Music & Movies

For practitioners and fans, jazz expresses the deepest meanings of life. Its rich history and its distinctive elements like improvisation and syncopation unite to create an unrepeatable and inexpressible aesthetic experience. But for others, jazz is an...

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 The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now,...

Their music changed pop history, but we've never known much about the people who made it...until now. Sly Stone shook the foundations of soul and turned it into a brand new sound that influenced and liberated musicians as varied as Miles Davis, Stevie...

In Boysie's Horn, social historian, radio host, producer, journalist, and novelist Steven Leech highlights the influence of one of America's greatest jazz educators, Boysie Lowrie, in making African American Wilmington, Delaware a launchpad for...

"Sesali Bowen is poised to give Black feminism the rejuvenation it needs. Her trendsetting writing and commentary reaches across experiences and beyond respectability. I and so many Black girls still figuring out who they are in this world will gain so...

Hip-hop meets self-help, with advice on creativity, self-belief, productivity, and more from rap's most influential voices. Adopt a hip-hop mindset to take control of your own narrative and become the best version of yourself with 50 must-read lessons on...

In a definitive and "excellent homage to a star who left this planet too soon" (Questlove), the life, career, tragic death, and evolution of Aaliyah into a music legend are explored--featuring in-depth research and exclusive interviews. By twenty-two...

The birth of acid house and club culture, as told by those who were there In 1987, four friends from London, Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway and Johnny Walker, took a week-long holiday to Ibiza. What they saw there, and brought back home,...

A New Yorker writer's intimate, revealing account of Tupac Shakur's life and legacy, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. In the summer of 2020, Tupac Shakur's single "Changes" became an anthem for the...

Breaking the global record for streams in a single day, nearly 10 million people around the world tuned in to hear Kendrick Lamar's sophomore album in the hours after its release. To Pimp a Butterfly was widely hailed as an instant classic, garnering...

"Revelatory . . . one of the most briskly revealing pieces of jazz biography that I've read." --Richard Brody, The New Yorker When Billie Holiday first stepped into a recording studio in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the...