Music & Movies

A thrilling account of life with Sun Ra's Arkestra and New York's avant-garde jazz scenes of the 1970s-90sIn this memoir, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts decades of national and international touring with the Sun Ra Arkestra and charts the...

The essential oral history of hip-hop, from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its reign as the most powerful force in pop culture--from the award-winning journalist behind All the Pieces Matter, the New York Times bestselling oral history...

Deep Inside the Blues collects thirty-four of Margo Cooper's interviews with blues artists and is illustrated with over 160 of her photographs, many published here for the first time. For thirty years, Cooper has been documenting the lives of blues...

This fun and challenging game offers hip-hop listeners 200 questions to test their knowledge of the genre! Set includes: Trivia Deck: 50 full-color printed cards filled with trivia questions (4 per card, for a total of 200 questions) Range of Eras and...

Cultural criticism and pop culture history intertwine in this important book, which dissects how hip hop has sidelined Black women's identity and emotional well-being. A "ride-or-die chick" is a woman who holds down her family and community. She's your...

Featuring over 300 hours of new interviews with 100+ subjects, an oral history of the girl groups (such as The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, and The Vandellas) that redefined the early 1960s The girl group sound, made famous and unforgettable by...

A major biography--intimate, gripping, revelatory--of an artist who revolutionized American comedy.Richard Pryor may have been the most unlikely star in Hollywood history. Raised in his family's brothels, he grew up an outsider to privilege. He took to...

Featuring over 300 hours of new interviews with 100+ subjects, an oral history of the girl groups (such as The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, and The Vandellas) that redefined the early 1960s The girl group sound, made famous and unforgettable...

Weaving together critical analysis and a filmic conversation, this book journeys through the multiple layers of Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno's thematically and aesthetically challenging body of work, framed here as a form of decolonial cinematic...

Some things we do for those we are responsible for, some things for ourselves, and some things we do for the ancestors.Today, it's all three! 1959. The first wave of independence is sweeping across Africa and Beneatha has left the prejudice of 1950s...

One of the few indisputable geniuses of pop music, Sly Stone is a trailblazer and a legend. He created a new kind of music, mixing Black and white, male and female, funk and rock. As a songwriter, he penned some of the most iconic anthems of the 1960s...

Singer. Dancer. Movie star. Activist. Queer icon. Afrofuturist. Working class heroine. Time traveler. Prophet. Feminist. Android. Dirty Computer. Janelle Monáe is all these things and more, making her one of the most fascinating artists to emerge in the...