Alex Dwyer's Off The Books columns returns with a look at Jooyoung Lee's new, "Blowin' Up."
| Off The Books: Check The Technique Vol. 2 – More Liner Notes For Hip-Hop Junkies by Brian Coleman | August 24, 2015 |
The sequel to Brian Coleman's legendary hip-hop text, "Check the Technique."
| Off The Books: “Big Machine” by Victor LaValle | May 12, 2015 |
Off the Books returns with Harold Stallworth, who recommends checking out the alternatively bleak and hilarious, "Big Machine."
| Off The Books: Who We Be: The Colorization of America by Jeff Chang | January 14, 2015 |
Alex Dwyer reviews the latest from "Can't Stop Won't Stop" author Jeff Chang. who, like most, summons DMX to understand race in America.
| Off the Books: “I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon” by Toure | October 14, 2014 |
Alex Dwyer reviews The Purple One as experienced by Toure, an apparent Old Testament stan
| Off The Books: “For Whom the Cowbell Tolls: 25 Years of Paul’s Boutique” by Dan LeRoy and Peter Relic | October 6, 2014 |
A quarter of a century after the genius of "Paul's Boutique", Alex Dwyer serves as our literary eggman
| Off the Books: “Los Angeles’s Central Avenue Jazz” | July 29, 2014 |
Dweez has been assigned Steve Zahn as a doppleganger on more than one occasion. “This was a brief glittering moment of jazz as straight-up entertainment before the music was bogged down by academia and oppressive seriousness. Jazz was once the music of the people, and an element of entertainment value was not just provided: it […]
| Off the Books #4: Henry Rollins — Occupants | March 27, 2014 |
Dweez may embed impersonations of the authors discussed within each post. I lived in Spain, Brazil, and China during the last decade. I spent nights in Maputo and Malmö camped on stranger’s couches. I rode buses to Bahia and Bordeaux crunched between uncouth passengers. I visited the Khmer Rouge torture chambers in Cambodia and saw […]
| Off the Books: M.K. Asante’s “Buck” | January 30, 2014 |
Dweez’s go-to phone greeting remains “How ya living on your block?” “I spot the crew, standing where they always stand, between the liquor store and the corner store, next to the Fern Rock Apartments fence, under the train tracks, and across the street from Rock Steady, this bugged ngh who sits on a crate all […]
| Off The Books: Signifying Rappers by David Foster Wallace & Mark Costello | September 24, 2013 |
Dweez confesses that he initially pavlovs from the Zeppelin “Kashmere” sample not from the original or the Schoolly D song but from Puff Daddy’s “Come With Me” off the Godzilla soundtrack. “Rap’s here-and-now is always here-and-now: a music without a future tense can’t but be immortal.” – David Foster Wallace (Page 144). I’d tried to […]
