Several years ago, Pitchfork compiled a list of our 60 favorite music books of all time. It had to be “favorite” because there are so many books, covering so many different aspects of music, that singling out any 10 or 25 or 50 as “best” seemed ludicrous. In 2017, we found ourselves in a similar position: In a year particularly packed with great books on an array of musical topics, how were we to pick the authoritative, capital-b Best? So we didn’t. Instead we asked our staff and books contributors to make a case for their favorite music book of the year.

The answers we got ranged from a critical appraisal of sex in popular music, a history of the Walkman, a dissection of “peak rock stardom,” juicy gossip from New York’s early-2000s rock scene, pioneers of noise, thrash, and trap in their own words, and influential punks in the words of one of Pitchfork’s own. (Full disclosure: Other authors on this list have written for Pitchfork as well.) Now, if you need us over the holidays, we’ll be holed up reading.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

The Force of Listening

Hearing, Pauline Oliveros wrote, is involuntary. Listening is voluntary, and it produces culture. The late sound artist is one of several thinkers whose writings are listened to attentively, and expanded upon, in this fascinating short book by the London-based researchers Lucia Farinati and Claudia Firth. The Force of Listening ruminates on the meaning and impact of listening, in a context that’s near and dear to any Trump-fearing music obsessive: the space where art and activism intermingle. As The Wire’s reviewer put it, prompting me to buy the book: “What are the politics of listening?”

The Force of Listening doesn’t state the answer to this question so much as embody it. It is arranged as a “free montage” of interviews with artists, activists, and scholars; along with their own conversations, and the wisdom of Oliveros, Farinati and Firth draw on the etymology of the word “listen” as well as the the ideas of Hannah Arendt and 1970s feminist groups, plus the lessons of the Occupy movement. Though the results can be dense and academic, they’re also bracing. Listening, the authors suggest, can be as powerful as speaking, and not only through words. They write, “We might need to allow for silences and hear things that are not necessarily spoken, spaces and silences between and beyond speech.” I’m still listening, which is to say, I’m trying not to talk so much. –Marc Hogan

The Raincoats 33 ⅓

It’s a good thing (Pitchfork editor) Jenn Pelly’s 33 ⅓ book about the Raincoats’ first album is so compact, because after tearing through it in 48 hours, I carried it around with me for weeks. I reread passages while listening to the record on the train, in bars, and curled up in bed with a cup of tea, hearing something new every time. So many well-meaning critics have condescended to this noisily textured post-punk classic, framing it as a work of naïve brilliance. For Pelly, though, “Each instrument is a character, singing. The melodic base, a trickster; the scratchy violin, a dramatist. The serrated noise guitar is lawless. The wandering drums dance.”

The book is a seamless hybrid of criticism and reportage; Pelly spent time with the band and visited their old haunts. But what’s extraordinary is that she doesn’t seem to be recounting the Raincoats’ early years so much as time-traveling back to the squats of late-’70s London and mind-melding with each of the four very different women who came together to make this strange, enchanting music. Over the years, The Raincoats has become a sort of talisman for feminist punks, a document that is somehow challenging and comforting at once. Pelly doesn’t just describe that effect—her writing recreates it. –Judy Berman

Read our excerpt from The Raincoats 33 ⅓.

Personal Stereo

In 2017, having music pumped into your ears through headphones while existing in public is a thoroughly normal thing to do. But as Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow outlines in the delightful Personal Stereo, being able to do so is a relatively recent development. Sony’s 1979 launch of the Walkman not only allowed listeners to create their own non-diegetic soundtracks—it supplied a fetish item for the then-ascendant caste of yuppies and sparked kids-these-days hand-wringing from everyone from the religious right to the music business itself. The Walkman, you must understand, was a loaded format.

Tuhus-Dubrow’s entrant in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series takes the reader on a brisk tour of the device’s journey from holiday wishlist to history’s dustbin. (I have one next to my kitchen sink; it’s a later model with digital tuning and a broken volume knob that I use as a still-reliable clock.) She details how it exploded the possibilities offered by transistor radios, and how that sparked skepticism from the old guard. With the replacement of a few key nouns, those worried columns could run as head-shaking polemics about smartphones. But Tuhus-Dubrow has empathy towards these tech screeds of the past, as evidenced by a declaration towards the end of the book: “If the Walkman gave us an ideal amount of control, its successors have given us too much.” Her thoughtfulness imbues this chronicle of a once-modern, now-obsolete device with a mindfulness that isn’t often seen in writing about technology. –Maura Johnston

Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

You already know how you feel about the Beatles. Who needs another book about them? Dreaming the Beatles makes you feel like a fool for even asking that question. This is the definitive Beatles book, the only one that comes close to the rush of listening to Rubber Soul or Revolver for the first time.

