Paperback Books 15 Items

An album which distilled a genre from the musical, cultural, and social ether, Portishead's Dummy was such a complete artistic achievement that its ubiquitous successes threatened to exhaust its own potential. RJ Wheaton offers an impressionistic investigation of Dummy that imitates the cumulative structure of the album itself, piecing together interviews, impressions of time and place, cultural criticism, and a thorough exploration of the music itself.

The approach focuses as much on the reception and response that Dummy engendered as it does on the original production of the album. How is that so many people have, collectively, made a quintessential headphone album into a nightclub album? How have they made the product of a niche local scene into an international success? This is the story of how an innovative, experimental album became the iconic sound for the better part of a decade; and an aesthetic template for the experience of music in the digital age.

248 pages.

A unique record of hip-hop history from the late 1990s through to the present, captured through informal Polaroid portraiture.

Just as Andy Warhol: Red Books defined a generation of artists, Big Shots offers a collection of photos that captures the energy of the world of hip-hop and the greater worlds of music and fashion alike. Started as snaps of friends and visitors, this unprecedented volume shot by Phillip Leeds, former tour manager of Kelis and N.E.R.D., is a compilation of previously unpublished work documenting some of the biggest names in hip-hop and fashion. His collection of Polaroid portraits has effectively grown to capture an important moment in music and fashion.

With more than 250 Polaroids of artists and figures including Mos Def, Jay Z, Tyler the Creator, Quest-love, and Rita Ora, Big Shots gives readers a unique and oftentimes impromptu look into an era of music and fashion shared through the ever-nostalgic format of the Polaroid.

As a Dutchman living in Belgium, Peter Schouten has an outsider's view on the country that he loves and is fascinated by. As a photographer, he finds Belgium a rewarding subject: its infrastructure, its cities, the diversity of its architecture... In Belgium, it sometimes seems as if everyone just does as he pleases, unbothered by rules or regulations. Peter wanted to find a way to capture the uniqueness of his surroundings, and found the answer one night while looking through his photographs of an original house from the sixties. It wasn't the house itself that grabbed his attention, but the strange letterbox in front of it: it had the shape of a big eagle sitting on a little concrete house, painted in bright colours. Ever since, Peter has been photographing the weirdest, most puzzling letterboxes all over Belgium. Over six years he has built a collection of over 300 photos of the most exceptional examples. Looking at those photos, you'll agree with the photographer that the Belgian letterboxes form a unique little piece of the country's cultural heritage.

Mechanical Fantasy Box is Cowley’s homoerotic journal, or as he called it, “graphic accounts of one man’s sex life.” The journal begins in 1974 and ends in 1980 on his 30th birthday. It chronicles his slow rise to fame from lighting technician at The City Disco to crafting a ground-breaking 16-minute remix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” to performing with Sylvester at the SF Opera House. Vivid descriptions are told of cruising in ‘70s SoMA sex venues to primal highs in Buena Vista Park and composing pornophonics in his Castro apartment. The entries are introspective and show a very out-front, alive person going through the throes of gay liberation post-Stonewall.

French-born artist and Berlin resident Gwenaël Rattke works in collage, silkscreen, photography and Xerox graphics. Rattke's collage works borrow from the visual codes of the 60s and 70s. Intricate, ornamental and excessive, they present "an imagined past fired with beauty and sexual freedom." For this book Rattke created 25 original illustrations inspired by selected entries, 3 street maps documenting locations mentioned herein and 4 collages of photos, ephemera and notes Patrick stuffed inside the journal. We’ve included Patrick’s doodles too, as well as introductory essays by Josh Cheon, Theresa McGinley and Jorge Socarrás.

