MUSIC WE LIKE (MOSTLY)

Funk: It's the only musical genre ever to have transformed the nation into a throbbing army of bell-bottomed, hoop-earringed, rainbow-Afro'd warriors on the dance floor. Its rhythms and lyrics turned bleak urban realties inside out with distinctive, danceable, downright irresistable music. Learn More

Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. Learn More

Bring the Noise weaves together interviews, reviews, essays, and features to create a critical history of the last twenty years of pop culture, juxtaposing the voices of many of rock and hip hop’s most provocative artists—Morrissey, Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, The Stone Roses, P.J. Harvey, Radiohead—with Reynolds’s own passionate analysis. Learn More

For two nights in January 1972, Aretha Franklin sang at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, while tape recorders and film cameras rolled. Learn More

Christopher Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing - even occasionally stomping on vinyl that sounded too clean. Learn More

This book explores a key hip hop album marking the cross over point where the streets and the charts collided. Learn More

While A Tribe Called Quest was a sample-heavy group, they steered away from the ubiquitous funk and old-school samples of their fellow Native Tongue members and embraced rock and roll and jazz; this musical form would become their signature style. Learn More

PAUL'S BOUTIQUE transformed the Beastie Boys from frat-boy novelty to critically lauded hip-hop giants. Learn More

What resonated about Endtroducing when it was released in 1996, and what makes it still resonate today, is the way in which it loosens itself from the mooring of the known and sails off into an uncharted territory that seems to exist both in and out of time. Learn More