Here are 100 books that Bass Culture fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a professor, writer, and musician who performs and produces Jamaican influenced music. I have always loved ska, reggae, dancehall, and dub music since I first heard it as a child. Since starting in ska bands, I have been lucky enough to travel around the world performing and was extremely lucky to be able to study and record in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies Reggae Studies Unit and Anchor Music Studios. In writing about music, I had always taken an outsider looking in approach before this book. For this book I wrote from the inside, and everything changed because of it.
I have read all of David Katz’s material and absolutely loved every bit of it. This book is essential as it details the life and times of a master.
The interviews and behind the scene look at a person who changed everything for Jamaican popular music kept me engaged throughout the writing. Katz brilliantly organizes the book and kept me engaged throughout the entire thing. His voice is heard but not overwhelming and this book is, not only about a master and Jamaican music, but about how to write an interview effectively.
One of the best biographies I have ever read in my life.
'David Katz's in-depth portrayal of his genius is to be commended and is an essential addition to any serious music fan's collection' David Rodigan MBE OD
'For the complete picture of this musical genius you can't get better than David Katz's People Funny Boy - if you're into Scratch, it's essential' Don Letts
Arguably the most influential force in Jamaican music, Lee Perry brought Bob Marley to international stardom and has since collaborated with artists such as Sir Paul McCartney, The Clash and The Beastie Boys. The book delves behind the myth of Perry to give a fuller examination of…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am a professor, writer, and musician who performs and produces Jamaican influenced music. I have always loved ska, reggae, dancehall, and dub music since I first heard it as a child. Since starting in ska bands, I have been lucky enough to travel around the world performing and was extremely lucky to be able to study and record in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies Reggae Studies Unit and Anchor Music Studios. In writing about music, I had always taken an outsider looking in approach before this book. For this book I wrote from the inside, and everything changed because of it.
Veal’s book changed the way that I thought about writing about music. The detailed analysis and academic approach made me realize that it was possible to write about the music that I love in a professional way.
After reding this book I applied for graduate school with the distinct goal of publishing on Jamaican music. I read this book and fell back in love with ethnographic research and the music that I was playing. It also inspired me to write and produce a song related to all of the greats of the genre.
When Jamaican recording engineers Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock, Errol Thompson, and Lee "Scratch" Perry began crafting "dub" music in the early 1970s, they were initiating a musical revolution that continues to have worldwide influence. Dub is a sub-genre of Jamaican reggae that flourished during reggae's "golden age" of the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Dub involves remixing existing recordings-electronically improvising sound effects and altering vocal tracks-to create its unique sound. Just as hip-hop turned phonograph turntables into musical instruments, dub turned the mixing and sound processing technologies of the recording studio into instruments of composition and real-time improvisation. In…
I am a professor, writer, and musician who performs and produces Jamaican influenced music. I have always loved ska, reggae, dancehall, and dub music since I first heard it as a child. Since starting in ska bands, I have been lucky enough to travel around the world performing and was extremely lucky to be able to study and record in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies Reggae Studies Unit and Anchor Music Studios. In writing about music, I had always taken an outsider looking in approach before this book. For this book I wrote from the inside, and everything changed because of it.
This book was essential in my research and longing to develop a relationship to affect theory through Jamaican dub and sound system culture. I could not stop reading this book, as it connected many of the ideas that I had in my head.
I was amazed that someone could write about this topic in this way, and it shifted my thought process to make me more detailed and affect based in my approach to dub music.
Breaking new ground in the field of Sound Studies, this book provides an in-depth study of the culture and physicality of dancehall reggae music. The reggae sound system has exerted a major influence on music and popular culture. Every night, on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica, Dancehall sessions stage a visceral, immersive and immensely pleasurable experience of sonic dominance for the participating crowd. "Sonic Bodies" concentrates on the skilled performance of the crewmembers responsible for this signature of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing, building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful "set" of equipment; the selectors choosing the music…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am a professor, writer, and musician who performs and produces Jamaican influenced music. I have always loved ska, reggae, dancehall, and dub music since I first heard it as a child. Since starting in ska bands, I have been lucky enough to travel around the world performing and was extremely lucky to be able to study and record in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies Reggae Studies Unit and Anchor Music Studios. In writing about music, I had always taken an outsider looking in approach before this book. For this book I wrote from the inside, and everything changed because of it.
