MyBookshelf
My Bookshelf – Book 8
Dec 3rd
i spied this book at the home of a gentleman by the name of Yusuke.
hip hop heads, it’s time to blister those thumbs, tire those eyes and burn the midnight candles.
get your paws on this crazy compendium on some Oxford Dictionary ish for hip hop.
no, not ebonics, slang or colloquialisms.
but rather, a historical dossier on the who’s whos of rap, charting their track histories and who they’ve sampled.
comin’ straight out of Japan, there are only a few more copies left in stock.
the homie Yusuke will be bringing me a copy back from the land of the rising sun. go get yours!
this is for the diggin in the crates crews.
My Bookshelf – Book 7
Jul 5th
when you see a video for a song you love and don’t want to share with anyone get played over and over on tv and get mad then you know it has meant something to you.
i’d say this book has meant something to me.
bearing in mind it’s got one of the most memorable endings i’ve ever come across, the great gatsby comes to mind, you have to give the young author, nick mcdonell, a teenager at the time it was published, serious props.
combine intelligence, hip-hop and a cautionary tale and you have a winner.
this winner has also been adapted to fit the big screen. fifty is in it.
i’m kinda apprehensive about adaptations but if it’s good it’s good.
My Bookshelf – Books 5 & 6
Feb 19th
The most beautiful woman in the world. And she ain’t even breathing. Femme fatale. I’m a fan six feet deep. Ava Lavinia Gardner: the star, the moon, the African Queen, the farm girl, the actress, the beauty and the tragedy. This is the kind of woman all men fall in love with even though they know not to. I have a thing for old movies. Watching anythin’ in black & white. Mr Frank Sinatra, many would say, was really Mr Frank Gardner. Lee Server’s brilliant book is intimate, revealing, funny and well written. It’s an epic. You feel tired after reading it, but the good kind of tired. The kind of tired that comes after watching long ass films with twists, oohs and aaahs that make your heart smile and cry at the same time, hardly missing a beat, wishing the movie would never end. This book just happens to be about one of film’s true legends. The last of a dying breed. The brightest shimmer of Hollywood’s Golden generation. Read your heart out. Make it smile.
My Bookshelf – Books 3&4
Jan 6th
A few heads might recognise the title as the same as Sly & The Family Stone’s fifth offering. Peter Doggett’s page turner of a book is an interesting read. It combines a love for history with a love for music and looks at how the latter can influence the former and vice versa. It’s got stories and facts about and on everything from the Hippies to the Yippies, James Brown, the Black Panthers, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan…everything. It’s very cool. And it’ll last a while. One to savour.
Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders Raging Bulls is very much the same thing. It’s the filmic version of the book above. It looks at the 60s and the rise of the auteur. Lookin’ at the birth of creative minds like Scorcese, Spielberg, Friedkin, Lucas and the like. It’s a rollercoaster of a read with pages of slowburners and high peaks.
