I like to read my books in bunches, one lead to another.
*Can’t Stop Won’t stop, David Chang*
A classic that I just hadn’t gotten to before. From the Caribbean connection, the jungle of New York, curious British interlopers and the West coast rap scene. It is not just to music, it is the City, the dancing etc and the connections.
You can’t see Afrika Bambaataa without the effects of the city planning of New York as done by Robert Moses. The white flight etc. Only downside to this book is that your are constantly stopping to listen to the music.
*Robert Moses, the master builder of New York City, Pierre Christin*
If the Robert Caro is tl;dr, this is nice short graphic depiction of the man that made New York for better and for worse.
*The life and times of Malcom McLaren, Paul Gorman*
Fascinating read on the man behind the Sex Pistols but also fashion and the early days of hip hop and other bands. And let’s not forget the art. Every outing of his creativity was from the Situationist International concept of society.
To quote Wikepedia: Essential to situationist theory was the concept of the spectacle, a unified critique of advanced capitalism of which a primary concern was the progressively increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of social relations through images.
McLaren came from the blighted parts of post-war Londen. His famous boutique started as a squat. His Duck Rock album and especially the video (the buffalo gals) is a who’s who of the NYC Hip Hop scene. Sampled in preputium. And he was simply fun. I will just quote his parting shot to a crowd of townspeople “Don’t you know Jesus Christ is a sausage?”
*The society and the spectacle, Guy Debord (1967)*
‘The prestigiousness of mediocre objects of this kind is solely due to the fact that they have been placed, however briefly, at the center of social life and hailed as revelation of the unfathomable purposes of production’ NFT’s anybody?
Hampered by the Marxist dialectic style (one hand, other hand followed by a pretzel paradox), still a fun and valuable read. The spectacle will become real. The Ur text of the Situationist International.
*City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis*
“The old liberal paradigm of social control, attempting to balance repression with reform, has long been superseded by a rhetoric of social warfare that calculates the interest of the urban poor and the middle classes as a zero-sum game.”
No wonder the city brought us “Fuck tha Police”. A history of the city and the ideas that shaped them. From urban planning, police violence and environmental gambles.
*In search of Gil Scott-Heron, Thomas Mauceri, Seb Piquet (graphic novel)*
A Frenchman want’s to learn about African America Culture and ends up in New Hampshire to study cinema. He does learn about Gil Scott-Heron though, through the classic ‘the revolution will not be televised’. What follows is his quest to get a movie made about Gil Scott-Heron, and his travels to that goal.
Well drawn, well paced story, about searching for something that is just out of grasp. Be it the movie, acceptance or the understanding of Gil Scott-Heron.
by pointmaisterflex