I loved reading this book for the detailed history of Alpha Boys school and its relationship to Jamaican popular music.
Augustyn has written many books on ska and the people involved with it, but this book is detailed and lively in its look at the starting point of the genre. As a performer, writer, and lover of this music I could not stop reading this book. I strongly recommend this book and all the books from Augustyn.
This book is not only for ska fans but everyone who is interested in the history of a pivotal institution in Jamaica that has helped countless numbers of people excel in life.
The true story of the school that started a musical revolution.
Ska and reggae music has reverbarated around the planet but without the musical brilliance of the graduates of Jamaica's Alpha Boys' School it might never have been that way.
From the Jamaican big band swing of the 1940s and '50s through the ska and rocksteady of the 1960s, the global roots reggae explosion of the 1970s and the rise of the new dancehall style in the 1980s, graduates of Alpha Boys' School have been right at the heart of the musical action, composing, arranging and playing on thousands of…
Besides having come of age while Black, I’ve published two coming-of-age novels about Black adolescents. Even before I became a writer, or an adult, I had had a particular interest in coming-of-age narratives. From Walter Dean Myers’ Harlem-located Young Adult novels to Toni Morrison’s Sula and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, I’ve always been attracted to such stories. However, what the book list offered here does is map a reading series for what I see as an exciting intellectual formation for a Black reader.
I simply love these bracingly contemporary stories of Black Jamaican women who span the gamut from self-absorbed teenagers to Rihanna-inspired celebrities and overtaxed elders. These narratives take place both in JA and the USA and weave together elements of our twenty-first-century Black diaspora. Each of Arthurs’ stories sings in its own way, with exquisitely rendered details and moments of moral clarity. I love that these stories chronicle such a wide variety of Black women’s lives in such depth and detail.
'In this thrilling debut collection Alexia Arthurs is all too easy to love.' - Zadie Smith
Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret - these are the tensions at the heart of Alexia Arthurs' debut book about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Some stories ask big questions about the things that define a person, others explode small moments of deep significance and lasting effect. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City, How to Love a Jamaican offers a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.
I grew up in a small village in India. The nearest library was in the next town, two bus rides and a long walk away and comprised of one bookshelf, half full, the books with several pages missing. I read and reread those books, making up my own narratives for the missing pages. I suppose this was the crucial first step in my journey to author. I write stories featuring diverse protagonists. In my books, I explore themes of displacement and belonging, how people brought up in different cultures and during different times respond to challenges, how their interactions and reactions are informed by their different upbringings and values.
Oh, this book was just magical. And the ending – wow! Everything comes together and how. The writing is just beautiful and the story is enchanting. This book transported me and wowed me - truly I wasn’t expecting to love it as much as I did. I cried so much while reading this book – the language is so poetic and lyrical. It is a story about stories and it is a masterpiece in my opinion.
"This is magical, lyrical, spellbinding writing." Granta
Adamine Bustamante is born in one of Jamaica's last leper colonies. When Adamine grows up, she discovers she has the gift of "warning": the power to protect, inspire, and terrify. But when she is sent to live in England, her prophecies of impending disaster are met with a different kind of fear people think she is insane and lock her away in a mental hospital.
Now an older woman, the spirited Adamine wants to tell her story. But she must wrestle for the truth with…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I grew up in a culture that both fears and embraces spirits or outrightly rejects the idea that spirits live on beyond death. I grew up on stories of rolling calves and duppies that caused havoc among the living. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by what haunts us—whether it be our familial spirits that float among the living and continue to play a role in our lives, our memories, or our past actions. I’ve written three books that play with this idea of past actions lingering long into the characters’ lives and returning in unexpected ways.
