Punk In The Present Tense

Kiss This

Michael Goddard

Kirsty Fairclough

Daniel Cookney

This book is a lively, comprehensive and timely reader on the music video, capitalising on cross-disciplinary research expertise, which represents a substantial academic engagement with the music video, a mediated form and practice that still remains relatively under-explored in a 21st century context. The music video has remained suspended between two distinct poles. On the one hand, the music video as the visual sheen of late capitalism, at the intersection of celebrity studies and postmodernism. On the other hand, the music video as art, looking to a prehistory of avant-garde film-making while perpetually pushing forward the digital frontier with a taste for anarchy, controversy, and the integration of special effects into a form designed to be disseminated across digital platforms. In this way, the music video virally re-engenders debates about high art and low culture. This collection presents a comprehensive account of the music video from a contemporary 21st century perspective. This entails revisiting key moments in the canonical history of the music video, exploring its articulations of sexuality and gender, examining its functioning as a form of artistic expression between music, film and video art, and following the music video's dissemination into the digital domain, considering how digital media and social media have come to re-invent the forms and functions of the music video, well beyond the limits of "music television†?.

Histories, Aesthetics, Media

Music/Video

This book is a lively, comprehensive and timely reader on the music video, capitalising on cross-disciplinary research expertise, which represents a substantial academic engagement with the music video, a mediated form and practice that still remains relatively under-explored in a 21st century context. The music video has remained suspended between two distinct poles. On the one hand, the music video as the visual sheen of late capitalism, at the intersection of celebrity studies and postmodernism. On the other hand, the music video as art, looking to a prehistory of avant-garde film-making while perpetually pushing forward the digital frontier with a taste for anarchy, controversy, and the integration of special effects into a form designed to be disseminated across digital platforms. In this way, the music video virally re-engenders debates about high art and low culture. This collection presents a comprehensive account of the music video from a contemporary 21st century perspective. This entails revisiting key moments in the canonical history of the music video, exploring its articulations of sexuality and gender, examining its functioning as a form of artistic expression between music, film and video art, and following the music video's dissemination into the digital domain, considering how digital media and social media have come to re-invent the forms and functions of the music video, well beyond the limits of “music television”.

From baby boomers to millennials, attending a big music festival has basically become a cultural rite of passage in America. In Half a Million Strong, music writer and scholar Gina Arnold explores the history of large music festivals in America and examines their impact on American culture. Studying literature, films, journalism, and other archival detritus of the countercultural era, Arnold looks closely at a number of large and well-known festivals, including the Newport Folk Festival, Woodstock, Altamont, Wattstax, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and others to map their cultural significance in the American experience. She finds that—far from being the utopian and communal spaces of spiritual regeneration that they claim for themselves— these large music festivals serve mostly to display the free market to consumers in its very best light.

Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella

Half a Million Strong

Although Exile in Guyville was celebrated as one of the year's top records by Spin and the New York Times, it was also, to some, an abomination: a mockery of the Rolling Stones' most revered record and a rare glimpse into the psyche of a shrewd, independent, strong young woman. For these crimes, Liz Phair was run out of her hometown of Chicago, enduring a flame war perpetrated by writers who accused her of being boring, inauthentic, and even a poor musician. With Exile in Guyville, Phair spoke for all the girls who loved the world of indie rock but felt deeply unwelcome there. Like all great works of art, Exile was a harbinger of the shape of things to come: Phair may have undermined the male ego, but she also unleashed a new female one. For the sake of all the female artists who have benefited from her work-from Sleater-Kinney to Lana Del Rey and back again-it's high time we go back to Guyville.

Gina Arnold

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