Paperback Books 13 Items

From a Los Angeles hospital bed, equipped with little more than a laptop and a stack of records, James “J Dilla” Yancey crafted a set of tracks that would forever change the way beatmakers viewed their artform. The songs on Donuts are not hip hop music as “hip hop music” is typically defined; they careen and crash into each other, in one moment noisy and abrasive, gorgeous and heartbreaking the next. The samples and melodies tell the story of a man coming to terms with his declining health, a final love letter to the family and friends he was leaving behind. As a prolific producer with a voracious appetite for the history and mechanics of the music he loved, J Dilla knew the records that went into constructing Donuts inside and out. He could have taken them all and made a much different, more accessible album. If the widely accepted view is that his final work is a record about dying, the question becomes why did he make this record about dying?

Drawing from philosophy, critical theory and musicology, as well as Dilla’s own musical catalogue, Jordan Ferguson shows that the contradictory, irascible and confrontational music found on Donuts is as much a result of an artist’s declining health as it is an example of what scholars call “late style,” placing the album in a musical tradition that stretches back centuries.

152 pages.

apper Bun B lends his street cred and occasionally his face to the creative, hilarious, and just flat-out fun imaginings of Shea Serrano in Bun B's Rap Coloring and Activity Book. Described by the Washington Post as "what every hip-hop head wishes they had as a child," this imaginative work started as a series of printable rap-related coloring and activity images. The 48-page, fully interactive book of coloring pages, unbelievably clever activities, and smart plays on rap culture brings these stars and their music right into your living room.Featured rappers include:
Bun B
Queen Latifah
Drake
Talib Kweli
Ice-T
Common
Wiz Khalifa
Ludacris
LL COOL J
Big Boi
Childish Gambino
Questlove
B.o.B
Mac Miller

And many, many more!

Rapper’s Delight: The Hip Hop Cookbook features thirty recipes inspired by your favourite hip hop artists of today and yesteryear. Split into three categories of Starters, Mains and Desserts, the book includes a wide range of delights such as Wu-Tang Clam Chowder, Public Enemi-so Soup, Run DM Sea Bass and Busta Key Lime Pie.

Each of the recipes is accompanied by a bespoke piece of artwork, created by one of thirty of the best upcoming illustrators. Rapper’s Delight celebrates the many humorous parallels between food and hip hop, making it a must-have for anyone with a love for cooking, music or illustration, or indeed all three.

Finally, a brilliant exploration of the German rock band Can's monumental 1971 album Tago Mago.
Tago Mago is a hugely unique and influential album that deserves close analysis from a fan, rather than a
musicologist. In this officially approved account of one of the most influential and powerful albums of the 1970s, Scottish novelist Alan Warner details the
concrete music we hear on the album as well as how it was composed,
executed and recorded—including the history of the album in terms of
its release, promotion and art work. Warner includes a backtracking of
the history of the band up to that point and also some description of Can's unique recording approach taking into account their home studio set up. Yet this tale of Tago Mago is more than just a history of the band; it is also the tale of a young man obsessed with record collecting
in the dark and mysterious period of pop music before Google.
Through a combination of Warner’s own experiences and interviews with the two surviving members of the band (drummer Jaki Liebezeit, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and bassist Holger Czukay) Can’s Tago Mago
is a hilariously personal and illuminating picture of one of the biggest names in experimental rock.

160 pages, paperback.

Words like "inspiring," "expansive," and "moving" are
regularly used to describe Sigur Rós's ( ), and yet the
only words heard on the record itself are a handful of
meaningless nonsense syllables. The album has no
title—or rather, its title is no title: just an empty pair
of parentheses. The intention being that listeners will
fill in the parentheses with their own title, their own
interpretation of the sounds on the record. The CD
sleeve consists of twelve pages that are essentially blank, lacking song
titles, liner notes or production credits. Instead, it contains only semitranslucent
frosted images of abstract natural scenes (tree branches,
clouds, etc.), on which the listener is free to inscribe their own notes—
or no notes at all. And then there are the lyrics, sung in a deliberately
unintelligible tongue called "Hopelandic" which the band invites listeners
to interpret freely.
Ethan Hayden's book doesn't try to fill in the gaps between the album's
parentheses, but instead explores the ways in which listeners might
attempt to do so. Examining the communicative powers of asemantic
language, the book asks whether music can bring sense to nonsense.
What happens to the voice when it stops singing conventional
language: does it simply become another musical instrument, or is it
somehow more "human"? What role does space play on ( )? And how do
we interpret music that we cannot possibly understand, but feel very
deeply that we do?

168 pages, paperback.

Oasis’s incendiary 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe managed to summarize almost the entire history of post-fifties guitar music from Chuck Berry to My Bloody Valentine in a way that seemed effortless. But this remarkable album was also a social document that came closer to narrating the collective hopes and dreams of a people than any other record of the last quarter century.

In a Britain that had just undergone the most damaging period of social upheaval in a century under the Thatcher government, Noel Gallagher ventriloquized slogans of burning communitarian optimism through the mouth of his brother Liam and the playing of the other Oasis ‘everymen’: Paul McGuigan, Paul Arthurs and Tony McCarroll. On Definitely Maybe, Oasis communicated a timeworn message of idealism and hope against the odds, but one that had special resonance in a society where the widening gap between high and low demanded a newly superhuman kind of leaping.

Alex Niven charts the astonishing rise of Oasis in the mid 1990s and celebrates the life-affirming, communal force of songs such as “Live Forever,” “Supersonic,” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol.” In doing so, he seeks to reposition Oasis in relation to their Britpop peers and explore one of the most controversial pop-cultural narratives of the last thirty years.

