Six Years of Dead Precedents
Proud of the Precedents, even if past tense.
Today marks the six-year anniversary of the publication of my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future! In celebration, here are some pictures from the book’s release and some information on a related project you may have heard about.
Read on!
We launched Dead Precedents properly at Volumes Bookcafé in Chicago with readings by me, Krista Franklin, and Ytasha L. Womack.
Ytasha and I went on to do a talk at the Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park, and I spoke at SXSW again, this time specifically about the ideas in Dead Precedents.
A couple of months later, I ventured to my adopted home in the Pacific Northwest. I got to speak at Powell’s City of Books in Portland with Pecos B. Jett, who called the sign outside, “Biz Marquee!” I was even on TV!
Next up was a fun chat at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle with my friend Charles Mudede.
I was also on my favorite hip-hop podcast, Call Out Culture with my mans Alaska, Zilla Rocca, and Curly Castro.
I know Amazon is wack, but Dead Precedents was also a #1 New Release in both their Rap Music and Music History & Criticism categories.
Dan Hancox reviewed Dead Precedents for The Guardian, writing that it is, "written with the passion of a zine-publishing fan and the acuity of an academic."
Mark Reynolds at PopMatters wrote, "In Christopher’s construction, hip-hop is is not merely party music for black and brown Gen-Xers and millennials, but the first salvo in a radical, transformative way of understanding and making culture in the technological era — the beginning, in essence, of the world we’re living in now."
My photographer friend Tim Saccenti, who has several photos in the book, sent me a picture of it with the hands from Run the Jewels’ RTJ3, the cover of which he also shot.
Many thanks to all the people who bought the book, said nice things about it, came out to hear me talk about it, gave me rides, put me up at your home, or spread the word.
Companion Compendia
In the meantime, my friends and I put together a companion: Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (Strange Attractor Press). Through essays by some of hip-hop’s most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective.
“Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing. Dead Precedents is sharp and accelerated. Boogie Down Predictions is a symphony of voices, beats, and bars messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.” — Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Thank you for reading, supporting, and such,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com