Literary

Born In The Bronx

A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop

Publisher: Rizzoli

“Early Hip Hop”—when I read that I was tempted to put this in the bin next to the three copies of

Wild Style

’s 25th anniversary book that arrived in the office. So, apparently hip-hop started in the Bronx and has grown into the most influential subculture in the world, dominating media as a billion-dollar industry. From the Boogie Down Bronx all the way to Wall Street. Bored yet? Me too.

If you buy this book, skip Afrika Bambaataa’s foreword and Jeff Chang’s pointless timeline (“1984—Brian DePalma’s

Scarface

is released”) and go straight to Buddy Esquire’s Flyer Art section. Along with his brother Eddie Ed, Buddy produced pre-desktop flyers for 1,000s of hip-hop parties throughout the 70s and 80s. “Ecstasy Garage Presents Super Rhymes”, “Crash Crew perform their hit ‘Hi Powered Rap’”, all done in a DIY aesthetic closer to punk zines and a million miles away from hip-hop’s depressing, conservative, tacky gloss of today. We reprinted some of them here for you to look at.

JAMIE-JAMES MEDINA

rizzoliusa.com

1-800-Mice Issue 1

Matthew Thurber

Publisher: Picturebox

I remember picking up

Carrot For Girls

a while back, which was my first encounter with Matthew Thurber. That was a great big inky tabloid thing that was surreal with an innocence that allowed it to endear, rather than heckle bile in your stomach like a

Mighty Boosh

re-run on BBC3. Anyway,

1-800-Mice

is, I guess, Thurber’s new regular outlet for things like twisted, weird, talking horses called Mr Colostomy and a kamikaze vampire called Distinguished Death as well as mock-profound statements like: “A tree is an explosion in slow motion”. Reading for too long can be perilous because you begin to lose touch and think that you are an extra in Thurber’s imaginary world of melting

Itchy & Scratchy

faces. I wonder if he stole the name from Megamix’s night at the Old Blue Last?

Buck Shots

Peter Sutherland

Publisher: PowerHouse

I have never properly encountered or engaged with Peter Sutherland’s work before despite being aware of him and him being in

Vice

a hundred times. Does this make me an idiot? On this showing: yes. A massive, ignorant, know-nothing idiot who needs to get back to the whole paying-attention-to-shit game. This book is INCREDIBLE. It is worth it for the centerpiece double truck alone.

Sutherland shoots and follows some deer around where they hang out. He shoots them in the forest, he shoots them in the stream, he shoots them nosing around in the human world and looking cute and confused and he shoots them in packs at night so all you can see are loads of pairs of eyes gleaming in the darkness at you like a Le Mans grid coming to rape your village. He also takes pictures of what the deer see every day: beautiful, sparkling sunrises; dewy, virginal spiders webs; and mighty, soaring ferns. The portrait of a dead, skinned deer near the end made me choke worse than the first time I saw E.T. Deer are my new favorite animals. I want to be a deer. Thank you, Peter Sutherland.

Substantials No.3

CCA

How can a book that is just transcriptions of a series of lectures that took place in the sound workshop of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu be one of the funniest, most interesting and insightful things we’ve read in a million months of Sundays? Well, it’s mainly due to a line-up that would make anyone who has an even vaguely passing interest in dudes who hide behind lots of machines and make weird noises grow a massive stiff one on sight. You get Russell Haswell jumping from discussions about the nature of creating music using Xenakis’s UPIC machine (which makes sonic representations of drawings) to anecdotes about playing in support of Societal Death Slaughter in London squats, as well as William Bennett from Whitehouse confessing an obsessive typo-compulsion. Oh, and there is a free CD of unreleased work which you will not find anywhere else.

Enter Exit

Pierre Crocquet De Rosemond

Publisher: Hatje Cantz

Sometimes it’s nice to be shocked into action by a demonstration of your own ignorance. Like when you are sitting in the pub and everyone starts talking about some old film that is obviously a standard reference-point and you cluelessly nod your head along and hope that no one calls you out with your faker-pants on. It often happens with films made by Fellini. Then you run home, Google every living fact you can find and buy the remastered, directors cut, four-disc special edition to hide your shame forever beneath purchased pride. Well, until this book came along I was totally unaware of what life was like in a rural South Africa. Turns out it is pretty out-there and populated largely by wrinkly, limbless old people who drink their morning tea next to severed pigs’ heads on the kitchen table. So many photographers take photos of old, rural people that come off just really patronising towards the subjects, but that’s not the case with Pierre Rosemond. I’m not sure whether it’s by virtue of genuine interest in the lives of the people pictured or the careful appearance of such, but this book is a mark above all the geek shows masquerading as ethnography. It’s also made me really want to visit South Africa, which, if you’ve read a newspaper in the past 10 years, is saying a’plenty.

JAMES KNIGHT AND BRUNO BAYLEY