Ladies and germs! May we present Will Fulton and Patrick Rivers who will pen the 33 1/3 on Camp Lo’s 1997 album Uptown Saturday Night. This book is one of 16 new titles in the 33 1/3 series.
Give it a good long listen!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKR9tlhUqWs]
We caught up with Will and Patrick to learn more about their listening and reading habits.
33 1/3: What was your favorite book or record store growing up?
PR: Nobody Beats the Wiz, Brooklyn, NY
WF: Skippy Whites, Cambridge MA
33 1/3: What is your favorite book or record store in the world?
PR: Amazon.com (books), eBay.com (records).
WF: Amoeba Records, LA (active); Beat Street, Brooklyn NY (closed 🙁 )
33 1/3: What are you listening to right…NOW?
PR: Living Colour, Vivid; Johnny Gill, “Rub You the Right Way” (Extended Hype); Jodeci, Forever My Lady; Redhead Kingpin and the F.B.I., “Do the Right Thing”
WF: Lil Wayne, FWA; Jimi Hendrix Sweeping up the Pieces (studio outtakes and demos); Craig Sheppard Well-Tempered Clavier Book II
33 1/3: What are you reading right….NOW?
PR: Sound on Sound magazine; Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue; Wax Poetics piece on Gary Clark Jr.
WF: George Packer, The Unwinding; Karl Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud; Ta-nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me; James Gleick, The Information.
33 1/3: Where do you live?
PR: New Haven, CT
WF: Brooklyn, New York
Want to know more about Patrick and Will?
PR: www.patrickrivers.com and @patrickriversbk
WF: http://laguardia.academia.edu/willfulton and @WillFulton70
What to expect from Patrick and Will’s 33 1/3:
Concise 250 word description of the book (likely copy and pasted from your
proposal or revised):
Geechie Suede and Sonny Cheeba, two emcees from the Bronx, entered the hip-hop landscape of the mid-1990s with comprehensive insider slang that bewildered as they radiated the look of a bygone era of black culture. They collaborated with producer Ski to create Uptown Saturday Night (1997), which featured the seminal single “Luchini (a.k.a. This is It).” In the mid-1990s, hip-hop contained an assortment of sounds and imagery, into which Camp Lo inserted a concentrated dose of 1970s Blaxploitation culture, and re-envisioned it as a musical tapestry on their own terms. Songs were aural films that fluidly juxtaposed late-night diamond heist narratives with free association rhymes of exotic locales and luxury cars, creating a world that was both gritty and glamorous.
Uptown Saturday Night was fantastic and fantasy, an album that reimagined a black cool inaugurated in the 1970s, and represented by the work of actors like Lawrence Hilton- Jacobs (Coolie High’s “Cochise”) who defined the concept of 1970s cool with an ever- present toothpick hanging from the side of his knowing grin. This volume will detail how the fantastic musical world of Uptown Saturday Night was borrowed from the films of that era—particularly the Sidney Poitier film from which the album’s name is derived—and position the album as an essential example of Mark Anthony Neal’s “post- soul aesthetic.” Informed by new interviews, autobiographical accounts by former group A&R/co-author Will Fulton, and musical and cultural analyses, the volume details the development of the album, and how it exemplifies a “re-membering” of black cultural experience.
Say hello to Patrick and Will!
