Music Book Club launches today (Wed/10) with a robust calendar of online events and an ambitious mission to become a reading community, online magazine/newsletter, book and zine publisher, and author events hub. Don’t get nervous about the idea, which I came up with recently—there’s no homework here unless you want it. You’re welcome to browse our Music Club Book picks on our affiliate page on Bookshop, which supports independent bookstores, and participate in discussions about them online (and eventually IRL). Or you can just simply lurk and learn about new and classic books, listen to DJ mixes and playlists, and nerd out. Sign up today for reminders about MBC events!
Producing partner Carly Eiseman will soon integrate her listening project, 1 Album A Day Art, into Music Book Club, with picks that correlate with our content. Our generous media partner is none other than 48 Hills, which will help us get the word out about our author conversation series and host an archive of the events. Free subscribers are most welcome, and premium subscriptions offer more participatory power, copies of our original zine and book releases to come (with the member’s name inside the acknowledgements), and other perks we’re currently researching and brainstorming.
Music Book Club started in a very Bay Area way. As an experienced author in this realm, I was quite demoralized last fall when a book proposal about Bay Area rap music that I submitted to a large publisher yielded an extremely low and exploitative offer that wasn’t respectful of the decades of interviews and work that I’ve done on this topic. The proposed contract included a clause that would give the publisher 80% of anything ancillary that I could have cooked up surrounding the project, like a documentary film or a podcast deal. The whole thing would piss anyone off, and I’ve been talking about it publicly as a way for other authors to see some transparency and to stand up for themselves in situations like that.
I’ve successfully crowdfunded several issues of my California Eating print zine, so after chilling out a bit, I decided pretty quickly that I’d use Kickstarter again to self-publish this book myself. After all, the prevailing ethos of the Bay Area rap world since its inception is independence and doing it yourself, like Too $hort traveling around East Oakland, selling cassettes hand-to-hand. I should have realized that all along, but it took this situation with the publisher to know for sure.
A few months after I told that deal to kick rocks, I thought, I’m going to build a community around the joy of reading music books that could also serve as a support group and incubator for my future books and zines. So Music Book Club is now a publisher in the making as well. Maybe it could also one day publish other authors, too—that would be a dream!
Once the Music Book Club community gets rolling, there will be occasions for members to suggest and vote on books to discuss, and to submit questions to authors who participate in the live series or feature stories on our site. In the meantime, I’ve booked a full season of online conversations with authors that are free to join live and will later be archived here on 48 Hills.
The Music Book Club event page will be updated with the best way to join these conversations on Zoom as best practices are established in the coming weeks. I’m excited for participants to learn about these author’s books and professional lives, to gain their insights into book publishing and music, and to ask questions of their own. Read on to learn about this awesome opening lineup, with a few personal notes on why I’m excited about each event, and check out the Music Book Club FAQ at the bottom for more information on how this all works. Join us?
