The Music Book Podcast

On this episode, Marc talks with Melvin Gibbs, author of "How Black Music Took Over The World," published today, April 14, 2026. It's a unique look at what Gibbs considers "the science of Black Music," a combination of musical theory, analysis, history, and memoir.  Gibbs has played in such diverse projects as Defunkt, Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, Rollins Band, and the Punk-Funk All Stars, as well as collaborating with Arto Lindsay, Bernie Worrell, Marc Ribot, Vernon Reid, and so many more. He brings all this experience and knowledge to his book, combing through history, telling stories of his work, and analyzing how black music works rhythmically, melodically, and culturally. 
As he writes, "Even when culturally sensitive people analyze Black music, and they are able to properly situate it in its cultural context, they still have to wrestle with Western cultural hierarchies and tussle with the Western musical tool set. This book is my effort to reset that dynamic, to wrestle out of its straitjacket that confines analysis of Black music. I analyze the music on its own terms, using tools I've uncovered and methods I've either discovered or had passed on to me."
We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Melvin Gibbs!

On this episode, Marc talks to two authors, Peter J. Woods and John Melillo. Peter is an assistant professor in learning sciences at the University of Nottingham in England, and John is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona. They've both written academic books about noise: Woods' "Learning Through Noise" was published in early 2025, and Melillo's "The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk" was published in 2020.
In the former, Woods examines noise as a potential vehicle for education, because "noise music as a distinctive musical genre relies on the production of unique learning ecologies and vice versa." And Melilo's book looks at 20th century poetry through the lens of noise, "constructing a literary history of noise through poetic sound and performance...and tracing how poets figure noise in the disfiguration of poetic voice."
In our chat, Peter and John talk about how they approach something as abstract as noise through academic analysis, and how writing academic books is unique and challenging. Peter and John are both musicians themselves as well as show organizers, so they both bring more than just academic experience to the subject of noise.
We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Peter J. Woods and John Melillo!

On this episode, Marc talks with Adele Bertei, author of "No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene," released today, March 31, 2026. It's an insightful and super-entertaining chronicle of Bertei's journey through New York music and art in the late 70s, including her time in Contortions and The Bloods as well as her solo career. It also delves deep into so many figures of the scene that Bertei worked and associated, particularly women such as Lydia Lunch, Nan Golden, Vivienne Dick, Patti Smith, and so many more.
As she writes, "I wrote this book to dig deeper. What truly set No Wave apart from other artistic movements of the 1970s and early '80s? The women. They didn't just participate. They set the tone – and they lit the fuse...resisting tired stereotypes and reinventing according to our individual artistic visions...dismantling art's male-dominated paradigms, we ignored the boundaries of gender and genre."
We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Adele Bertei!

On this episode, Marc talks with Kembrew McLeod, the author of two closely related books: "Parallel Lines," an entry on Blondie's 1978 album for the 33.3 series published in 2016, and "The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock 'N' Roll Glitter Queens Who Revolutionized Culture," published in 2018. 
Both books cover all the amazing counterculture music and art made in the 60s and 70s in New York, and how it bubbled up into the mainstream. "Parallel Lines" of course focuses on Blondie, but also on the context within which the group operated, particularly as punk was crossing with disco. "The Downtown Pop Underground" extends to many other musicians as well as poets, playwrights, actors, venues, organizers, and much more.
As McLeod writes in Parallel Lines, "Blondie was part of a social network of artists, musicians, intellectuals, and freaks who remade popular culture...Parallel Lines  was the multiplatinum punctuation point on a slow-building subcultural explosion, a fuse that was lit in the early 1960s by a handful of outsiders living in the margins of New York City. Today, we inhabit a world that was conjured into existence by these downtown denizens."
We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Kembrew McLeod!

On this episode, Marc talks with Ronen Givony, author of "Us v. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (2004-2014)," published in March of 2026. It's a fascinating history of the indie and underground music scene in Brooklyn during a time when Givony ran the Wordless Music concert series, worked for Nonesuch records, and pursued many other music-related activities. Givony divides the book into chapters on individual bands, curators, venues, and publications that had a huge effect on music in New York – groups such as Oneida, Parts and Labor, Weyes Blood, and Vagabon, and spaces such as Glasslands, Silent Bard, and Death by Audio.
As he writes, "This is a book about a dozen or so individuals and bands with a curious claim to fame. A few of them achieved a degree of renown; a few would nearly make it big, only to self-destruct; as of this writing, though, none is a household name. Yet what they did was more decisive for the culture of New York than billionaire philanthropists whose names were carved in concert halls, more enduring than bands with fifty times their sales."
You can buy "Us v. Them" here.
We hope you enjoy Marc's chat with Ronen Givony!