Wax Poetics Anthology

"The fandom driving the magazine is infectious, and the best pieces are simply essential.... A large part of Anthology's draw, as with Wax Poetics the magazine, is how gorgeous it looks: Many pieces come with lovingly reproduced album covers and 45 labels, arrayed neatly like so much recordcollector porn." -The Onion A.V. Club Wax Poetics Anthology, Volume 1, the first book from the esteemed music journal showcasing everyone from jazz and Hip Hop heavyweights to soul and funk musicians, gathers articles from their first five issues into an attractive hardbound edition filled with vintage photos and album art. Including profiles of the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, funk drummers Clyde Stubblefield and John "Jab'O" Starks, Wild Style director Charlie Ahearn, the late jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, and many more, this first installment of the Wax Poetics Anthology is a must-have for record collectors and music connoisseurs alike. First published in December 2001, Brooklyn-born Wax Poetics hit newsstands with a new vision for music journalism, creating a bridge between the past and present of Hip Hop, jazz, funk, soul, reggae, disco, and Latin music. Although originally created for a concentrated market of music aficionados, the magazine's audience has grown exponentially, making musical anthropologists out of average music listeners and spawning a soul renaissance, complete with comeback tours and sophomore efforts. Wax Poetics illuminates the dark corners of our sonic past, while also striving to give new and innovative artists the credit they truly deserve.

Make room on your book shelves!! One of the premier magazines for music lovers and vinyl collectors, Wax Poetics is here with their first anthology book. Compiled of their favorite articles from issues 1 - 5, all in one book. All of your favorites and appreciated artists from jazz, hip-hop to funk and soul shown in this book, which is a collectors must have!!!

If you can speak and read English, you can write poetry. The trick is knowing where to start. Stephen Fry, who has long written poems, and indeed has written long poems, for his own private pleasure, invites you to discover the incomparable delights of metre, rhyme and verse forms. Whether you want to write a Petrarchan sonnet for your lover's birthday, an epithalamion for your sister's wedding or a villanelle excoriating the government's housing policy, The Ode Less Travelled will give you the tools and the confidence to do so. Brimful of enjoyable exercises, witty insights and simple step-by-step advice, The Ode Less Travelled guides the reader towards mastery and confidence in the Mother of the Arts.

It's all about the scratch in Groove Music, award-winning music historian Mark Katz's groundbreaking book about the figure that defined hip-hop: the DJ. Today hip-hop is a global phenomenon, and the sight and sound of DJs mixing and scratching is familiar in every corner of the world. But hip-hop was born in the streets of New York in the 1970s when a handful of teenagers started experimenting with spinning vinyl records on turntables in new ways. Although rapping has become the face of hip-hop, for nearly 40 years the DJ has proven the backbone of the culture. In Groove Music, Katz (an amateur DJ himself) delves into the fascinating world of the DJ, tracing the art of the turntable from its humble beginnings in the Bronx in the 1970s to its meteoric rise to global phenomenon today. Based on extensive interviews with practicing DJs, historical research, and his own personal experience, Katz presents a history of hip-hop from the point of view of the people who invented the genre. Here, DJs step up to discuss a wide range of topics, including the transformation of the turntable from a playback device to an instrument in its own right, the highly charged competitive DJ battles, the game-changing introduction of digital technology, and the complex politics of race and gender in the DJ scene. Exhaustively researched and written with all the verve and energy of hip-hop itself, Groove Music will delight experienced and aspiring DJs, hip-hop fans, and all students or scholars of popular music and culture.

As the visual representation of an essentially oral text, Sylvia Huot points out, the medieval illuminated manuscript has a theatrical, performative quality. She perceives the tension between implied oral performance and real visual artifact as a fundamental aspect of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poetics. In this generously illustrated volume, Huot examines manuscript texts both from the performance-oriented lyric tradition of chanson courtoise, or courtly love lyric, and from the self-consciously literary tradition of Old French narrative poetry. She demonstrates that the evolution of the lyrical romance and dit, narrative poems which incorporate thematic and rhetorical elements of the lyric, was responsible for a progressive redefinition of lyric poetry as a written medium and the emergence of an explicitly written literary tradition uniting lyric and narrative poetics. Huot first investigates the nature of the vernacular book in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, analyzing organization, page layout, rubrication, and illumination in a series of manuscripts. She then describes the relationship between poetics and manuscript format in specific texts, including works by widely read medieval authors such as Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, and Guillaume de Machaut, as well as by lesser-known writers including Nicole de Margival and Watriquet de Couvin. Huot focuses on the writers' characteristic modifications of lyric poetics; their use of writing and performance as theme; their treatment of the poet as singer or writer; and of the lady as implied reader or listener; and the ways in which these features of the text were elaborated by scribes and illuminators. Her readings reveal how medieval poets and book-makers conceived their common project, and how they distinguished their respective roles.

A vivid, dramatic account of how half a dozen kinds of modern music--punk rock, art rock, disco, salsa, rap, minimalist classical--emerged in new forms and cross-pollinated all at once in the middle seventies in NYC. Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented—block by block, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless. Will Hermes's Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era's music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year's Day 1973 to New Year's Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGB and the Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation.

From the school yards of the South Bronx to the tops of the "Billboard" charts, rap has emerged as one of the most influential cultural forces of our time. This pioneering anthology brings together more than 300 lyrics written over 30 years, from the "old school" to the present day.

This illustrated history of Jewish culture in America as told through music includes a collection of amazingly kitschy, truly unforgettable album covers and insightful essays that highlight the funniest, most influential contributions to the musical canon. Full color throughout.