Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Caitlin Fitzpatrick, 212-340-8136
Caitlin.Fitzpatrick@perseusbooks.com
Publication Date: Jan. 4, 2010

BORN TO USE MICS: Reading Nas’s Illmatic
Edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai

The Best and Brightest Writers of the Hip-Hop Generation
Reflect on the Era’s Landmark Album: Illmatic

* * *

At the age of nineteen, Nasir “Nas” Jones began recording tracks for his debut album and changed hip-hop and the face of the music world forever. Released in 1994, Illmatic is a captivating, personal account of life in New York’s Queensbridge housing project, as well as a meditation on the larger issues of the isolation, inequality, and the despair of urban poverty. Unprecedented in its lyricism and the power of its beats, the album was hailed as a masterpiece and set a new standard for hip-hop culture. Certified platinum by the RIAA, Illmatic soon took its rightful place amongst the most influential albums not only within hip-hop, but in all of popular music.

In BORN TO USE MICS: Reading Nas’s Illmatic (Basic Civitas: Trade Paperback Original; Jan. 4, 2010), editors Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai have brought together an original collection of critical voices to confront to confront Nas’s masterpiece in a “literary remix.” In a novel application of hip-hop’s method of sampling other musicians’ work and interpreting it in a new way, Dyson and Daulatzai use Illmatic as a sample, letting each contributor reinterpret and meditate on Nas’s work with a fresh perspective. Each scholar assesses an individual track from the album, using the song as a jump-off point for their own analysis. Understanding its legacy, charting its relationship with the evolution of hip-hop culture, and exploring the social forces that surround hip-hop music as a whole, the contributors to BORN TO USE MICS bring a fresh viewpoint to a classic album. Along with original reviews from the album’s release, interviews with Nas, and artistic “freestyles” on the themes and legacy of Illmatic, these new riffs are a brilliant engagement with and commentary upon one of the most incisive and incendiary sets of songs ever laid to wax.

BORN TO USE MICS assembles an impressive group of journalists, poets, filmmakers, musicians and scholars, all of whom are products of the hip-hop generation. Together, they cover a variety of issues, including:

• Mark Anthony Neal on jazz, hip-hop, and fathers
• Imani Perry on lyrical transcendence
• Sohail Daulatzai on the significance of “N.Y. State of Mind” in a post-9/11 America.
• Marc Lamont Hill on Nas as a black public intellectual
• Kyra Gaunt on the intersection of Nas, hip-hop, gender, and patriarchy
• James Braxton Peterson on hip-hop worldviews

Along with a number of other essays, BORN TO USE MICS reaffirms the influence and brilliance of Illmatic while also cementing hip-hop’s place in American music as a catalyst for dialogue and a call to action.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Michael Eric Dyson, named by Ebony as one of the hundred most influential black Americans, is the author of seventeen books, including Can You Hear Me Now?, Holler if You Hear Me, Is Bill Cosby Right?, April 4, 1968, and Know What I Mean? He is currently University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. He lives in Washington, DC.

Sohail Daulatzai has written about race, culture and U.S.–Muslim relations, and is an executive producer on Free Rap, a benefit album for Jamil Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown). He is the author of the forthcoming Black Star, Crescent Moon: Black Radicalism and the Muslim Third World, and a graphic novel on the film The Battle of Algiers. He is an Assistant Professor in African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

ABOUT THE BOOK

BORN TO USE MICS: Reading Nas’s Illmatic
Eds. Michael Eric Dyson & Sohail Daulatzai
Published by Basic Civitas
Trade Paperback Original
Publication date: Jan. 4, 2010
ISBN: 9780465002115
$15.95 (US) / $20.00 (CAN)

▫ Contributors to BORN TO USE MICS will be available for interview, please inquire ▫

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