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One evening in September 1963, the Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, assembled in nearby Newark to record their third live album with gospel music’s rising star, James Cleveland. Nobody that evening could have predicted the album’s overwhelming popularity. For two years, Peace Be Still and its haunting title track held top positions on gospel radio and record sales charts. The album is reported to have sold as many as 300,000 copies by 1966 and 800,000 copies by the early 1970s—figures normally achieved by pop artists. Nearly sixty years later, the album still sells. Of the thousands of gospel records released in the early 1960s, why did Peace Be Still become the most successful and longest lasting? To answer this question, the book details the careers of the album’s musical architects, the Reverends Lawrence Roberts and James Cleveland. It provides a history of the First Baptist Church and the Angelic Choir, explores the vibrant gospel music community of Newark and the roots of live recordings of gospel, and, most important, assesses the sociopolitical environment in which the album was created. By exploring the album’s sonic and lyrical themes and contextualizing them with comments by participants in the recording session, the book challenges long-held assumptions about the album and offers new interpretations in keeping with the singers’ original intent.

This book aims to delineate, describe, explore, and examine hardcore in Washington, DC, during its zenith of both impact and innovation, 1978-83. During these indispensably creative and influential years in DC music, hardcore was not simply born—a mutated sonic stepchild of rock ’n’ roll, British and American punk—but also evolved into an uncompromising and resounding paradigm of and for a specific segment of DC youth. Through the revelatory music of DC hardcore, a new formulation of sound, and a new articulation of youth, arose: one that was angry, loud, fast, and minimalistic. With a total of only ten albums among all five bands this book covers—Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Teen Idles (considered jointly), State of Alert, Government Issue, and Faith—over a five-year period, DC hardcore cemented a small yet significant subculture and scene. More specifically, this book considers two major components inherent in any genre of popular music: (1) aesthetics and (2) the social politics that stem from those aesthetics. Throughout these chapters, we consider the way music communicates, its structure—facets like timbre, melody, rhythm, pitch, volume, dissonance—and simultaneously dissects how these features communicate messages of social and cultural politics, expressly representations of race, class, and gender.