Sheffield—who, full disclosure, is a friend of myself and many other Pitchfork contributors—is full of wildly original insights on the Fab Four themselves. (Particularly Paul. The chapter titled “Paul Is a Concept By Which We Measure Our Pain” is a master class in how to write about one’s heroes.) But, ingeniously, he spends most of the book focusing on the fan’s-eye view of the band whose audience invented pop fandom as we know it. “When I listen to Hollywood Bowl, I do not imagine being one of the Beatles,” Sheffield writes. “I fantasize about being the girl in the upper-balcony cheap seats, ripping out my hair and shrieking, tapping into a ruinous eternal gnosis that not even the boys in the band could ever know.”

That ecstasy is what powers Dreaming the Beatles, and it doesn’t let up when the band splits; Sheffield cares as much about the second, third, and fourth waves of Beatlemania. With this endlessly delightful glass onion of a book, you’re constantly torn between racing ahead to the next chapter and rereading the one you just sped through. It’s a 318-page-long “yeah, yeah, yeeeeah.” –Simon Vozick-Levinson

The Autobiography of Gucci Mane

The Autobiography of Gucci Mane, written with Neil Martinez-Belkin, is a captivating dive into the mind of Radric Davis. Across 270 pages, Gucci peels back the layers of a persona he spent over a decade crafting, breaking down his history of misdeeds and transgressions and detailing the prison stint that changed him. There are candid glimpses into sentencing hearings, private looks into public meltdowns, explanations for altercations. The book provides incredible insight into one of the most influential rappers of the last decade, detailing a volatile and fascinating life via anecdotes that range from hilarious to harrowing. There are asides about the Atlanta rap scene at large and a clear-eyed account of how Gucci helped to shape its sound and vision. The Autobiography of Gucci Mane is a great entry point for anyone looking to see what all the hype is about, but there are plenty of tidbits for longtime fans, too. By the end, every reader will have a greater understanding of Gucci Mane, the man and the musician. –Sheldon Pearce

When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle Between Jazz and Rock

Matt Brennan’s When Genres Collide isn’t just the most music-crit nerd book on this list, it’s the most music-crit nerd book on any list. But if you love learning not just about music and the lives of its creators, but also the framework in which music is discussed and understood (and I’m guessing that describes many Pitchfork readers), this book is for you. In the broadest sense, Brennan’s book is an overview of trends in American popular music criticism in the 20th century. Focusing on the most significant jazz publication of the century (Down Beat) and the one that popularized rock and pop criticism in the U.S. (Rolling Stone), Brennan digs deep to find what was valued and when, how distinctions between genres were drawn, what was held up as “art music” (in the 1940s, bebop; in the ’70s, guitar-based rock) and what was dismissed as merely “dance music” (in the ’40s, early R&B; in the ’70s, disco). Decade by decade, Brennan shows how the assumptions that guide our understanding of musical quality developed, and, in a fascinating tangent, he even uncovers who may have been the first “poptimist” critic: Down Beat’s first R&B columnist, the pioneering but now forgotten Ruth Cage. –Mark Richardson

Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music

With its recent Turning the Tables series—a list of 150 greatest albums by women and companion essays—NPR Music has provided a substantive catalyst in our rethinking of canons. The project also feels like an extension of NPR Music critic Ann Powers’ Good Booty, an overview of pop and eroticism so monumental, it’s been in the works for more than two decades and could reasonably be subtitled A People’s History of American Music. By rooting her centuries-traversing sweep through race, sex, and pop in the violence of American history, Powers “recast[s] history in terms that are more inclusive, and less dominated by old ideas of artistic genius or great works.” That means extending the story of rock’n’roll to its groupies, casting Madonna and her fans as a story of “utilitarian imagination,” and highlighting the “erotic desire” in the teenage voices behind songs we think we know, like the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” Beginning with slaves who carried rhythms in their bodies because their instruments were taken away, and landing at Lemonade, Powers offers a compellingly anti-patriarchal framework for thinking about popular music. It’s a history that feels refreshingly present. –Jenn Pelly

Read our interview with Ann Powers about Good Booty.

Jason Molina: Riding with the Ghost

In her lovingly rendered biography of Jason Molina, the songwriter behind the mystic alt-country projects Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., Erin Osmon never once positions her subject’s untimely death from alcoholism-related illness as the inevitable conclusion to a lifetime of writing sad songs. Many of Molina’s songs are mournful, but Osmon digs beneath the weary vocals and wounded slide guitars to uncover the spark of hope nestled within each one. That’s how Molina saw them, anyway: hopeful. Even in his bleakest recordings, he never once succumbed to fatalism. Osmon finds that Molina also manifested an optimism about humanity in his personal life, funneling it into his collaborative, spontaneous artistic process.

