Best summer books of 2024: Pop music

Hip Hop Is History by Questlove, with Ben Greenman (Auwa/White Rabbit)

“The amazing, beautiful, chaotic genre that has given me everything and taken almost as much,” is how Questlove sums up the topic of Hip Hop Is History. Drummer with Philadelphia band The Roots, he insightfully recounts rap’s rise to become the most significant US black art form since jazz.

My Family and Other Rock Stars by Tiffany Murray (Fleet)

Novelist Tiffany Murray grew up in recording studios in rural Wales where her bohemian mother worked as chef. In her fine memoir, vivid recollections of rock stars (Freddie Mercury’s laugh was “like a thin heron gobbling a fish”) are punctuated by her mother’s recipes for dishes such as pike quenelles.

The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955-1979) by Jon Savage (Faber)

Savage’s history of the often furtive association between gay culture and popular culture begins with rock and roll trailblazer Little Richard and ends with disco star Sylvester. Music is central to his compendious book, which depicts pop as being at the vanguard of changing attitudes to sexuality.

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I Was There: Dispatches from a Life in Rock and Roll by Alan Edwards (Simon & Schuster)

Publicists make a living from being unreliable narrators. But Edwards tells it straight in I Was There, an enjoyable memoir about life in London’s music publicity scene. David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and the Spice Girls are among those with walk-on roles. On this occasion, they must play second fiddle to their PR guy.

Pulp’s This Is Hardcore (33 ⅓) by Jane Savidge (Bloomsbury)

Ex-publicist for Pulp, Savidge’s addition to the 33 ⅓ series of books about albums is a witty, first-hand account of the Sheffield band’s fame-comedown record, 1998’s This Is Hardcore — a bleak but brilliant album about drugs, porn and self-loathing that brought Britpop’s curtain down with a crash.

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