144 pages.

Extravagantly opaque, willfully vaporous — Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released by the estimable British label Warp Records in 1994, rejuvenated ambient music for the Internet Age that was just dawning. In the United States, it was Richard D. James's first full length on Sire Records (home to Madonna and Depeche Mode) under the moniker Aphex Twin; Sire helped usher him in as a major force in music, electronic or otherwise.

Faithful to Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music, Selected Ambient Works Volume II was intentionally functional: it furnished chill out rooms, the sanctuaries amid intense raves. Choreographers and film directors began to employ it to their own ends, and in the intervening decades this background music came to the fore, adapted by classical composers who reverse-engineered its fragile textures for performance on acoustic instruments. Simultaneously, “ambient” has moved from esoteric sound art to central tenet of online culture. This book contends that despite a reputation for being beatless, the album exudes percussive curiosity, providing a sonic metaphor for our technologically mediated era of countless synchronized nanosecond metronomes.

144 pages.

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.

The world’s first practical coursebook on the art of graffiti.

If you want to learn how to write graffiti this is the book you need.

Find out how to: - design your own letter style - use effects to create a unique tag - create throw-ups - include fills and motifs - paint wildstyle, bubblestyle and blockbusters - build up large burners - handle a spray can - get your work up safely and legally

Teachers, this is the book you need if you want to teach graffiti.

It contains: - plans for lessons on graffiti - theory and practice - practical advice for staging safe, hands-on graffiti lessons - guidance on marking students' work - resources covering the origins and cultural history of graffiti - clear step-by-step explanations to suit students of all abilities - exercises and solutions

'The step-by-step demonstrations of techniques are surprisingly comprehensive, making this a perfect birthday or Christmas present for a teenage relative with a creative streak' Artists & Illustrators

About the Author: Chris Ganter is a former winner and judge of the Montana Style Combat competitions (Stuttgart and Munich). He also won the Stuttgart graffiti contest for public walls and Write4Gold (south Germany). His work has been exhibited in Germany and Australia, and he has contributed to many publications, including Street Fonts and Graffiti School.

Format:Paperback with flaps Size:29.7 x 21.0 cm Extent:176 pp Publication date:2 September 2013 ISBN:9780500290972

he exiting story about how the street wear pioneers Shirt Kings created a style that would define hip hop culture in the 1980s and beyond. Jamaica, Queens, New York in the mid 1980s. Rappers, celebrities and hip hop fans came from all over the city to get their own customized T-shirt by the Shirt Kings. The style traveled all over the world through record covers and music videos, and the Shirt Kings designs soon became synonymous with hip hop and the culture of making something out of nothing. Shirt Kings: Pioneers of Hip Hop Fashion looks at the early days of street wear through the lens of the pioneering group of artistic entrepreneurs known as the Shirt Kings. By adapting the graffiti skills from the trains and spray cans to shirts and airbrush they created a new look for a new generation. Edwin Phade Sacasa is a founding artist of the group and it is through his archives that we are transported to the 1980s in New York City where the fashion was loud, colorful, and filled with cartoon imagery. But not just any cartoon imagery for the cartoons where urbanized. Mickey Mouse with a Fila suit, Casper the Friendly Ghost with gold teeth and Pink Panther with gold chains. People from across the city made their way to Jamaica, Queens to a small shopping mall known as the Coliseum where you could easily bump into the biggest names in hip hop of the day. From DJ Red Alert to LL Cool J to Big Daddy Kane to Mike Tyson – they all had to have their Shirt Kings designs. Shirt Kings: Pioneers of Hip Hop Fashion chronicles the art, the styles, and the people who where loyal supporters of the Shirt Kings, and takes us on a trip down memory lane to when customization and art reigned supreme in New York City. After the hardcover has been sold out for years, just in time for Hip Hop’s 50th anniversary comes another chance to take part of the Shirt Kings’ inspiring history as pioneers of hip hop and street wear in this beautiful soft cover edition. “Shirt Kings brought the hip hop element into the clothes for real and integrated it, and it was the first time I saw hip hop culture completely merged with clothing.” — LL Cool J “The Shirt Kings network was fashion TV of the times, and advertising and promotion way before it became trendy.” — Chuck D, Public Enemy ”Phade and the Shirt Kings are pioneers of hip hop fashion, also it is duly noted that the graffiti element has been elevated and made fashionable thru their airbrushing work.” – RZA ”Phade has been my go to guy since the eighties for all airbrush collabos!” – Dapper Dan Born in East New York, Brooklyn, Edwin Phade Sacasa founded the Shirt Kings in the mid 1980s, where he serviced many of todays Hip Hop stars and pioneers, such as Jay Z and Run DMC. Phade is working with youth in the inner city and have developed a program that teaches urban fashion through art therapy and entrepreneur skills. Alain KET is an artist, photographer, author, artistic consultant, marketing professional and frequent lecturer on the topic of graffiti.

Released to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the coolest and best- known label in jazz, this book celebrates over seven decades of extraordinary music from a company that has stayed true to its founders commitment to Uncompromising Expression. Tracing the evolution of jazz from the boogie- woogie and swing of the 1930s, through bebop, funk and fusion, to the eclectic mix Blue Note releases today, the book also narrates a complex social history from the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany to the developments in music and technology in the late 20th century. Blue Note is not only known as the purveyor of extraordinary jazz but is also famous as an arbiter of cool. The photography of co-founder Francis Wolff and the cover designs of Reid Miles were integral to the labels success and this highly illustrated, landmark publication featuring the very best photographs, covers, and ephemera from the archives, including never-before-published material commemorates Blue Notes momentous contribution to jazz, to art and design as well as to revolutionizing the music business.