Through interviews with his friends, his bandmates, and his widow, Osmon paints Molina in a light rarely cast by his music alone. The anecdotes she relays expose his good-humored side: his first date with the woman he’d marry was a trip to the grocery store for cream soda, and the couple later named their cat after a typo Molina had made writing an email on a European keyboard. Osmon also unearths the roots of Molina’s signature imagery—the crosses, moons, and animals that populated his lyrics and his homemade album art. Even in its harrowing final chapters about Molina’s illness and death, Riding with the Ghost avoids using the tropes of artistic tragedy as a crutch. Instead, it allows the details of Molina’s life to emerge without embellishment or sentimentality, as stark and poignant as one of his songs. –Sasha Geffen

Read our excerpt from Jason Molina: Riding with the Ghost.

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

We’ve arrived at a point in time when debates about pop culture and debates about identity politics are inexorably connected. That is what makes Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, just one of two books the Ohio poet put out this year, essential. Whether he’s exploring the charisma of Chance the Rapper, describing the appeal of the Afropunk festival, or tracing his long relationship with the music of My Chemical Romance, Willis-Abdurraqib unites familiar sounds with fresh observations about music and the state of contemporary America.

Willis-Abdurraqib has a poet’s eye for innovations in form, including an experimentally-structured meditation on Whitney Houston and vignettes about the life of Marvin Gaye, which punctuate the book. As part of an essay about Twenty One Pilots, Willis-Abdurraqib riffs on an earlier piece by the legendary music writer Lester Bangs, paying homage to his over-the-top style but placing it in a different context. What Bangs and Willis-Abdurraqib share are an attention to small societal details and a penchant for incisive critiques; both make They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us essential, gripping reading. –Tobias Carroll

The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince

The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince—written by Prince’s first wife, Mayte Garcia—is memoir as meditation: a thoughtful, reverent retelling of their relationship, from the moment the two first met until Prince passed away in 2016. This book is not some cheap, supermarket celebrity tell-all, but rather a dignified (and, at times, irreverent and hilarious) recounting of a love story. Garcia accomplishes bringing the reader right into the heart of Paisley Park, all purple paint and cloud ceilings and doves living in the atrium.

Garcia is also funny and sarcastic, and her stories are highly readable: There’s a good balance of mystical, inscrutable Prince-ness, as well as frank accounts of the birth and loss of their son, Amiir, and the impact of their deep grief on their relationship. Garcia treads a very careful line between detail and discretion, and the result is enough of the former to keep you enthralled, but doesn’t veer into any kind of prurient over-sharing that would make a reader feel guiltily voyeuristic. Those books will undoubtedly show up at some point, but for now, Prince fans can enjoy indulging in The Most Beautiful. –Caryn Rose

Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars

The founder, editor, and/or publisher of just about every British rock magazine worth reading over the past 40 years (Smash Hits, Q, Mojo, The Word), David Hepworth’s fourth book is very likely his testament. With deep knowledge and deceptively easy style, Uncommon People examines 40 rock stars at crucial historical junctures—less for them individually (though that too) than for the actual condition of rock stardom. He takes devastating stock of Led Zeppelin’s 1979 Knebworth concert, as their patented rock-god moves faltered in the teeth of punk: “In the era of the Jam and Stranglers, this looked almost like historical reenactment.” He notes how solo folk singer Bob Dylan, playing his first New York dates in 1961, could go unfettered by bandmates who “would never have let him get away with inventing himself and also inventing a life in which he could star.” And as for the Beatles’ announcement of Apple Corps on “The Tonight Show” in 1968, Hepworth argues that this signaled the deeper split between Paul McCartney and John Lennon: “One was trying to start a company. The other just wanted to give away $2 million.” Lots of rock books ask, in essence, “Who are these people?” Few deliver answers this nuanced, thorough, and indelible. –Michaelangelo Matos

My Riot: Agnostic Front, Grit, Guts & Glory

There was a time in the early ’80s when Agnostic Front were arguably the most important hardcore band in the world. The New York group helped pioneer the thrash sound that bands like Metallica and Anthrax would take worldwide—and for much of it, vocalist Roger Miret was front and center. In his memoir My Riot: Agnostic Front, Grit, Guts & Glory, Miret weaves Agnostic Front into his own story, which begins in Cuba; fleeing the Castro regime with his family, Miret grew up poor in New Jersey, making soup from pigeons he caught in the park and watching his mother suffer abuse at the hands of her partners. And as one of the few Latinos in the burgeoning New York hardcore scene, he was uniquely positioned to maintain diplomacy between the hardcore kids and the Puerto Rican street gangs that ran their turf in the Lower East Side. Throughout the book, co-authored by Jon Wiederhorn (who also co-wrote biographies with Anthrax’s Scott Ian and Ministry’s Al Jourgensen), Miret maintains a matter-of-fact tone as he relays gritty, surprising tales, from beating down halfway house residents outside CBGB to clothing the homeless in Agnostic Front Ts. My Riot is a frank appraisal of a life filled with mistakes, triumphs, and the transcendentalism of the stage. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz

Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011

In Pitchfork’s interview with Meet Me in the Bathroom author Lizzy Goodman, she recalled getting pushback about her decision to write a book about a scene that had only recently run its course. But speaking as someone who was only 6 years old when Is This It was released, I will say that Goodman’s oral history feels essential to understanding this moment in rock. Between stories chronicling the rise of Interpol and gushing quotes about the raw immediacy of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Meet Me in the Bathroom captures the electric undercurrent of New York during the nascent days of bands that would soon garner fans worldwide. Many critics justifiably pegged the book as a tell-all tome about the Strokes but, in reality, the main character is the city—albeit a seedier version, one that has long since faded away. Meet Me in the Bathroom is a rich document of the people and places that shaped the music that convinced so many young people (myself included) to move to New York. Or maybe it’s 600 pages of now-famous musicians misremembering things through a substance-fueled haze. I can’t be sure. Unlike James Murphy, I wasn’t there. –Noah Yoo

Read our interview with Lizzy Goodman about Meet Me in the Bathroom.

Hadley Lee Lightcap

Like the writer Sam Sweet, I have a habit of imprinting certain songs on the places I drive through while listening to them. As Sweet puts it, in his former home of Memphis, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “hunchbacked riddims somehow suited the midnight panorama of Highway 7.” When he arrived in his adopted city of Los Angeles, it was the little-known, short-lived ’90s band Acetone whose music suited these “deep lonely canyons that separate the city from the sea.”

For some years now, in his All Night Menu book series, Sam Sweet has excavated the strange, hidden histories of seemingly innocuous settings in L.A. and profiled the characters who once populated them. In Hadley Lee Lightcap, which takes its title from the names of the three members of Acetone (and coincides with Light in the Attic’s re-release of the band’s catalog), Sweet draws on 10 years of interviews with the two surviving members for a book that’s something between a band biography and a novel. It doesn’t matter that you’ve never heard of Acetone; by this book’s end, you’ll be caught up in the band’s beautifully moody drift, which Sweet indelibly links to the landscape of their origins. –Rebecca Bengal

Art Sex Music

If Viv Albertine’s 2014 memoir Clothes Music Boys offered a woman’s revelatory perspective on punk, then Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Art Sex Music does the same for industrial, the genre she helped invent as part of Throbbing Gristle. This wasn’t, she explains, just an unsettling sound but a way of life, a form of liberation that took her from a schoolgirl oppressed by her domineering father in Hull to an internationally recognized artist of the avant-garde: a way “to be independent, active, thorough, and committed.” TG were defiantly underground until the mainstream caught wind; for this ethos, and their explicit exhibition at London’s ICA, they were deemed “wreckers of civilization” by Tory politicians in 1976.

Outside of the band, this dynamic underpinned Cosey’s revolutionary artworks. She started out making mail art, compiling collages from porn magazines and sending them through the post. But she realized that for her work to be truly authentic, she couldn’t rely on images of other women’s bodies, and started putting her own into the frame: in her own erotic photo shoots, in commercial pornography films and magazines, and as a dancer. “My life is my art,” she writes. “My art is my life.”

Cosey is a funny, lucid writer, who describes bathing her infant son in one breath and participating in a faux lesbian act the next with no distinction between the satisfaction they gave her. Her self-assurance and sheer dedication to her work show up her bandmate and early lover Genesis P-Orridge (who uses the pronoun h/er) as a charlatan. Though Cosey unsparingly describes h/er attempts to kill her by throwing a cinderblock from a balcony, the accounts of h/er mewling petulance might be more damning to P-Orridge’s supposedly transgressive reputation. Art Sex Music is a book for the ages—it doesn’t just illuminate Cosey’s personal liberation but how her work loosened Britain’s staid mores, too. –Laura Snapes

Read our interview with Cosey Fanni Tutti about Art Sex Music.

The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums

Often, the Great American Songbook is viewed either in terms of composers or singers, which makes a certain amount of sense. These were songs written at a time when there was no such thing as a definitive recorded version of them, and there wouldn’t be until after World War II. So until then, these arrangements existed in the mass subconscious, ready to be interpreted by countless singers live.

In this massive and needed book, vocal expert Will Friedwald uses the best-known versions of these songs as the gateway to assembling a canon of The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums. As a list, it’s useful and surprising: There are more Louis Armstrong albums than Frank Sinatra ones, and he finds space for the notorious oddball Tiny Tim. Where the book excels, though, is in providing context to this music that’s so common, people rarely know its origins. What Friedwald attempts to do is provide a background for some of our most ubiquitous music—and while he can occasionally be a bit exacting, his thesis is a powerful corrective in an age when we listen without information. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine