Music & Movies

From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and...

In the underground labyrinths of New York City's subway system, beneath the third rail of a long forgotten line, Saul Williams discovered scrolls of aged yellowish-brown paper rolled tightly into a can of spray paint. His quest to decipher this mystical...

On the heels of Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer Prize, as the world begins to recognize the creative side of Hip-Hop, comes a writing guide from a musician and The greatest MC of all time, Rakim. The musician and Hip Hop legend--hailed as "the greatest MC of...

On the heels of Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer Prize, as the world begins to recognize the creative side of Hip-Hop, comes a writing guide from a musician and The greatest MC of all time, Rakim. The musician and Hip Hop legend--hailed as "the greatest MC of...

"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the...

This stirring collection of Negro spirituals, edited by the great Negro poet James Weldon Johnson and arranged for voice and piano by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, presents 120 of these melodic -- and intensely moving -- religious folk songs for...

This vibrant book pulses with the beats of a new American South, probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed southern identities for a post-civil rights generation. For scholar and critic Regina N. Bradley, Outkast's work is the touchstone,...

In this classic account of the new black music of the 1960s and 70s, celebrated photographer and jazz historian Val Wilmer tells the story of how a generation of revolutionary musicians established black music as the true vanguard of American culture...

NOW A NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, AND PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY BESTSELLERDyson writes with the affection of a fan but the rigor of an academic. ... Using extensive passages from Jay-Z's lyrics, 'Made in America' examines the rapper's role as a poet, an...

Should Johnny Cash have been charged with murder after he sang, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die"? Few would seriously subscribe to this notion of justice. Yet in 2001, a rapper named Mac whose music had gained national recognition was...

Tupac Shakur's most intimate and honest thoughts were uncovered only after his death with the instant classic The Rose That Grew from Concrete.   His talent was unbounded a raw force that commanded attention and respect. His death was tragic--a...

Two longtime friends share an intimate and urgent conversation about life, music, and their enduring love of America, with all its challenges and contradictions, in this stunningly produced expansion of their groundbreaking Higher Ground podcast,...

Tupac Shakur's most intimate and honest thoughts were uncovered only after his death with the instant classic The Rose That Grew from Concrete.   His talent was unbounded a raw force that commanded attention and respect. His death was tragic--a...

The British comedian of Nigerian heritage and co-executive producer and writer of the CBS hit series Bob Hearts Abishola chronicles her odyssey to get to America and break into Hollywood in this lively and humorous memoir. According to family...

How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theoryand Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album,...

A definitive account of Blaxploitation cinema--the freewheeling, often shameless, and wildly influential genre--from a distinctive voice in film history and criticism In 1971, two films grabbed the movie business, shook it up, and launched a genre that...