Short books about albums. Published by Bloomsbury
Read posts related to rap music and the best-loved artists in the genre.
What’s your favorite song to listen to during the festive season? Ben Apatoff, the author behind Body Count’s Body Count, tells us about his favorite and why Run-DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis” continues to be a festive classic. So settle in folks, It’s Christmastime in Hollis, Queens…
Glastonbury has finally returned to Worthy Farm! To get you in the mood for the one of the most iconic music festivals in the world, we’ve put together a list of books inspired by legendary Glasto performances.
Got a favorite Glastonbury performances? Let us know in the comments!
Zach Schonfeld on the various dimensions of sampling When I tell people about my book about 24-Carat Black, I often mention that the group’s music has been sampled hundreds of times throughout hip-hop. If you’ve listened to, say, Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN, or Nas’s double-platinum album It Was Written, you’ve heard bits and pieces of 24-Carat Black. But the surviving members of 24-Carat Black haven’t received royalties for those samples, even when the samples were legally cleared. The latter half of my 33 1/3 book explores both the creative and legal…
Zach Schonfeld in conversation with Jerome Derrickson While researching and reporting my 33 1/3 book about 24-Carat Black’s progressive funk masterpiece Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, I tracked down and interviewed ten surviving members of 24-Carat Black. (Some from the group’s original lineup, others from the group’s Chicago-based second lineup.) These interviews were long and fascinating, full of vivid recollections of 24-Carat Black’s unusual rise and fall, but—for obvious reasons of space and narrative flow—I could only quote small portions of them in the book. So I figured I could use this…