Love for Sale

Love for Sale
Author: David Hajdu
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-10-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0374170533

A personal, idiosyncratic history of pop music traces the sheet-music era at the end of the nineteenth century and the invention of records through favorite chart-topping songs and the ways his mother shaped him as an aficionado.

Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons

Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons
Author: Jim Zub
Publisher: Oni Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2021-08-25
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1620108763

It's the COMPLETE ADVENTURE! Grab your dice, pencils, and spell book as Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons returns in this deluxe edition hardcover! When Morty asks Rick for help learning how to play D&D because he has a crush on a girl, it ends up drawing the entire family into a D&D world, where they inadvertently help the "bad guys" win, but make it right in the end. Then, in the hit series Painscape, magical D&D adventures come to Earth, and no one will survive the Painscape! The world’s greatest role-playing game returns to plague the world’s most dysfunctional animated family, and this time, we can’t just rest on brand-name recognition and curiosity to fuel your interest, Morty, because no one gives a d-d-damn about sequels unless they’re really good, so no pressure, you hacks! Including all eight issues of the hit series, plus a BRAND-NEW story from Jim Zub and Troy Little featuring Mr. Meeseeks conquering The Forgotten Realms! Over 300 pages of monsters, mayhem, and a bag of holding-worth of bonus materials.

Media Crossroads

Media Crossroads
Author: Paula J. Massood
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2021-02-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1478021306

The contributors to Media Crossroads examine space and place in media as they intersect with sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, class, and ability. Considering a wide range of film, television, video games, and other media, the authors show how spaces—from the large and fantastical to the intimate and virtual—are shaped by the social interactions and intersections staged within them. The highly teachable essays include analyses of media representations of urban life and gentrification, the ways video games allow users to adopt an experiential understanding of space, the intersection of the regulation of bodies and spaces, and how style and aesthetics can influence intersectional thinking. Whether interrogating the construction of Portland as a white utopia in Portlandia or the link between queerness and the spatial design and gaming mechanics in the Legend of Zelda video game series, the contributors deepen understanding of screen cultures in ways that redefine conversations around space studies in film and media. Contributors. Amy Corbin, Desirée J. Garcia, Joshua Glick, Noelle Griffis, Malini Guha, Ina Rae Hark, Peter C. Kunze, Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, Nicole Erin Morse, Elizabeth Patton, Matthew Thomas Payne, Merrill Schleier, Jacqueline Sheean, Sarah Louise Smyth, Erica Stein, Kirsten Moana Thompson, John Vanderhoef, Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Existential Togetherness

Existential Togetherness
Author: DeWayne R. Stallworth
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2019-08-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532651619

The notion of community entails more than just shared space in the here-and-now moment. For African Americans especially, communal engagement is a sacred experience that stretches from the mundane to the spectacular in a cyclical historical pattern. DeWayne R. Stallworth illumines the broadness of this African American religious experience by looking back to the first shared experience of unbiased community that occurred during slavery. He then explores the difficulties of maintaining such a unity under the threat of supremacy as experienced through systemic structures of both white and black privilege. Most important, Stallworth unpacks how the black religious leader, although caricatured as uncouth and ignorant, remained the moral compass for community progression and uplift until the civil rights era. This provocative book is essential reading for anyone with a desire to obtain a broader and deeper understanding of what it means to be black, religious, and American in the twenty-first-century United States.

The Lives of Guns

The Lives of Guns
Author: Jonathan Obert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2018-09-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190842938

Guns have never been as prevalent in American culture as they are at this moment. Most contemporary conversations on guns either highlight the gun as just a tool used in mass killings or a right to be fiercely defended; eventually, whatever progress these debates foster in the public conversation tend to halt altogether once the old cliché, "guns don't kill people; people kill people" is trotted out. These gun control and gun violence discussions take the gun as passive object, ignoring the changing effects, and the very agency, that guns may deploy as politicized objects. What happens if we reset the conversation and admit that guns, and not the people behind them, kill people? The Lives of Guns offers a new and compelling way of thinking about the role of the gun in our social and political lives. In gathering ideas from law, science studies, sociology, and politics, each chapter turns the stale, standard gun conversations around by investigating the gun as an object with agency. In approaching guns from a technological perspective, down to the very science of how they are created and how they fire, The Lives of Guns takes up a number of questions, such as: How does the presence of these objects shape civic ideology? What does it mean to develop and care for gun and gun accessories technology? What do guns mean to those who build them versus those who fight for-and against-them? What could happen when drone technology meets gun technology? In bringing together fresh perspectives from leading lawyers, political scientists, and historians, The Lives of Guns promises to move the gun debate forward by opening up new ways of thinking about these issues and broadening the scope of these perennial debates.

