Bestselling author and Sundance award-winning director Questlove harnesses his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and his deep curiosity about history to examine America over the past fifty years. Choosing one essential track from each year, Questlove unpacks each song's significance, revealing the pivotal role that American music plays around issues of race, gender, politics, and identity. Whether he is exploring how Black identity reshaped...

"Be My Baby is the behind-the-scenes story -- newly updated, and with an especially timely message -- of how the original bad girl of rock and roll, Ronnie Spector, survived marriage to a monster and carved out a space for herself amid the chaos of the 1960s music scene and beyond. Ronnie's first collaboration with producer Phil Spector, 'Be My Baby,' shot Ronnie and the Ronettes to stardom. No one sounded like Ronnie, with her alluring blend of innocence...

"Examines the ska and swing music of the late 1990s as a pop-culture movement, telling the stories behind some of the era's most important bands"--

A personal, idiosyncratic history of pop music traces the sheet-music era at the end of the nineteenth century and the invention of records through favorite chart-topping songs and the ways his mother shaped him as an aficionado.