Bring the Noise

Weaving 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 hip-hop's most provocative artists-Morrissey, Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, The Stone Roses, P.J. Harvey, Radiohead-with Reynolds' 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.These 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 Manchester to the Dirty South, Bring the Noise chronicles hip hop and alternative rock's 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."If I had to choose just one commentator to guide me through the last quarter-century of popular (and not so popular) music it would have to be-on the basis of depth of knowledge, range of reference, soundness of judgment, and fluency of style-Simon Reynolds."-Geoff Dyer"Reynolds' writing [is] a perfect alchemy of lightly worn erudition and focused enthusiasm." - The Village Voice