Mudpuppy's Andy Warhol Coloring Book features the iconic pop artist's greatest hits ready to be colored in and customized by young artists. Introduce well-known classics like Andy's Campbell's Soup Cans to a new generation in a creative and interactive way with this 32-page coloring book. Each page is perforated to easily tear out and display as a new work of art. - 32 pages, 9. 5 x 12. 25

In 1991, a loose-knit collective released a record called Blue Lines under the name Massive Attack, splicing together American hip-hop and soul with the sounds of the British underground. With its marauding bass lines, angular guitars, and psychedelic effects, Blue Lines built on the Caribbean soundsystems and nascent rave scene of the 1980s while also looking ahead to the group's signature blend of epic cinematics and lush downtempo. In the process, Blue Lines invented an entirely new genre called trip hop and launched the career of a rapper named Tricky.

Ultimately, Blue Lines created the sonic playbook for an emerging future: hybrid, digital, cosmopolitan, and rooted in the black and immigrant communities who animated the urban wreckage of the postindustrial city. Massive Attack envisioned an alternate future in sharp counterpoint to the glossy triumphalism of Brit Pop. And while the group would go on to bigger things, this record was both a warning shot and a definitive statement that sounds as otherworldy today as on the day of its release. As Blue Lines's iconic flame logo spun on turntables the world over, Massive Attack and their spaced-out urban blues reimagined music for the 1990s and beyond.

Draw Your Own Comic Book! is full of blank squares and speech bubbles of different sizes, waiting for you to release your imagination and create your own fun and exciting stories.

Draw and color your squares to give your stories life. You can fill the hundred pages with one long, continuous series or many short action-packed strips.
This is the perfect source of inspiration for creative children and young people with their heads full of ideas. Draw Your Own Comic Book! makes it easy to understand the backbone of every comic, i.e. the frames that give room for the pictures. The coloring book is suitable for every age, as you fill the frames with your own drawings.
For every easy-bored youngster it’s a perfect tool to carry along and turn waiting time into creative time.
For every anxious adult that looks for a good gift, the search is over.
What are you waiting for? Get your markers and create your own cartoon!

When LCD Soundsystem broke up in 2011, they left behind a small but remarkable catalog of music. On top of the genius singles and a longform composition for Nike, there was a trilogy of full-length albums. During that initial run, LCD Soundsystem-and the project's mastermind, James Murphy-were at the center of several 21st century developments in pop culture: indie music's growing mainstream clout, Brooklyn surpassing Manhattan as an epicenter of creativity in America, the collision and eventual erosion of genre perceptions, and the rapid and profound growth and impact of digital culture. Amidst this storm, Murphy crafted Sound Of Silver, the centerpiece of LCD's work.

At the time of Sound Of Silver's creation and release, Murphy was a man closing in on 40 while fronting a critically-adored band still on the ascent. This album was the first place where he earnestly grappled with questions of aging, of being an artist, and the decisions we make with the time we have left. Anchored by a series of colossal, intense dance-rock songs, Sound Of Silver called upon the rhythms of New York City in order to draw out, dissect, and ultimately rip open these meditations. By the time LCD Soundsystem reunited in 2016, Sound Of Silver had already proven to be a generational touchstone, living on as a document of what it's like to be alive in the 21st century.

At the outset of summer in 1990, a Houston gangsta rap group called the Geto Boys was poised to debut its self-titled third album under the guidance of hip-hop guru Rick Rubin. What might have been a low-profile remix release from a little-known corner of the rap universe began to make headlines when the album's distributor refused to work with the group, citing its violent and depraved lyrics. When The Geto Boys was finally released, chain stores refused to stock it, concert promoters canceled the group's performances, and veteran rock critic Robert Christgau declared the group "sick motherfuckers."
One quarter of a century later the album is considered a hardcore classic, having left an immutable influence on gangsta rap, horrorcore, and the rise of Southern hip-hop.
Charting the rise of the Geto Boys from the earliest days of Houston's rap scene, Rolf Potts documents a moment in music history when hip-hop was beginning to replace rock as the transgressive sound of American youth. In creating an album that was both sonically innovative and unprecedentedly vulgar, the Geto Boys were accomplishing something that went beyond music. To paraphrase a sentiment from Don DeLillo, this group of young men from Houston's Fifth Ward ghetto had figured out the "language of being noticed" - which is, in the end, the only language America understands.