128 Beats Per Minute: Diplo's Visual Guide to Music, Culture, and Everything In Between


Thomas Wesley Pentz - 2012
    His record label Mad Decent has helped bring Brazilian baile funk, Angolan Kuduro, and other unknown music to clubs around the world, while his work as a producer has brought a unique sound to hits like M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now,” and Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls).”128 Beats Per Minute follows Diplo on this fantastic journey, from his involvement with dub reggae in Jamaica to the electro/techno underground in Tel Aviv. Each chapter chronicles his tastes and travels, complete with tweets and playlists, as documented by photographer Shane McCauley. 128 Beats Per Minute provides unique access to the hottest scenes shaping music’s landscape today.

To Be Someone


Ian Stone - 2020
    Everywhere around him, adults were behaving badly. His parents’ relationship was in freefall so he tried not to spend too much time at home. But outside, there was industrial unrest, football violence, racism and police brutality. As for the music, it was all ‘Save All Your Grandma’s Kisses For My Love Sweet Jesus’. It made him feel physically sick. Then The Jam appeared.This is Ian’s story of that time. Of weekend jobs so that he could go to gigs. Of bunking into the Hammersmith Odeon and ending up on the roof. Of going to see The Jam in Paris and somehow finding himself being interviewed for Melody Maker. Of attempting to keep out of the way of skinheads and trying (and failing) to work out how to talk to girls. And of devastation when in 1982 Paul Weller announced that the band were splitting up. There will never be another band like The Jam. For those who went on that journey with them, the love ran deep. And still does. They helped Ian and thousands like him to grow up – to be someone.

LIFE Queen Elizabeth at 90: The Story of Britain's Longest Reigning Monarch


LIFE - 2016
    She remains the head of state of the United Kingdom, and a group of 16 nations including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand call her queen, and she is the head of the British Commonwealth which includes another 37 countries, including India and South Africa. Throughout her life, she has enjoyed much happiness including a long and happy marriage to Prince Philip, four children, and Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees. Her reign has also been marked by much sadness, including the failed marriages of three of her children, the deaths of close family members and friends, and the markedly difficult death of Princess Diana, which took a toll on both the Royal Family and the nation.Now Life, in a new special edition, takes a nuanced and thoughtful look at the reign of Elizabeth at 90 and what her over-63 years on the throne have meant for her subjects and the world at large, including her early life, the years of World War Ii, her marriage and family, life ruling Great Britain, Windsor family values and much more.With dozens of stunning photos, stories, and analysis, Queen Elizabeth at 90 is a keepsake of both a life well-lived and an historical time on the throne, as well as a captivating collection for any royal watcher.

Brief Histories of Everyday Objects


Andy Warner - 2016
    Chapters are peppered with ballpoint pen riots, cowboy wars, and really bad Victorian practical jokes. Structured around the different locations in our home and daily life—the kitchen, the bathroom, the office, and the grocery store—award-nominated illustrator Andy Warner traces the often surprising and sometimes complex histories behind the items we often take for granted. Readers learn how Velcro was created after a Swiss engineer took his dog for a walk; how a naval engineer invented the Slinky; a German housewife, the coffee filter; and a radical feminist and anti-capitalist, the game Monopoly. This is both a book of histories and a book about histories. It explores how lies become legends, trade routes spring up, and empires rise and fall—all from the perspective of your toothbrush or toilet.

Vanity Fair's Hollywood


Vanity Fair - 2000
    The brightest stars in Hollywood's firmament have been assembled in one volume: Garbo and Swanson, Gable and Grant, Tracy and Hepburn, Fairbanks and Pickford, Taylor and Burton - along with today's cinematic giants: Cruise and Kidman, Nicholson and Streep, De Niro and DiCaprio, Hanks and Roberts, and scores more. Vanity Fair's photographers - among them Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Edward Steichen and Bruce Weber - have helped to define modern portraiture. Likewise, Vanity Fair's stable of Hollywood writers in this volume includes luminaries of the past (P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker and D.H. Lawrence) and of the present (Christopher Hitchens, Dominick Dunne, Amy Fine). Here, then, is a century's worth of stars and moguls, parties and scandals, power and glamour, through the unrivalled lens and the inimitable prose of Vanity Fair.

