As Author:
>> Dead Precedents: My new book, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, uses the concerns and conceits of cyberpunk to thoughtfully remap hip-hop’s spread from around the way to around the world. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop culture are the blueprint to the 21st century, and that an understanding of its appropriation of language and technology is an understanding of the now. Memories once firmly rooted in places in the past now float free of historical context. We all share memories courtesy of the mass media, and its rampant reproduction of artifacts. This book is about is the many ways that the foundations of hip-hop appropriation—allusions and creative language use, as well as technology and sampling—inform the new millennium. Dead Precedents will be out March 19, 2019 on Repeater Books. Preorder yours now from IndieBound or Amazon!
As Editor:
>> Follow for Now, Vol. 2: Follow for Now, Vol. 2: More Interviews with Friends and Heroes is my second anthology of interviews with minds of all kinds. This time around, there are thinkers like Dominic Pettman, Simon Critchley, Gareth Branwyn, Dave Allen, Simon Reynolds, and Peter Morville, theorists like Rita Raley, Jodi Dean, Tricia Rose, Doug Rushkoff, Ian Bogost, Zizi Papacharissi, and danah boyd, writers like Pat Cadigan, Mish Barber-Way, Mike Daily, Mark Dery, Daniel H. Pink, Albert Mudrian, and Clay Tarver, and entertainers like Juice Aleem, Bob Stephenson, Labtekwon, M. Sayyid of Antipop Consortium, Aesop Rock, Sean Price, Will Brooks of dälek, Matthew Shipp, El-P of Run the Jewels, and Sadat X, and musical groups like Shabazz Palaces, Naked Raygun, and Russian Circles, among many others.
>> Sound Unbound: I was Assistant Editor to Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky on his essay collection, Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (MIT Press, 2008). Contributors include Erik Davis, Manuel De Landa, Cory Doctorow, Chuck D, Brian Eno, Dick Hebdige, Vijay Iyer, Jaron Lanier, Jonathan Lethem, Moby, Steve Reich, Simon Reynolds, Scanner a.k.a. Robin Rimbaud, Bruce Sterling, Lucy Walker, and Saul Williams, among many others. David Byrne says Sound Unbound is “a nice antidote to the usual way music and the history of music is often categorized into high/low, pop/classical, or black/white,” Branford Marsalis says, “Sound Unbound is an excellent reference on art–in the popular context–in the twenty-first century”; and Laurie Anderson agrees, saying, “What a marvelous collection! … I love this book!”
>> Follow for Now: Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes is an anthology of forty-three interviews with minds of all kinds. Published through my own Well-Red Bear imprint, Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Disinformation named it “among the most important books published in 2007,” Erik Davis called it “a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so,” and David Barker wrote that it and I were “about new ideas and trying to figure things out. I think he is about trying to make connections between things that no one else has connected.” Follow for Now includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages. Find out more, and order yours at the book’s own site, get it on Amazon’s Kindle, Google Books, or Barnes & Noble’s Nook.
As Contributor:
>> The St. James Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Culture: I contributed several entries to the St. James Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Culture (St. James, Press, 2018), including ones on Gangsta Rap, Horrorcore, Rap Metal, and the hip-hop scene in my beloved Pacific Northwest. This massive, 500-page encyclopedia covers all aspects of hip-hop culture and is essential for libraries, institutions, and researchers alike.
>> The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies: Eduardo Navas, author of Remix Theory (Springer, 2012), asked me to write an essay for The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (Routledge, 2014) collection, co-edited by Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. They describe my chapter (“The End of an Aura: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Haunting of Hip-hop”) like this: “Christopher’s text by and large comprises a series of quotes by divergent authors, ranging from cyberpunk to hip-hop, which take the shape of an intertextual collage that turns into a case study of authenticity in the time of constant digital reproduction.” I was more than glad to have a venue in which to expand a few pieces that had originally appeared on this site combining sampling, mediated memories, Walter Benjamin, and cyberpunk.
>> The First Time I Heard My Bloody Valentine: I have an essay in the collection The First Time I Heard My Bloody Valentine (Rosecliff Press, 2014) edited by Scott Heim, which recounts the first time I saw them live (opening for Dinosaur Jr. in 1992). Other people in the book include folks like Bob Mould, members of Slowdive, Pale Saints, God is an Astronaut, Maps, Failure, and dälek. Other bands in the series include David Bowie, Kate Bush, The Smiths, Cocteau Twins, Joy Division/New Order, Abba, Kraftwerk, R.E.M., The Pixies, and Roxy Music, with more in the works.
>> FREESTYLIN’: Generation F: I was a contributing writer to Freestylin’ Magazine‘s reunion book, Generation F (Wizard/Endo, 2008). Thanks to Mark Lewman, I got to reminisce about my early days of riding BMX and making my zines “The Unexplained” and “Front Wheel Drive,” as well as what I learned doing them with fellow travelers Mike Daily, Luke Strahota, Dave Fox, Todd Sines, The Swami, and Bill Keaggy, among others. It was an honor and a rare treat. You can flip through the book virtually here.
>> You Are Being Lied To: I have a little piece in Disinformation‘s first book, You Are Being Lied To (Disinformation, 2001), a compendium of dissent, which also includes essays by Noam Chomsky, Howard Bloom, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Zinn, Russ Kick, Richard Metzger, Alex Burns, and Mark Pesce, among many others. I was a part of a virtual round table discussion about when and where we are being lied to. It was the first of many such germinal books from The Disinformation Company, and I’m proud to have had a small part in it.