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Notes: Presenting 'Grunge' by Thurston Moore & Michael Lavine. Moore writes about the discovery of Seattle punk youth, the seminal bands that defined the movement, the exploitation of the subculture, & the backlash of grunge, as well as the death of his longtime collaborator & intimate Cobain.

Notes: The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from codebreakers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it had been repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians and soon became the ubiquitous voice of popular music.

In How To Wreck A Nice Beach, from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase, the How To Recognize Speech, music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin's gulags, from the 1939 World's Fair to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune.

Dave Tompkins saw the vocoder brush up against FDR, JFK, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, the Cylons, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on the morning before V-E Day, We Must Go Off! And now vocoder technology is a cell phone standard, allowing a digital replica of your voice to sound human.

From T-Mobile to T-Pain, How To Wreck A Nice Beach is a riveting saga of technology and culture, illuminating the work of some of music's most provocative innovators.

Notes: American folk legend Michael Hurley is considered a master of songcraft by fellow musicians and it is easy to see why. His songs can be highly eccentric, populated by werewolves, sign-painters, tea and whiskey-drinkers, pork chops and hot dogs, wild geese, intoxicated lovers and blue navigators, but above all, they always manage to be moving and funny. The perfection of his peculiar, personal and utterly unique oeuvre is even more apparent on paper and in print. The Words To The Songs Of Michael Hurley presents lyrics to 19 of his songs and marks the first time Hurley's lyrics have been published in book form. It includes a foreword by the music critic Byron Coley and a French version by Marie Frankland, winner of the 2007 John-Glassco Prize for translation.

All songs are calligraphed by the author. Michael Hurley (aka DOC SNOCK), is an American songwriter, reputedly born in 1941, whose songs have been seeping into the folk unconscious for almost 50 years now (including covers by Cat Power, Yo La Tengo, Espers and others). Hurley's melodies and lyrics take flight into a world of plenty, inspiring wonder and humor, sin and slowness, laziness and longing. His music is often coined as outsider folk. His hobo lifestyle indeed could be looked upon as eccentric, but it might be better to regard him as one of the last insiders keeping alive the traditions of the folk troubadour. Hobo-ing around the
country, making music since the days Bob Dylan first set foot in NYC''s Gaslight club, Hurley recorded his first album for the legendary Folkways label in 1964 and continued to release albums for Warner Brothers, Rounder or Devendra Banhart's Gnomonsong label. His mid '70s Have Moicy album was among the top ten for the decade selected by Rolling Stone. While many of his contemporaries are long past their prime (or deceased), Hurley's muse is still very much alive.

Notes: Written with Chuck D, illustrator Adam Wallenta presents an impressive graphic novel featuring the legendary rap crew Public Enemy. With an original storyline and original illustrations on each of its 152 pages, Public Enemy become the first hip hop artists to be recreated as characters in a full-length graphic novel.

Notes: In these 384 pages of garish, pop and glam rock european picture sleeve glory, the Wired Up! celebrates the sights and sounds of the zeitgeist aberration that was early 70's glitter rock records; where the flash, shock and outrageousness of the picture sleeve oftentimes proved just as important as the explosive sounds within.

A renaissance of style, a riot of color and the raving rocking rebirth of the three-minute-pop single, the Wired Up! Is not only an early clue to the new direction rock and roll was taking in the 1970's, but the final statement on a disposable era's lasting appeal.