Books for Black Music Appreciation Month

Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction; Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award • A sweeping, genre-bending exploration of Black art, music, and culture in all their glory and complexity—from Soul Train, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Whitney Houston, and Beyoncé.

From Pitchfork and Guardian contributor Dean Van Nguyen comes a revelatory history of Tupac beyond his musical legend, as a radical son of the Black Panther Party whose political legacy still resonates today.

A political and intellectual history of American counterculture and the historical figures who redefined mainstream understandings of freedom, culture, art, and politics—from The Beat Generation to Basquiat.

An electrifying memoir from the pioneering cultural icon The New Yorker called “the coolest person in New York,” whose fearless creativity reshaped the worlds of art, music, and style.

In the first biography of Billie Holiday in more than two decades, Paul Alexander—author of heralded lives of Sylvia Plath and J. D. Salinger—gives us an unconventional portrait of arguably America’s most eminent jazz singer. He shrewdly focuses on the last year of her life—with relevant flashbacks to provide context—to evoke and examine the persistent magnificence of Holiday’s artistry when it was supposed to have declined, in the wake of her drug abuse, relationships with violent men, and run-ins with the law.

Shining a light on the curators of our culture, Forever for the Culture narratively follows the construction of a new Black art movement and how creators have defined a community when that community does not have a physical space.

A weave of biography, criticism, and memoir, Shine Bright is Danyel Smith’s intimate history of Black women’s music as the foundational story of American pop.

Bessie Smith is a beautiful genre-bending tribute to the larger-than-life blues singer Bessie Smith. Scotland’s National Poet blends poetry, prose, fiction, and nonfiction to create an entirely unique biography of the Empress of the Blues.

Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother blends music and cultural criticism and personal essay to explore race, gender, class, and sexuality as they pertain to punk rock and straight edge culture.