Also of interest...in the music that made us

My Old Kentucky Home by Emily Bingham (Knopf, $30)

It’s time to retire Kentucky’s state song, said Rebecca Gayle Howell in The Washington Post. This “riveting” new book details the racist history of “My Old Kentucky Home,” which began as a minstrel-show staple performed in blackface before it was embraced and disseminated by Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Kentucky Derby. Author Emily Bingham, a native Kentuckian, rejects the notion that the song has transcended its racist roots. “Ignorance, she intimates, is not an option for the patriotic.”

Shine Bright by Danyel Smith (Roc Lit 101, $28)

Danyel Smith’s new hybrid memoir “tackles one of pop music’s core truths—that without Black women, there is no genre,” said Jon Mael in The Boston Globe. The former editor of Vibe and Billboard, who’s been writing about music since the late 1980s, weaves rich portraits of Gladys Knight, Whitney Houston, and other pop luminaries into her account of her own experiences as a fan and scribe. “The common thread through it all is the songs that provided the backing track to her life.”

Corporate Rock Sucks by Jim Ruland (Hachette, $30)

Early on, Jim Ruland’s history of

SST Records is “the tale of a culture being stubbornly constructed from the ground up,” said Mark Athitakis in the Los Angeles Times. Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn launched the label out of necessity in 1979, before going on to sign Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, and others, establishing SST as the 1980s’ preeminent indie label. But SST wasn’t heaven, as Ruland ably documents, and its eventual creative decline “exhausted whatever authority the zeitgeist had conferred on it.”

More Real Life Rock by Greil Marcus (Yale Univ., $28)

Music critic Greil Marcus is “a world-class cultural spelunker,” said David Kirby in The Wall Street Journal. In this second collection of his “Top Ten” columns, here spanning 2014–21, he once again displays his talent for snatching curiosities out of the media culture’s deluge, whether his subject is an obscure band or a dry-cleaning ad. “Even better, he connects it all in a way that makes our world seem often odder, occasionally more sinister, and always more delightful than it did before.”