Somebody Scream!

Somebody Scream!
Author: Marcus Reeves
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2009-03-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780865479975

"A strong and timely book for the new day in hip-hop. Don't miss it!"—Cornel West For many African Americans of a certain demographic the sixties and seventies were the golden age of political movements. The Civil Rights movement segued into the Black Power movement which begat the Black Arts movement. Fast forward to 1979 and the release of Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." With the onset of the Reagan years, we begin to see the unraveling of many of the advances fought for in the previous decades. Much of this occurred in the absence of credible, long-term leadership in the black community. Young blacks disillusioned with politics and feeling society no longer cared or looked out for their concerns started rapping with each other about their plight, becoming their own leaders on the battlefield of culture and birthing Hip-Hop in the process. In Somebody Scream, Marcus Reeves explores hip-hop music and its politics. Looking at ten artists that have impacted rap—from Run-DMC (Black Pop in a B-Boy Stance) to Eminem (Vanilla Nice)—and puts their music and celebrity in a larger socio-political context. In doing so, he tells the story of hip hop's rise from New York-based musical form to commercial music revolution to unifying expression for a post-black power generation.

Bad Boy

Bad Boy
Author: Ronin Ro
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2002-02-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 074343417X

This is a tale of friendship, greed, and betrayal in the music industry—and a definitive history of America's biggest rap mogul. No one knows more about creating hits than Sean “Puffy” Combs. For years he virtually ran hip-hop. It seemed the perfect arrangement: “Puffy” provided the sounds and obsessive attention to detail while the Notorious B.I.G. promoted an image that kept rap fans happy. It should have lasted forever, but “Biggie” was murdered at the height of his career—and “Puffy”'s ascension to superstardom ushered in an age of disloyalty and deception that exploded into one of the greatest debacles in the history of the music industry. Through interviews with label insiders, grand jury testimony, and other sources, America's preeminent rap journalist Ronin Ro -reveals the true story of “Puffy” -addresses the larger issues that shaped the man and the industry -explains how Bad Boy both helped and destroyed hip-hop and R&B music -details why some artists “Puffy” created ultimately left his Bad Boy family in disgust. At once an intimate history and a portrait of an era, Bad Boy shows readers exactly how Combs lost his strangle-hold over the multibillion-dollar rap music industry. The story of Bad Boy Entertainment is the story of the American Dream, an up-close and personal account of the people, the money, the creative process that made it all come true, and the young mogul who caused the dream to fall apart. In this hip-hop tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, readers finally learn the story that Sean “Puffy” Combs does not want them to know.

In the Heart of the Beat

In the Heart of the Beat
Author: Alexs Pate
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2009-11-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0810861453

Despite its extraordinary popularity and worldwide influence, the world of rap and hip hop is under constant attack. Impressions and interpretations of its meaning and power are perpetually being challenged. Somewhere someone is bemoaning the negative impact of rap music on contemporary culture. In In the Heart of the Beat: The Poetry of Rap, bestselling author and scholar Alexs Pate argues for a fresh understanding of rap as an example of powerful and effective poetry, rather than a negative cultural phenomenon. Pate articulates a way of "reading" rap that makes visible both its contemporary and historical literary values. He encourages the reader to step beyond the dominance of the beat and the raw language and come to an appreciation of rap's literary and poetic dimensions. What emerges is a vision of rap as an exemplary form of literary expression, rather than a profane and trendy musical genre. Pate focuses on works by several well-known artists to reveal in rap music, despite its penchant for vulgarity, a power and beauty that is the heart of great literature.

Angelos Odyssey

Angelos Odyssey
Author: J.B.M. Patrick
Publisher: Joshua Brian McCabe Patrick
Total Pages: 650
Release: 2019-11-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 057846117X

Thousands of years have passed since the Earth was invaded by gods, demons, and foreign species with capabilities far beyond that of most humans. Reality collapsed, disaster having become so widespread that hope was ultimately forgotten. Humankind was backed into a corner and forced to either evolve or submit; the world erupted into a never-ending war that resulted in new cultures, superior technology, and great division among living beings. This is the tale of the assassin, Tavon, whose ambition drove him to explore past his simple upbringing in the slums of the Citadel in order to become one of the most notorious killers in the universe.