Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Kendrick Lamar is at the top of his game. The thirteen-time Grammy Award-winning rapper is just in his early thirties, but he's already won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, produced and curated the soundtrack of the megahit film Black Panther, and has been named one of Time's 100 Influential People. But what's even more striking about the Compton-born lyricist and performer is how he's established himself as a formidable adversary of oppression and...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A freak plane crash sets off a chase for a little girl with strange powers in this “stay-up-all-night” thriller from an Edgar Award–winning author (USA Today). Amanda is playing in the backyard when the plane explodes overhead. As metal, fire, and bodies rain down on her small town, the little girl wanders off. Houses on either side explode as she toddles away from the carnage, across the park, and into the woods....
Author
Language
English
Description
"Otis Redding remains an immortal presence in the canon of American music on the strength of such classic hits as "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay," "I've Been Loving You Too Long," "Try a Little Tenderness," and "Respect," a song he wrote and recorded before Aretha Franklin made it her own. As the architect of the distinctly southern, gospel-inflected style of rhythm & blues associated with Stax Records in Memphis, Redding made music that has long...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"Carlisa "Carli" Henton is a musician and songwriter hoping to follow in her father's musical footsteps. But, biding her time until she makes it big in the music industry, she works as a junior account manager at a big-name media company to cover her New York City rent. Carli meticulously balances her work with her musical endeavors as a songwriter--until a chance meeting with rising star Tau Anderson sends her calculated world into a frenzy. Their...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The Notorious B.I.G. was one of the most charismatic and talented artists of the 1990s. Born Christopher Wallace and raised in Clinton Hill/Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, Biggie lived an almost archetypal rap life: young trouble, drug dealing, guns, prison, a giant hit record, the wealth and international superstardom that came with it, then an early violent death. Biggie released his first record, Ready to Die, in 1994, when he was only 22. Less than three...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Ray McMillian loves playing the violin more than anything, and nothing will stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional musician. Not his mother, who thinks he should get a real job, not the fact that he can't afford a high-caliber violin, not the racism inherent in the classical music world. And when he makes the startling discovery that his great-grandfather's fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, his star begins to rise....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"From the streets of Baltimore to the halls of the New Mexico Philharmonic, a musician shares his remarkable story in I'm Possible, an inspiring memoir of perseverance and possibility. Growing up, Richard Antoine White and his mother didn't have a key to a room or a house. Sometimes they had shelter, but they never had a place to call home. Still, they always had each other, and from a young age, Richard believed he could look after his mother, even...
8) Taft
Author
Language
English
Description
"John Nickel is a black ex-jazz musician who only wants to be a good father. But when his son is taken away from him, he's left with nothing but the Memphis bar he manages. Then he hires Fay, a young white waitress, who has a volatile brother named Carl in tow. Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft--Fay and Carl's dead father--and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met. But his sympathies for these lost souls soon take...
Author
Language
English
Description
In 1963, at the age of 17, Dwayne Hallston discovers James Brown and wants to perform just like him. His band, the Amazing Ramblers, studies and rehearses in the storage room of his father's shop in a small North Carolina town. Meanwhile, Dwayne's forbidden black friend Larry apprentices to a jazz musician. His mother hopes music will allow him to escape the south.
12) Passing strange
Publisher
IFC Films
Language
English
Formats
Description
Spike Lee's adaptation of the Broadway show "Passing Strange" presents the portrait of a musician as a young man. In 1970s Los Angeles, a talented but rebellious middle-class African-American discovers punk rock. Through the intervention of a sincere choir director, the young man travels to Europe, where his talents blossom, but at the expense of those who care for him. The film is based on the life of musician Stew, who appears as narrator and commentator...
13) Urban blues
Author
Series
Phoenix books volume P291
Language
English
Formats
Description
Charles Keil examines the expressive role of blues bands and performers and stresses the intense interaction between performer and audience. Profiling bluesmen Bobby Bland and B. B. King, Keil argues that they are symbols for the black community, embodying important attitudes and roles-success, strong egos, and close ties to the community. While writing Urban Blues in the mid-1960s, Keil optimistically saw this cultural expression as contributing...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
This insightful biography looks at the turbulent lives, groundbreaking music and lyrics, and powerful brand of hip hop's infamous Wu-Tang Clan.
The Wu-Tang Clan and RZA: A Trip through Hip Hop's 36 Chambers chronicles the rise of the Wu-Tang Clan from an underground supergroup to a globally recognized musical conglomerate. Enhanced by the author's one-on-one interviews with group members, the book covers the entire...
The Wu-Tang Clan and RZA: A Trip through Hip Hop's 36 Chambers chronicles the rise of the Wu-Tang Clan from an underground supergroup to a globally recognized musical conglomerate. Enhanced by the author's one-on-one interviews with group members, the book covers the entire...
Publisher
First Run Features
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Description
Musician Daryl likes to meet and befriend members of the Ku Klux Klan- something few black men can say. In his travels, he's collected robes and other artifacts from friends affiliated with the Klan, building a collection piece by piece, story by story, and person by person in hopes of eventually opening a "Museum of the Klan", a testimony to what knowledge and respectful, personal communication can accomplish. In ACCIDENTAL COURTESY, Daryl's journey...
Author
Language
English
Description
Kem goes back to the very beginning to introduce his grandmother who worked as a sharecropper in the South and had thirteen children. As Kem's family rises from the sharecropping and ultimately lands in Detroit, there is an unspoken mantra of "hard things are better left unsaid," which has devastating consequences down the line. His mother is never without a beer in her hand, and his relationship with his father is oddly tense. Emotionally starved,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"He came on stage in a coffin, carried by pallbearers, drunk enough to climb into his casket every night. Onstage he wore a cape, clamped a bone to his nose, and carried a staff topped with a human skull. Offstage, he insisted he'd been raised by a tribe of Blackfoot Indians, that he'd joined the army at fourteen, that he'd defeated the middleweight boxing champion of Alaska, that he'd fathered seventy-five illegitimate children. The R & B wildman...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"From pop culture critic and music journalist Miles Marshall Lewis comes a book about the power and poetry of Kendrick Lamar! Kendrick Lamar is one of the most influential rappers, songwriters and record producers of his generation. Widely known for his incredible lyrics and powerful music, he is regarded as one of the greatest rappers of all time. Promise That You Will Sing About Me explores Kendrick Lamar's life, his roots, his music, his lyrics,...