5 Books Published by AMS Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

For years, hip-hop fans have been robbed of context and background when buying and enjoying classic albums from the Golden Age: the 1980s. Rakim Told Me brings you these invisible liner notes, one album at a time, with new angles and engaging stories. 21 albums are examined in-depth, and facts are uncovered with the turn of every page. Journalist Brian Coleman has, over the past decade, immersed himself in and written about the hip-hop art form as a columnist for national magazines like XXL, Scratch, CMJ and URB. In this volume, The 80s, he digs deep, one-on one, with legendary artists like Rakim, De La Soul, Ice-T, Public Enemy, KRS-One, Run-DMC, Slick Rick, Too $hort and many more. Rakim Told Me lets you dive head first into the world of your favorite hip-hop artists and the classic albums they produced. These are pure wax facts straight from the original artists, broughtto the surface again after years of invisibility. So dig out your turntable, clean off your Zulu Nation medallion, crack open a chapter, and relive hip-hop s most creative and captivating era.

1923. With a decoration by Robert E. Locher. Van Vechten was one of the first to understand the importance of the Harlem Renaissance movement and became interested in promoting black artists and writers. He was an avid collector of ephemera and books pertaining to black arts and letters and a frequent visitor to Harlem. These experiences provided the inspiration for his controversial novel, Nigger Heaven. In the early 1930s Van Vechten was introduced to the 35 mm Leica camera. He began photographing his large circle of friends and acquaintances. Some of his subjects from this period include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Alfred A. Knopf, Bessie Smith, and Gertrude Stein. The novel begins: Harold Prewett sat in the broad, black-walnut seat of an ambiguous piece of furniture which branched above, in spreading antlers, into a rack for coats and hats and which below, at either side, provided means for the disposition of canes and umbrellas. The mere presence of these heavy, sullen antlers was sufficiently dispiriting to increase the gloomy atmosphere which environed the young man. The room in which he sat waiting was a hallway. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.

Fiction

Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein. Several books of Van Vechten’s essays on various subjects such as music and literature were published between 1915 and 1920. Between 1922 and 1930 Knopf published seven novels by Van Vechten, starting with Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works and ending with Parties.