Download or read book Mama Phife Represents written by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor and published by Breakbeat Poets. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik 'Phife Dawg' Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest in this intimate collection.
Download or read book Go Ahead in the Rain written by Hanif Abdurraqib and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Best Seller A February IndieNext Pick Named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by Buzzfeed, Nylon, The A. V. Club, CBC Books, and The Rumpus. And a Winter's Most Anticipated Book by Vanity Fair and The Week Starred Reviews: Kirkus and Booklist "Warm, immediate and intensely personal."—New York Times 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 Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group’s history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself. Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast–West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels’ shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he’s remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe’s 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg’s death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that—like the low end, the bass—are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.
Download or read book Funeral Diva written by Pamela Sneed and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Funeral Diva is the Winner of the Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry! A poetic memoir about coming-of-age in the AIDS era, and its effects on life and art. "Sneed is an acclaimed reader of her own poetry, and the book has the feeling of live performance. . . . Its strength is in its abundance, its desire for language to stir body as well as mind."—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review "She is a writer for the future, in that she defies genre."—Hilton Als "This notable achievement, traveling from youth to adulthood, is a harrowing account of how Sneed transforms violence and pain into an artist's life."—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric "There's an eerie sense of timeliness to this book, which features prose and poetry by the writer and teacher Pamela Sneed and is largely — though not entirely — about mourning Black gay men killed too soon by a deadly virus."—Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed "OH MY GOODNESS, it was amazing. I was in tears by the end. What starts off as beautiful memoir evolves into incredibly moving poetry, painful and sweet and lovely."—Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY "Balancing and mixing, with rhyme and reason, love and anger, good and bad, memory and the created present, all to tell the story of a life, a memoir unrestrained, devoid of artificial forms. Honest. Free."—Anjanette Delgado, New York Journal of Books In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on Black Queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed’s poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears—like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde—whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape. Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts today's most pressing issues with acerbic wit and audacity. The collection closes with Sneed's reflections on the two pandemics of her time, AIDS and COVID-19, and the disproportionate impact of each on African American communities. "Riveting, personal, open-hearted, risky and wise."—Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse " . . . a tour de force about the collision between a coalescing 1980s 'Black lesbian and gay literary and poetic movement' in New York and the onslaught of AIDS."—Donna Seaman, Booklist "Pamela Sneed's Funeral Diva is deft, defiant, and devastating."—Tommy Pico, author of Feed "Funeral Diva is urgent and necessary reading to live by. This is writing at its finest. Keep this book close to your heart and soul."—Karen Finley, author of Shock Treatment "Reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s Zami, Pamela Sneed’s memoir is, in itself, a healing balm, affirming in its truths and honesty. I cannot remember ever reading a book that illustrates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on our community more poignantly than Funeral Diva."—Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy "Pamela Sneed takes enormous risks in this book. She tells the truth with fierce concentration and an abiding sense of purpose.”—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Hip Hop written by Justin A. Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion covers the hip-hop elements, methods of studying hip-hop, and case studies from Nerdcore to Turkish-German and Japanese hip-hop.
Download or read book We Want It All written by Andrea Abi-Karam and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of poems by trans writers that explores the relationship between explicitly political desires and the formal inventions possible to enact or imagine those desires.Who is writing formally exciting, explicitly political poetry right now? Editors, Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel bring together contributions by an intergenerational constellation of radical trans writers to both answer this question and enable writing in these modes. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, against capital, racism, empire, borders, prisons, ecological devastation; the writers here imagine an altogether different, overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture and the working day. The editors offer this anthology as an experiment: how far can literature written and/or collected from an identitarian standpoint go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands?
Download or read book Listening to Rap written by Michael Berry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past four decades, rap and hip hop culture have taken a central place in popular music both in the United States and around the world. Listening to Rap: An Introduction enables students to understand the historical context, cultural impact, and unique musical characteristics of this essential genre. Each chapter explores a key topic in the study of rap music from the 1970s to today, covering themes such as race, gender, commercialization, politics, and authenticity. Synthesizing the approaches of scholars from a variety of disciplines—including music, cultural studies, African-American studies, gender studies, literary criticism, and philosophy—Listening to Rap tracks the evolution of rap and hip hop while illustrating its vast cultural significance. The text features more than 60 detailed listening guides that analyze the musical elements of songs by a wide array of artists, from Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash to Nicki Minaj, Jay-Z, Kanye West, and more. A companion website showcases playlists of the music discussed in each chapter. Rooted in the understanding that cultural context, music, and lyrics combine to shape rap’s meaning, the text assumes no prior knowledge. For students of all backgrounds, Listening to Rap offers a clear and accessible introduction to this vital and influential music.
Download or read book New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone written by R. Rivera and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-02-07 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Puerto Ricans have been an integral part of hip hop culture since day one: from 1970s pioneers like Rock Steady Crew's Jo-Jo, to recent rap mega-stars Big Punisher (R.I.P.) and Angie Martinez. Yet, Puerto Rican participation and contributions to hip hop have often been downplayed and even completely ignored. And when their presence has been acknowledged, it has frequently been misinterpreted as a defection from Puerto Rican culture and identity, into the African American camp. But nothing could be further from the truth. Through hip hop, Puerto Ricans have simply stretched the boundaries of Puerto Ricanness and latinidad.