2024 MUSIC BOOK CLUB EVENTS
JANUARY 28: Live Zoom conversation with Dan Charnas to discuss Dilla Time. I am beyond proud to begin this author conversation series with a personal friend. Charnas is an Associate Arts Professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. He worked on his masterpiece about the late producer J Dilla for five years, penning the perfect compendium for his Dilla courses. Dilla Time quickly became a New York Times Best Seller in 2022 and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography in 2023. 12pm PT
FEBRUARY 7: Live Zoom conversation with Danyel Smith to discuss Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop. Any book with a whole chapter about Gladys Knight is going to get an automatic invitation into my Music Book Club, and I’m very excited for Smith, who grew up in Oakland, was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford, and pens epic stories for the likes of the New York Times Magazine to get into the making of this passionate work. The Bay Area references in Shine Bright are certainly going to connect with other people from here, but the way she weaves her life into the history of Black woman icons in music, can be felt anywhere. 12pm PT
FEBRUARY 21: Live Zoom conversation with DJ Disciple to discuss The Beat, the Scene, the Sound: A DJ’s Journey through the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of House Music in New York City. In 2022, DJ Disciple emailed me for advice on finding a publisher for this memoir. All I said was that he shouldn’t feel limited to getting an agent. One year later, he emailed again to say that he had signed a deal and published a book with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, and he asked me to read the book to write a blurb for the back! He’s now got advice to share with aspiring memoirists. Alongside his own career playing to dancefloors around the world, Disciple documents a changing New York City in The Beat in vivid detail. 12pm PT
FEBRUARY 25: Live Zoom conversation with Lance Scott Walker to discuss DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution. Walker has done a lot to preserve and share the history and culture of Houston hip-hop, which has influenced the world more than many may know. In addition to this stellar tome about DJ Screw, the late inventor of the “chopped and screwed” style, he’s also released two editions of the Houston Rap Tapes book and has hosted several editions of Houston Rap Tapes Radio from Brooklyn. 12pm PT
MARCH 3: Live Zoom conversation with Shawn Reynaldo to discuss First Floor Volume 1: Reflections on Electronic Music Culture. Reynaldo will be joining us live from Barcelona, where he currently lives, but we still think of him as a Bay Arean, where he was a promoter of discerning parties and the editor of XLR8R. He parlayed his incisive electronic music newsletter First Floor into a book deal, and I know that in itself is going to inspire a lot of other writers. Read his September interview with Marke B. here on 48 Hills to learn more about his first book. 12pm PT
MARCH 20: Live Zoom conversation with Soren Baker to discuss co-writing Juicy J’s Chronicle of the Juice Man: A Memoir. Between rap music and baseball, Baker has written 17 (!) books, which is just a remarkable feat. His most recent project is this memoir for the co-founder and frontman of the Oscar-winning Three Six Mafia, and I suspect he has some juicy stories about working on it. I’ll see if we can learn any of the secrets to his productivity and longevity. 12pm PT
MARCH 24: Live Zoom conversation with Scott Woods to discuss Prince and Little Weird Black Boy Gods. Woods is a prominent poet, journalist, librarian, and culture driver from Columbus, Ohio. We met at Paisley Park in 2016 after Prince’s passing and have been friends ever since. He’s taught me way more about writing poetry and prose than my mean high school teachers ever dared, and his very personal book about Prince will have you feeling closer to the late legend. 12pm PT
MARCH 31: Live Zoom conversation with Dr. Regina N. Bradley to discuss Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South and An Outkast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South. I can’t wait for the Music Book Club community to become acquainted with the work of Dr. Bradley, who is an Associate Professor of African American Literature and Culture at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University. She is the leading scholar of the Hip-Hop South, and definitely has something to say! You may have read about her Outkast class and I definitely want to know what she thinks about the new André 3000 album. 12pm PT
APRIL 5: Live Zoom conversation with Gina Arnold to discuss Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana. Arnold is an adjunct professor of rhetoric at the University of San Francisco who is about to re-release her rare book about Nirvana that was originally published in 1993. We’ll be talking about it on the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s passing. She also recently served as a co-editor for the 2023 anthology The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store: A Global History. 1pm PT
MAY TBA: Conversation with Pamela Des Barres to discuss I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, Let’s Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies and current book projects. A warm and funny memoirist who single handedly made groupie lit a genre, she also now teaches the craft of memoir and shared solid advice in Let It Bleed: How to Write a Rockin’ Memoir. The legendary Ms. Des Barres has had a lot of influence on me as a writer, and I’m thrilled she’ll be coming through Music Book Club some time in May.
JUNE 9: Live Zoom conversation with Lori Tucker-Sullivan to discuss I Can’t Remember If I Cried: Rock Widows on Life, Love, and Legacy. I learned about this poignant book in a random social media conversation last year, and it has been on my mind ever since. Tucker-Sullivan, herself a widow from the Detroit area, spoke with women such as Jamie Weiland, the widow of Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots; Crystal Zevon, the ex-wife of Warren Zevon; and Sandy Chapin, widow of Harry Chapin. The book is released on May 21 (and available for pre-order now), and she’ll be joining us at Music Book Club shortly after. 3pm PT
JUNE TBA: Live Zoom conversation with Ann Powers to discuss Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. I’m delighted that Powers, who is NPR Music’s critic and correspondent and first began her career here in San Francisco at SF Weekly, will do a Music Book Club event in June. It’s most likely to be scheduled after the book drops on June 11 (pre-orders are open now). She’s another huge personal influence — I even wrote her a snail mail fan letter way back in 1995, when she and Evelyn McDonnell published the anthology Rock She Wrote. It’s certainly going to be inspirational to hear about the many years that she has put into this work.
