Books — All Formats  

An anthology of hip hop art & graphics compiled by designer Cey Adams – from street art, to snapshots of the NYC underground from the end of the 60s through the 80s, pivotal album cover art, hip hop in the worlds of advertising and film, fashion and more! Loads of classic hip hop imagery, iconography, art and design! Includes a forward by Russell Simmons and an intro by Bill Adler. Paperback, 187 pages.

The massive All Music Guide To Rock – The Definitive Guide To Rock, Pop And Soul (3rd Edition) – featuring reviews of thousands and thousands albums as rated and reviewed by the exceptional All Music Guide writers! The book is an encyclopedia of pop music from the 50s to the early 00s – and an very, very good one – we find the All Music Guide an indispensable reference around here, and this is a great one to have on the shelf! 14,000 reviews of albums by more than 2000 artists. Amazing! Paperback, 1399 pages.

A cool German book with a great sense of global street culture – photos from around the world, brought together with a National Geographic brand, but much grittier than anything we ever remember seeing in the magazine! The hefty tome is almost 400 pages, in full color, and is filled with images of global graffiti, underground art, skateboard culture, gang symbols, street festivals, t-shirts, and many other modes of expression – more than enough to save you an around the world trip to view local street culture. Notes are in German, but the book is mostly photos – and those are all pretty darn great!

A cool little guide to all things club jazz – put together by Shuya Okino of Kyoto Jazz Massive, and featuring both record listings and writings! The record listing section is a fair bit smaller than other Japanese books like this that we stock – about 40 pages that show how you might build a club set from one key record, with suggested segues for the tunes before and after. The remaining 200 pages of the book is an extended essay, in Japanese, written by Okino – telling his thoughts and concepts of what Club Jazz should be. Given that he's been lecturing around Tokyo these days on the topic, you can bet that he's got plenty to say – but we warned, you must read Japanese to enjoy the bulk of this book!

A great revolution in record cover art – the early 90s rise of the hand-made package in the punk rock underground! 7" singles were a key force in punk and other underground styles of the time – and these small pressings were often hand-assembled by the bands themselves – sometimes printed one by one, or hand-stickered – sometimes glued together from other images, and sometimes made from old record covers themselves! The approach also infected a lot of album cover art of the time too – in ways that would make even multiple copies of a record seem very individual – thanks to the variations in the packaging. This well-done book lovingly documents this moment in musical packaging – and has a look that's quite like the records themselves – a beautiful approach to the cover and binding which really lives up to the full color images inside. 142 pages, hardcover.

An incredible look at the all-too-short life and music of Sam Cooke – put together by Peter Guralnick with an amazing amount of historical detail, and an even more important love of Cooke's music! The book is to Cooke what Guralnick's earlier writings were to Elvis Presley – a much deeper look at the man than had ever before been published – put together with an keen understanding for the music and its contribution to the world around it. Guralnick follows Cooke's key years with a great amount of detail – presenting incredible research, along with a wealth of vintage photos, but in ways that always read with far more depth than typical music history. A whopping 749 pages, softcover, with lots of photos!