Download or read book The Black Maria written by Aracelis Girmay and published by BOA Editions, Ltd.. This book was released on 2016-04-18 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking its name from the moon's dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, The Black Maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay's newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better. "to the sea" great storage house, history on which we rode, we touched the brief pulse of your fluttering pages, spelled with salt & life, your rage, your indifference your gentleness washing our feet, all of you going on whether or not we live, to you we bring our carnations yellow & pink, how they float like bright sentences atop your memory's dark hair Aracelis Girmay is the author of two poetry collections, Teeth and Kingdom Animalia, which won the Isabella Gardner Award and was a finalist for the NBCC Award. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, she has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome, Cave Canem, and Watson foundations, as well as Civitella Ranieri and the NEA. She currently teaches at Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and in Drew University's low residency MFA program. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she splits her time between New York and Amherst, Massachusetts.
Download or read book Survival Supervivencia written by Miguel Algarin and published by Arte Publico Press. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ñDonÍt believe the deadly game,î Miguel Algarin warns the elderly black Puerto Rican sitting in a park in Old San Juan, ñof Northern cities paved with gold and plenty / donÍt believe the fetching dream / of life improvement in New York / the only thing youÍll find in Boston / is a soft leather shoe up your ass.î In this affecting collection of poetry and prose, Nuyorican poet Miguel Algarin crafts beautifully angry, sad pieces about injustice and loss. While warning his compatriots about the unreality of the American Dream, he acknowledges that ñwe are the pistons that / move the roughage through Uncle / SamÍs intestines, we keep the flow / of New York happening / we are its muscles.î AlgarinÍs poems covering his long career give voice to the disenfranchisedthe junkie, the HIV inflicted, the poverty strickenand survival is a recurring theme. In the essay ñNuyorican Language,î which was originally published in 1975, he argues that for the New York Puerto Rican, there are three survival possibilities: to work hard for little money all your life and remain in eternal debt; to live life by taking risks of all types, including killing, cheating and stealing; and to create alternative behavioral habits. The Nuyorican poet, he says, must create a new language, ñA new day needs a new language or else the day becomes a repetition of yesterday.î While many of the poems focus on the Puerto Rican experience in New York, others touch on universal experiences such as the death of friends and the ephemeral nature of life. ñSo what if youÍre dead, / IÍm here, youÍre gone, / and IÍm left alone / to watch how time betrays, / and we die slow / so very slow.î And he turns his sharp gaze on events around the world, including the fights between England and Argentina for the Falkland Islands, Israel and Palestine for the Holy Land. With an introduction by Ernesto QuiÐonez, author of the acclaimed novel Bodega Dreams, this collection takes the reader through an intimate, autobiographical journey of one of the countryÍs leading Nuyorican writers and intellectuals.
Download or read book Seeing the Body Poems written by Rachel Eliza Griffiths and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominee for the 2021 NAACP Image Award in Poetry An elegiac and moving meditation on the ways in which we witness "bodies" of grief and healing. Poems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss. In radiant poems—set against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events, pop culture, and politics—Rachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mother’s death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The poems take shape in the space where public and private mourning converge, finding there magic and music alongside brutality and trauma. Griffiths braids a moving narrative of identity and its possibilities for rebirth through image and through loss. A photographer as well as a poet, Griffiths accompanies the fierce rhythm of her verses with a series of ghostly, imaginative self-portraits, blurring the body’s internal wilderness with landscapes alive with beauty and terror. The collision of text and imagery offers an associative autobiography, in which narratives of language, absence, and presence are at once saved, revised, and often erased. Seeing the Body dismantles personal and public masks of silence and self-destruction to visualize and celebrate the imperfect freedom of radical self-love.