MUSIC BOOK CLUB FAQ
What is Music Book Club?
Music Book Club is a social community, live author events hub, a newsletter/magazine, and a support group for my self-published music books. We’re starting with a robust calendar of live Zoom calls with authors we’re featuring. The conversation series begins on Jan. 28 with Dan Charnas and his NYT Best Seller Dilla Time.
Why did you start Music Book Club, Tamara Palmer?
I conceived Music Book Club as a way to build a community around people who love to read about music. I also wanted to form a support group around the music books and zines I intend to write, crowdfund and publish in 2024 and beyond. The first major project will be a book about Bay Area rap music, and is being produced independently after I rejected an exploitative book contract from a major publisher. (Seriously, you’d be offended on my behalf if I broke down how crazy this offer was — I know I can do better with the help of this community I am building from the ground up.)
It’s quite true to the DIY, independent ethos of the Bay Area rap world to undertake this project as a way to develop a readership for my future book, and other books about music that I’d like to publish under the Music Book Club umbrella. I have a lot more ideas I’d like to explore, too. For example, my first published book, Country Fried Soul: Adventures in Dirty South Hip-Hop turns 20 in 2005, so I’d like to commemorate that anniversary with new work. And as a professional DJ, I have continued interest in writing about DJing and electronic music. I look forward to seeing what develops with your input.
How does Music Book Club make money?
We will receive 10% commission through books purchased through our affiliate store on Bookshop.org, through paid monthly/yearly subscriptions and via founding memberships. We may also make a fee from sponsorships, events, and merchandise. Your financial support is much appreciated, but not required, to be in Music Book Club.
How are books selected?
Music Book Club begins with my personal picks and will grow to include recommendations from members of the community.
What is the difference between free subscriptions, paid subscriptions, and founding memberships?
The content is free to consume, and paid members get additional perks. Paid subscribers at all levels can comment and participate in discussions. Yearly subscribers and founding members also get one printed Music Book Club zine per year (release date TBA) with their name in it, and founding members get the first original Music Book Club book (release date TBA). Monthly subscribers get to vote on books from a provided list.
Do I have to read the books?
Absolutely not—we don’t want anyone to feel like they have homework here unless they want to participate. No pressure, lurkers are also most welcome! We are a place where you can hear and learn from authors of music books as well as our original editorial content with music book news, recommendations, DJ mixes, and playlists.
Do I have to buy the books?
Nope! I encourage you to flex your library card—here’s an article I wrote for CNET a few years back that will help you learn how to check out titles to your iPhone, Android or tablet with the Libby app.
However, if you do decide to buy a book that you see here on Music Book Club and you make your purchase through our affiliate store on Bookshop.org (for physical books; we’ll soon also have an affiliate store for ebooks and audiobooks), We will receive 10% commission on each title. You will also be supporting an independent bookstore instead of Amazon, and that feels good!
What are the upcoming Music Book Club events?
We are starting strong! Consult the Music Book Events Calendar for the most updated information on live events.
Will there be a listening aspect to Music Book Club?
Yes! Our producer Carly Eiseman is also the creator of 1 Album A Day Art, a listening project where she chooses relevant records for daily listening based upon weekly themes. All of our events will have coordinated listening days or even weeks to inspire readers to get more familiar with all the artists and music scenes we’re featuring. Tamara is also a professional DJ and will be sharing exclusive, thematic mixes that correlate with our content.
Who designed the cute Music Book Club logo?
Music Book Club logo was designed by Richard Alexander Caraballo.
Tamara Palmer is 48 Hills’ Good Taste columnist as well as the publisher of the California Eating zine project and the free Creative Jobs newsletter.
