Encyclopedia Of Popular Music

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 1600 pages
• Published by: Omnibus Press; 5 Concise edition September 1, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1846098564
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1846098567
• Book Dimensions: 10.5 x 7.6 x 2.6 inches
• Weighs: 5.4 pounds

Book Description
The Encyclopedia Of Popular Music is universally recognized as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference work on popular music. This new expanded edition is an essential reference book for anyone who has a query about any aspect of 20th Century popular music, including rock, dance, rap and R&B, as well as blues, soul, country and folk.

Reader Reviews
This is the best type of reference book: fun to browse in and reliable. (Warning: You'll want to buy a lot of CDs after looking at this book.) The coverage of this selection from the complete 10-volume set is impeccable; I found very few omissions that I could quibble with. There are some typos and mistakes (how could there not be?), but almost none in the information relevant to the purpose of the book. All of the articles I have read succeed in Larkin's aim of steering a course between an "encyclopediese" recitation of dry facts and the overopinionated critical writing that pop music often suffers from. The selection does favor English and American artists, but most users of the book will probably not find this a major limitation. The authors are at least aware of this byproduct of U.S. pop cultural hegemony. The five-star rating system for albums is relatively new and still has some rough edges: when the author of an article doesn't avail him- or herself of it, the result is that all the albums are rated equally. Since the system is most useful in relative terms (Blonde on Blonde versus, say, Nashville Skyline) and unavoidably subjective, it would be better to omit the stars altogether if the author of an article doesn't want to make distinctions. But it's a small point. It is hard to imagine how this could be better in any substantial way. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)