Download or read book Permanent VOLTA written by Rosie Stockton and published by . This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A debut collection of love poems that resist subjection and ask how we might live together outside of capitalism, providing for each other through intimate acts of care and struggle
Download or read book Check the Technique written by Brian Coleman and published by Villard. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Tribe Called Quest • Beastie Boys • De La Soul • Eric B. & Rakim • The Fugees • KRS-One • Pete Rock & CL Smooth • Public Enemy • The Roots • Run-DMC • Wu-Tang Clan • and twenty-five more hip-hop immortals It’s a sad fact: hip-hop album liners have always been reduced to a list of producer and sample credits, a publicity photo or two, and some hastily composed shout-outs. That’s a damn shame, because few outside the game know about the true creative forces behind influential masterpieces like PE’s It Takes a Nation of Millions. . ., De La’s 3 Feet High and Rising, and Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). A longtime scribe for the hip-hop nation, Brian Coleman fills this void, and delivers a thrilling, knockout oral history of the albums that define this dynamic and iconoclastic art form. The format: One chapter, one artist, one album, blow-by-blow and track-by-track, delivered straight from the original sources. Performers, producers, DJs, and b-boys–including Big Daddy Kane, Muggs and B-Real, Biz Markie, RZA, Ice-T, and Wyclef–step to the mic to talk about the influences, environment, equipment, samples, beats, beefs, and surprises that went into making each classic record. Studio craft and street smarts, sonic inspiration and skate ramps, triumph, tragedy, and take-out food–all played their part in creating these essential albums of the hip-hop canon. Insightful, raucous, and addictive, Check the Technique transports you back to hip-hop’s golden age with the greatest artists of the ’80s and ’90s. This is the book that belongs on the stacks next to your wax. “Brian Coleman’s writing is a lot like the albums he covers: direct, uproarious, and more than six-fifths genius.” –Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop “All producers and hip-hop fans must read this book. It really shows how these albums were made and touches the music fiend in everyone.” –DJ Evil Dee of Black Moon and Da Beatminerz “A rarity in mainstream publishing: a truly essential rap history.” –Ronin Ro, author of Have Gun Will Travel
Download or read book The Hood Health Handbook written by Supreme Understanding and published by Proven Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a dozen writers contributed to this handbook, edited by C BS Alife and Supreme Understanding. The contributors include fitness gurus, dieticians, personal trainers, and holistic practitioners from around the country.
Download or read book The Crazy Bunch written by Willie Perdomo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a prize-winning poet, a new collection that chronicles a weekend in the life of a group of friends coming of age in East Harlem at the dawn of the hip-hop era Willie Perdomo, a native of East Harlem, has won praise as a hip, playful, historically engaged poet whose restlessly lyrical language mixes "city life with a sense of the transcendent" (NPR.org). In his fourth collection, The Crazy Bunch, Perdomo returns to his beloved neighborhood to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a "crew" coming of age in East Harlem at the beginning of the 1990s. In poems written in couplets, vignettes, sketches, riffs, and dialogue, Perdomo recreates a weekend where surviving members of the crew recall a series of tragic events: "That was the summer we all tried to fly. All but one of us succeeded."
Download or read book What Noise Against the Cane written by Desiree C. Bailey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets is a lyrical and polyvocal exploration of what it means to fight for yourself “Bailey invites us to see what twenty-first-century life is like for a young woman of the Black diaspora in the long wake of a history of slavery, brutality, and struggling for freedoms bodily and psychological.” —Carl Phillips, from the Foreword The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration, and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation, and womanhood. Series judge Carl Phillips observes that Bailey’s “poems argue for hope and faith equally. . . . These are powerful poems, indeed, and they make a persuasive argument for the transformative powers of steady defiance.”
Download or read book You Don t Have to Be Everything written by Diana Whitney and published by Workman Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems to Turn to Again and Again – from Amanda Gorman, Sharon Olds, Kate Baer, and More Created and compiled just for young women, You Don’t Have to Be Everything is filled with works by a wide range of poets who are honest, unafraid, and skilled at addressing the complex feelings of coming-of-age, from loneliness to joy, longing to solace, attitude to humor. These unintimidating poems offer girls a message of self-acceptance and strength, giving them permission to let go of shame and perfectionism. The cast of 68 poets is extraordinary: Amanda Gorman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, who read at Joe Biden's inauguration; bestselling authors like Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Acevedo, Sharon Olds, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Mary Oliver; Instagram-famous poets including Kate Baer, Melody Lee, and Andrea Gibson; poets who are LGBTQ, poets of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, poets who sing of human experience in ways that are free from conventional ideas of femininity. Illustrated in full color with work by three diverse artists, this book is an inspired gift for daughters and granddaughters—and anyone on the path to becoming themselves. No matter how old you are, it helps to be young when you're coming to life, to be unfinished, a mysterious statement, a journey from star to star. —Joy Ladin, excerpt from "Survival Guide"
Download or read book The Sentences That Create Us written by PEN America and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sentences That Create Us draws from the unique insights of over fifty justice-involved contributors and their allies to offer inspiration and resources for creating a literary life in prison. Centering in the philosophy that writers in prison can be as vibrant and capable as writers on the outside, and have much to offer readers everywhere, The Sentences That Create Us aims to propel writers in prison to launch their work into the world beyond the walls, while also embracing and supporting the creative community within the walls. The Sentences That Create Us is a comprehensive resource writers can grow with, beginning with the foundations of creative writing. A roster of impressive contributors including Reginald Dwayne Betts (Felon: Poems), Mitchell S. Jackson (Survival Math), Wilbert Rideau (In the Place of Justice) and Piper Kerman (Orange is the New Black), among many others, address working within and around the severe institutional, emotional, psychological and physical limitations of writing prison through compelling first-person narratives. The book’s authors offer pragmatic advice on editing techniques, pathways to publication, writing routines, launching incarcerated-run prison publications and writing groups, lesson plans from prison educators and next-step resources. Threaded throughout the book is the running theme of addressing lived trauma in writing, and writing’s capacity to support an authentic healing journey centered in accountability and restoration. While written towards people in the justice system, this book can serve anyone seeking hard won lessons and inspiration for their own creative—and human—journey.
