The Best Music Books of 2024

The narrative refracts through three lenses: Witt’s delirious rave odysseys, her day job as a New Yorker writer traveling to Trump rallies and towns plagued by school shooter crises, and her relationship with Andrew. The latter thread is the most compelling, as Witt brings the reader through her destructive love affair, from joyous optimism to something far worse than a breakup: a partner becoming warped, deranged, and totally unrecognizable.

Like a comedown sunrise set after a night of feverish debauchery, Health and Safety is an elegy, both for the halcyon days of Witt’s youth and a musical ecosystem that has changed rapidly and dramatically. Even in my own short time in Brooklyn, I’ve observed how much has already shifted since Witt began her book—whether it’s clubs shuttering, new ones spawning, or an arson attack. Reading Health and Safety, I’m glum at what I’ve missed, yet amped for the nights to come.

–Kieran Press-Reynolds

Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk

By Kathleen Hanna

The key talking points of Kathleen Hanna’s career—Bikini Kill frontwoman, pivotal figure in the riot grrrl movement, the liberating “Girls to the front!” call—that turned her into a household name are also guilty of boiling her down into a 2D pulp of third-wave feminist music. Although zines and documentaries like The Punk Singer have tried to capture Hanna’s influence and contextualize it in the modern day, it wasn’t until this year, with her engrossing memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, that Hanna fully set the record straight firsthand with candor and clarity.

An addictive read, Rebel Girl is filled with behind-the-scenes tour stories from Hanna’s time in Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and the Julie Ruin, and still examines broader topics like the lingering consequences of sellout culture, the debilitating side-effects of autoimmune diseases, and the lack of intersectionality in her early feminist efforts. “If you don’t process your own traumas,” she warns, “you may dump them onto others.” The stories Hanna dislodges from the recesses of her brain are raw enough to be plucked from a diary, and that frankness, once again, renders Hanna’s life story in its full three dimensions.

–Nina Corcoran

A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time

By Sheryl Kaskowitz

The New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s heralded series of projects to revive the United States after the Great Depression, is well-documented and still lauded nearly a century on from its creation. One program, however, has gone overlooked, and music scholar Sheryl Kaskowitz with her new book A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time, aims to re-educate Americans. A vivid and thoroughly researched breakdown of the Federal Music Project, the book recounts the origin story of the Resettlement Administration’s Special Skills Division, which developed art activities on American homesteads, in remarkable detail through a focus on its music unit and attempt to shift the country’s ideology from “rugged individualism to a new sense of collective purpose.”