Featured Conservative Authors
Conservative Book Zone
Conservative Classics
General Market Books
Shop our bookstore where you will find books for each conservative topic you are looking for!
|
|
|
|
|
|
Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small
| Our Price |
$ 14.78
|
|
| Retail Value |
$ 18.95 |
|
| You Save |
$ 4.17 (22%) |
|
| Item Number |
1560118 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Item Description...
Product Description
Merge Records defies everything you've heard about the music business. Started by two twenty-year-old musicians, Merge is a lesson in how to make and market great music on a human scale. The fact that the company is prospering in a failing industry is something of a miracle. Yet two of their bands made the Billboard Top 10 list; more than 1 million copies of Arcade Fire's Neon Bible have been sold; Spoon has appeared on Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show; and the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs is a contemporary classic.
In celebration of their twentieth anniversary, founders Mac and Laura offer first-person accounts---with the help of their colleagues and Merge artists---of their work, their lives, and the culture of making music. Our Noise also tells the behind-the-scenes stories of Arcade Fire, Spoon, the Magnetic Fields, Superchunk, Lambchop, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Butterglory. Hundreds of personal photos of the bands, along with album cover art, concert posters, and other memorabilia are included.
|
Item Specifications...
Pages 289
Dimensions: Length: 1" Width: 7.5" Height: 9.5"
Weight: 1.7 lbs.
Binding Softcover
Release Date Sep 15, 2009
ISBN 1565126246
EAN 9781565126244
|
Availability 3 units.
Availability accurate as of May 30, 2012 03:59.
Usually ships within one to two business days from La Vergne, TN.
Orders shipping to an address other than a confirmed Credit Card / Paypal Billing address may incur and additional processing delay.
|
More About John Cook, Mac MacCaughan & Laura Ballance
Product Categories
Similar Products
Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | The Story of the Little Label that Could Jan 2, 2010 |
For an essential part of the music industry, independent record labels have a short shelf life. Most either serve as clearing houses for great bands that jump to the majors once they start to generate buzz (IRS Records) while others pay for artistic freedom with a leaky business model (Factory). It's harder and harder to for indie labels to survive in the post-Napster era, but one humble label from a small North Carolina college town is doing just that.
"Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records" chronicles the labor of love that is Merge Records, founded in the dark days after R.E.M. signed to Warner Brothers but before Nirvana made alternative rock attractive to the majors. John Cook, the primary author, constructs the book as an oral history, with input from Merge's two founders Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance. As the book goes through the sometimes turbulent, sometimes transcendent, but always interesting history of Merge and some of its most prominent artists, it's clear that McCaughan and Ballance have learned the hard way how to stay viable as a business when major labels with more cash and attractive enticements come calling on your best-selling artists.
McCaughan and Ballance started Merge in 1989, as a way to get their records (as the band Superchunk and other side projects) out without having to make the compromises that major labels would force on them. In time, other groups with simpatico interests were drawn to the label, from the Magnetic Fields to Neutral Milk Hotel. Merge finally broke into the mainstream to a large degree with the success of Arcade Fire, whose two albums for the label ("Funeral" and "Neon Bible") rock harder than anything the Jonas Brothers could even dream of achieving.
Throughout the book, Cook interviews those closest to the Merge Records story, including the major-label executives who tried to lure away some of Merge's biggest acts once the alternative "boom" kicked in with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Merge hasn't had all the resources of major labels (such as signing bonuses and, in the case of Arcade Fire during their tour for "Funeral," the means of replenishing albums to meet the demand once the initial pressing sold out), but they do have one up on the majors in this respect: they put out music that they love, by artists that they respect, and they put all their efforts into making sure that it gets heard.
In analyzing the go-for-broke (but financially savvy) approach of Merge, Cook contrasts it with the excesses of the post-"Nevermind" music world (when record labels combed Seattle and Merge's home base of Chapel Hill for any group that wore flannel and long hair). The ability of Merge to thrive in that era, and to survive the fall-off when record sales for the majors started to plummet, is testament to the founding ideal of McCaughan and Ballance. For all their success, however, they have occasionally run into the same issues as befall other indie labels in the past, from disgruntled former clients to predatory major label representatives, and they're honest in the interviews about when they've screwed up. But for a trial-and-error business like the music industry (where last year's hit band can be this year's costly flop), Merge has managed to survive and thrive.
In the interest of full disclosure, I wasn't aware of Merge Records before I read this book, and it caused me to go back and notice that some of my favorite records had the "Merge Records" label on them (most recently, "Chapter One" by She & Him). But I will say that, like Factory Records' mercurial head Tony Wilson, Mac and Laura put the artists above profits, and I'm glad for that. In an age where cynical major labels try to hook you in with the latest "It" band, it's refreshing to know that some people still give two cents about good music. Merge Records is one of the few good guys left, and "Our Noise" shows how they got big without losing their soul.
| | | | Our Noise Oct 21, 2009 |
| This books is amazing. Well written and great photos that shows Merge from the beginning til now. This books has alot of behind the scene info that alot of us record collectors crave which helps make it great. If you are a fan of Merge Records and/or Superchunk this is a must read. | | | | Raleigh wasn't dark, angry Sep 3, 2009 |
"Raleigh was dark, angry and punk - more leather jackets and houses with spray paint on the walls. Chapel HIll was collegiate and hip"
Really? Having been part of the Raleigh scene in the mid-80s, I testify that we were far from dark and angry. I remember laughter, overflowing parties, bands in basements hoping to play the basement of the Fallout Shelter. The author seems intent on making Raleigh sound like a town of mines and soul crushing factories.
Chapel Hill was an over-priced smug little town. And those kids in Chapel Hill wore leather jackets while skate boarding in front of the courthouse. They went tattoo crazy before Raleigh (if you don't count Simon Bob Sinister)
Maybe a book will come out about Wifflefist Records to set the story straight | | | | Brilliant Must Read for Any Fan of Music Aug 29, 2009 |
An absolutely fascinating account of the life of independent label Merge Records and the band (Superchunk) that gave it life, over the past 20 years. What was started by Mac and Laura of Superchunk fame to put out 7" records of their bands and their friends' bands in Chapel Hill, NC, in the late '80s has become one of the most influential and successful independent labels in the music business. While other labels and major labels are imploding with massive sales declines in recent years, Merge soldiers on during its most successful era ever, with only one guiding principle - they put out the music of bands that they like, regardless of commercial viability, and will stay with the band as long as the band wants, regardless of sales. Profits are split 50-50 with the artist (major labels are more like 85-15) and there is never any thought of interference or suggestion of what the artist should do. As a result, some of the most successful albums in indie rock history have been released on Merge, including Neutral Milk Hotel's immortal "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea", The Magnetic Fields' 3-CD "69 Love Songs", Spoon's "Girls Can Tell" and The Arcade Fire's "Funeral".
The book consists largely of interviews with those involved over the last 20 years (the bands, the Superchunk members, friends, family, roadies, etc.), told in an impressive narrative form that reads as a fascinating story of a group of music outsiders who learned how to make the music they loved outside the corporate system, and make enough money to survive for 20 years and counting. The history of Superchunk is intertwined with the history of Merge (it's about a 50/50 split in the book), so for any even casual fan of this classic band, this is a must-read. But the story of Merge is equally fascinating, as are the in-depth chapter-long discussions of several Merge artists, including The Arcade Fire, Spoon, The Magnetic Fields, Matt Suggs, Lambchop, and Neutral Milk Hotel. I can't recommend this enough. | | | Write your own review about Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small
|
|
