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Wax Poetics Anthology: Vol 2

Vol 2 meets more of the powerhouse musicians who've been dug and sampled, plus the intense-looking beatmasters who’ve done the digging and sampling. Collector-stiffening pieces on Sun Ra, Deodato, Randy Muller, rap A&R wunderkind Dante Ross, and much more. Danny Krivit picks out 12s and DJ Premier confesses he’s a Smiths fan. Mind you, I still think “Wax Poetic” would have been a cleverer name.
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Wax Poetics Anthology: Vol 1

If DJhistory smoked bigger doobies, knew Pete Rock, lived in Fort Greene and did capoeira at the weekend it would be Wax Poetics. We’d be kicking back with Idris Muhammad, Bernard Purdie, the RZA, Prince Paul, cat’s like that. We’d have James Brown’s drummers, graffiti nostalgia, and acres of record porn. The best of the studious magazine’s first six years. Fine, detailed, earnest and pure.
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Slumberland – Paul Beatty (2008)

DJ philosophising of a higher fidelity. Beatty cracks post-racial satire like no other, and his third novel does for music what ‘Perfume’ did for stink. Trying to erase notions of ‘negritude’, Los Angeles DJ Darky gets his blackness caressed as “jukebox sommelier” in wall-time Berlin while tracking missing jazz ghost ‘the Schwa’, whose chops are destined to wail over his perfect beat.
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Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap – Nik Cohn (2007)

Old white music writer (he inspired Saturday Night Fever), dying with hepatitis, settles in New Orleans, city of his personal demons, and as a musical last rites tries to connect with local rappers. It’s all doomed; their styles are too local and they don’t want to be helped. Filled with scenes of poverty, struggle, hope, despair, and that’s even before Katrina hits. Beautiful in its futility.
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