Music: A Subversive History Audiobook (Free)

Through the dawn of civilization towards the modern-day music scene, this breathtaking global history reveals how songs have shifted societies and sparked revolutions.

Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who have created music revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who also borrowed innovations, diluted their effect, and disguised their resources. In Music: A Subversive History, historian Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs.

Gioia tells a four-thousand-year history of music as a global way to obtain power, change, and upheaval. He displays how interpersonal outcasts have repeatedly become trailblazers of musical expression: slaves and their descendants, for example, have repeatedly reinvented music, from historic times completely to the jazz, reggae, and hip-hop sounds of the current day.

Music: A Subversive History is essential reading for anybody interested in this is of music, from Sappho towards the Sex Pistols to Spotify.