Tokyo: A Certain Style


Kyoichi Tsuzuki - 1997
    Think again. Tokyo: A Certain Style, the mini-sized decor book with a difference, shows how, for those living in one of the worlds most expensive and densely packed metropolises, closet-sized apartments stacked to the ceiling with gadgetry and CDs are the norm. Photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki rode his scooter all over Tokyo snapping shots of how urban Japanese really live. Hundreds of photographs reveal the real Tokyo style: microapartments, mini and modular everything, rooms filled to the rafters with electronics, piles of books and clothes, clans of remote controls, collections of sundry objects all crammed into a space where every inch counts. Tsuzuki introduces each tiny crash pad with a brief text about who lives there, from artists and students to professionals and couples with children. His captions to the hundreds of photographs capture the spirit and ingenuity required to live in such small quarters. This fascinating, voyeuristic look at modern life comes in a chunky, pocket-sized format-the perfect coffee table book for people with really small apartments.

Gothic: Dark Glamour


Valerie Steele - 2008
    “Gothic” is an epithet with a strange history – evoking images of death, destruction, and decay. Ironically, its negative connotations have made the gothic an ideal symbol of rebellion for a wide range of cultural outsiders. Popularly associated with black-clad teenagers and rock musicians, gothic fashion encompasses not only subcultural styles (from old-school goth to cyber-goth and beyond) but also high fashion by such designers as Alexander McQueen, John Galliano of Christian Dior, Rick Owens, Olivier Theyskens, and Yohji Yamamoto. Fashion photographers, such as Sean Ellis and Eugenio Recuenco, have also drawn on the visual vocabulary of the gothic to convey narratives of dark glamour. As the text and lavish illustrations in this book suggest, gothic fashion has deep cultural roots that give it an enduring potency.

The Curse of Beauty


James Bone - 2016
    Many readers will recognize Audrey Munson, even without knowing her name. She was America's first supermodel. Munson's beauty, though, was also her curse, exactly as a fortune teller predicted in her youth. Her looks won her entry to high society, but at a devastating cost. In 1919 she became a recluse, eventually being admitted to an asylum where she remained until her death. This is her story.

Grantland Issue 3


Bill Simmons - 2012
    It will feature the best sports writing from the website, delivered in a full-color book featuring original artwork and a host of print exclusives—including original fiction, new writing from editor-in-chief Bill Simmons, posters and pull-out sections, old-school baseball cards and mini-booklets, and a cover that looks and feels like you're holding a basketball. Like its namesake website, Grantland Quarterly will regularly include some of the most exciting and form-pushing sports writers currently plying the trade, including Chuck Klosterman, Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Bissell, Harris Wittels, John Brandon, Anna Clark, Chris Jones, Colson Whitehead, and many more.

Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution


Stephen Colegrave - 2001
    Collecting the testimony of more than 260 artists, record producers, designers, and journalists — including John Cale, Debbie Harry, Joe Strummer, Maureen Tucker, Gerard Malanga, Lou Reed, Johnny Rotten, Danny Fields, Legs McNeil, Bob Gruen, David Byrne, Iggy Pop, Tommy Ramone, William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Cherry Vanilla, and Malcolm McLaren, former manager and ringleader of the Sex Pistols — Punk brings to life the profound effect punk music had on global popular culture in the words of those who created it. With reverberations in style, fashion, attitude and philosophy, the birth of punk music released the greatest shockwaves in the popular culture since The Beatles. Punk tells the story through the words of the people who were closely tied to the mania and through hundreds of contemporaneous color and black-and-white photographs.

Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture


Jon Savage - 2007
    Rather, the teenager as icon can be traced back to the 1890s, when the foundations for the new century were laid in urban youth culture. Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture is a monumental cultural history that charts the spread of the American ideal of youth through England and Europe and around the world. From Peter Pan to Oscar Wilde, Anne Frank to the Wizard of Oz, Savage documents youth culture’s development as a commodity and an industry from the turn of the last century to its current driving force in the global economy. Fusing film, music, literature, diaries, fashion, and art, this epic cultural history is an astonishing and surprising chronicle of modern life sure to appeal to pop culture fans, social history buffs, and anyone who has ever been a teenager.

The Hipster Handbook


Robert Lanham - 2003
    One who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool. (Note: it is no longer recommended that one use the term "cool"; a Hipster would instead say "deck.") The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2% body fat. Clues You Are a Hipster1. You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration.2. You frequently use the term "postmodern" (or its commonly used variation"PoMo") as an adjective, noun, and verb.3. You carry a shoulder-strap messenger bag and have at one time or another worn a pair of horn-rimmed or Elvis Costello-style glasses. 4. You have refined taste and consider yourself exceptionally cultured, but have one pop vice (ElimiDATE, Quiet Riot, and Entertainment Weekly are popular ones) that helps to define you as well-rounded.5. You have kissed someone of the same gender and often bring this up in casual conversation.6. You spend much of your leisure time in bars and restaurants with monosyllabic names like Plant, Bound, and Shine.7. You bought your dishes and a checkered tablecloth at a thrift shop to be kitschy, and often throw vegetarian dinner parties.8. You have one Republican friend whom you always describe as being your "one Republican friend."9. You enjoy complaining about gentrification even though you are responsible for it yourself.10. Your hair looks best unwashed and you position your head on your pillow at night in a way that will really maximize your cowlicks.11. You own records put out by Matador, DFA, Definitive Jux, Dischord, Warp, Thrill Jockey, Smells Like Records, and Drag City.

Dress Code: The Naked Truth About Fashion


Mari Grinde Arntzen - 2014
    In this book, Mari Grinde Arntzen asks how and why this is—how can fashion simultaneously attract us to its glamour and repel us with its superficiality and how being called “fashionable” can be at once a compliment and an insult. Arntzen guides us through the major figures and brands of today’s fashion industry, showing how they shape us and in turn why we love to be shaped by them. She examines both everyday, affordable “fast fashion” brands, as well as the luxury market, to show how fashion commands a powerful influence on every socioeconomic level of our society. Stepping into our closets with us, she thinks about what happens when we get dressed: why fashion can make us feel powerful, beautiful, and original at the same time that it forces us into conformity. Stripping off the layers of the world’s fifth largest industry, garment by garment, she holds fashion up as a phenomenon, business, and art, exploring the questions it forces us to ask about the body, image, celebrity, and self-obsession. Ultimately, Arntzen asks the most direct question: what is fashion? How has it taken such a powerful hold on the world, forever propelling us toward its concepts of beauty?

Roadies: The Secret History of Australian Rock'n'Roll


Stuart Coupe - 2018
    The roadies see it all, and now they are sharing their secrets. Roadies are the unsung heroes of the Australian music industry. They unload the PAs and equipment, they set it all up, they make sure everything is running smoothly before, during and after the gigs. Then they pack everything up in the middle of the night, put it in the back of the truck and hit the road to another town - to do it all over again. They know everything about the pre- and post-show excesses. They bear witness to overdoses, the groupies, the obsessive fans. They are part of - and often organise - all the craziness that goes on behind the scenes of the concerts and pub gigs you go to. From The Rolling Stones to AC/DC, Bob Marley to Courtney Love, Sherbet to The Ted Mulry Gang, INXS to Blondie - these guys have seen it all. And now they're stepping onto the stage and talking.The Roadies' Creed: If it's wet, drink it. If it's dry, smoke it. If it moves, **** it. If it doesn't move, throw it in the back of the truck. 'Fabulous . . . a bold portrait' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD on Stuart Coupe's GUDINSKI

Raising Hell: Backstage Tales from the Lives of Metal Legends


Jon Wiederhorn - 2020
    The book contains the crazy, funny and sometimes horrifying anecdotes musicians have told about a lifestyle both invigorating and at times self-destructive. The metal genre has always been populated by colorful individuals who have thwarted convention and lived by their own rules. For many, vice has been virtue, and the opportunity to record albums and tour has been an invitation to push boundaries and open a Pandora ’s Box of wild experiences. Even before they joined bands, the urge for metalheads to rebel and a seemingly contradictory need to belong was ingrained in their DNA. Whether they were oddballs who didn’t fit in or angry kids from troubled backgrounds, metal gave them a sense of identity and became more than a form of music. From the author of the classic collection of Metal music-making tales Louder Than Hell comes a collection that goes behind the music with the lead singers, guitarists, bassists, drummers, stage hands, roadies, groupies, fans, and more. These are the stories of the parties, the tours, the rage, the joy, . . . the Heavy Metal life!