About 40 years ago, hip-hop started as a penniless outcast in some of America’s poorest neighborhoods.
"Hip-hop is innovation out of necessity, the necessity of being broke," the rapper/producer El-P once said.
Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry that transcends cultures and generations and permeates not just the pop music charts, but television, movies, comedy, fashion and product lines ranging from toys to liquor.
It’s a classic American story of cultural innovation intertwined with capitalist opportunity, a tale of music creating a community which in turn attracted maverick investors who then were swallowed by corporations. The transformation bred multi-media stars, moguls and celebrities such as Jay-Z and Eminem.
Author Dan Charnas tenaciously follows the money trail in “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-hop” (New American Librarian), which celebrates hip-hop even as it details the backroom deals and marketing strategies that contributed to its explosive growth.
Continue reading "'The Big Payback': How hip-hop went from penniless outlaw to penthouse mogul" »
Ever wondered what’s the longest Keith Richards had stayed up while pursuing a song, drugs, kicks, the next misadventure?
Nine days, it turns out.
“I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes,” Richards writes in his fast-paced, pull-no-punches autobiography, “Life” (Little Brown), estimating that he sleeps on average twice a week. The Rolling Stones guitarist has built a well-deserved reputation for indestructibility in those three lifetimes, surviving drug addiction, legal shakedowns, life-threatening accidents, a parade of unsavory companions and unstable lovers, and his own reckless nature. Along the way he cowrote some of the greatest songs in rock history and created an archetype of cool that seems only to expand with the years. In a culture awash with impermanence, the guitarist with the skull ring and the half-cocked smile endures as a symbol of outlaw integrity.
Underpinning it all is a devotion to music, and an innate musicality as a guitarist, songwriter and band leader that make all the rest seem like a series of distractions. For what really matters about Richards is the sound of those records he created with the Stones at their best, and this book unpacks the secrets of that quest with a passion as searing as the guitar solo on “Sympathy for the Devil” or the ringing, distorted riff that ushers in “Gimme Shelter.”
Continue reading "Book review: Keith Richards' 'Life'" »