There’s no escaping past actions in this book—from a dying man confessing he assumed the identity of a dead friend and began a new life to the exploits of the Paisley family during colonial-era Jamaica.
I love the way the family stories intertwine, how the book traces the movement of Jamaican people from the Caribbean island to England and America, and the way the ghosts in the family are not just people but also broader things: slavery, colonization, migration, and abandoned families.
Longlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
A "rich, ambitious debut novel" (The New York Times Book Review) that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
*An Entertainment Weekly, Millions, and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2020 Pick and Buzz Magazine's Top New Book of the New Decade*
Stanford Solomon's shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole…
As a child, I was an avid reader. However, I noticed none of the characters I read about looked like me. As a Black girl growing up in London, I yearned for stories that reflected my experiences. Thankfully, by the time I was a teenager, I was able to immerse myself in books written by some amazing African American authors. There was still something missing on my reading list, though. The stories of Black people who lived where I did, especially those from the past. Fast forward to now, and as an author of historical fiction, my passion is telling, writing, and highlighting ‘forgotten’ stories.
This gorgeous book was one of the first mainstream stories I had seen that addressed the Black presence during World War 2.
Although it was released a good few years before my first historical fiction novel was published, reading it surely planted those early seeds for my later books. Of bringing untold Black British stories to light. To remind us all that history has been whitewashed and so many untold stories exist.
Hortense shared Gilbert's dream of leaving Jamaica and coming to England to start a better life. But when she at last joins her husband, she is shocked by London's shabbiness and horrified at the way the English live. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was. Queenie's neighbours do not approve of her choice of tenants, and neither would her husband, were he there. Through the stories of these people, Small Island explores a point in England's past when the country began to change.
I’m a fifth generation Miami native, and Miami is my bad boyfriend. The traffic, the construction, the daily drama, and let’s not forget hurricanes—it could all make you crazy. But Miamians are never dull. We are passionate about everything. I kinda love that about us. While you may associate my city with glitz and bling, what’s glamourous about Miami happens naturally. It’s the water, the glorious weather, fresh ripe mangoes and avocadoes right off the tree, and our vibrant multicultural community. With this Shepherd list, and with my cookbook Miami Vegan, I want to give you a delicious taste of the tropics, a taste of my home. Without the hurricanes.
I did not want to love this book. I resisted reading it because everyone told me how great it was, and how the author nailed living in Miami. I’m glad I came around, because they were right.
This is not the glamorous Miami of celebs, this is the real gritty Miami, a city of immigrants like the Jamaican-American family who we come to know and care about in Escoffery’s punchy connected short stories. It explores identity, culture, racism, family, and finding home. It haunts me still. I want to know what’s next for this family, and that the characters are doing okay.
'Kaleidoscopic, urgent, hilarious, revelatory' MARLON JAMES
'An absolute delight to read' DIANA EVANS
'Superb ... A strong, much needed new voice in our literature' PERCIVAL EVERETT
'A compelling hurricane of a book' ANN PATCHETT
A major debut that follows a Jamaican family in Miami navigating recession, racism and Hurricane Andrew.
1979. Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm.
Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion, greeting him…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I teach and have written too many articles on these books as an English professor. There’s a time for tragic or difficult books (James Joyce, anyone?), but also a time for fun, and I believe it’s good for my students to giggle and enjoy reading while they learn. As a Canadian, I’m told my humor is dry but warmer, and accordingly, the books I prefer make me think—and some break my heart—but my favorites also make me laugh. If you want a quality read but aren’t above a fart joke, I hope you will check out my list.
This book has always hit the trifecta for me—interesting, moving, and funny. A story about London immigrant families in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it shows a lesser-known side of society and certainly is the raunchiest book in my list—there’s a lot of sex among its confused screw-ups.
I admit my mind was opened, and my sympathies widened by this book, and after re-reading, I can appreciate it as a masterpiece of comic chaos. I wouldn’t want to be these characters—how many books begin with a failed suicide attempt?—but I’m glad they let me into their lives.
One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, "White Teeth" is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.
