Life and Death and New Orleans Rap

Triksta

A hymn to New Orleans and Nik Cohn's first book on music since the legendary Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom.

Extraordinary...Triksta is [Cohn's] most vivid book in decades and a gripping read

A poignant snapshot of a vibrant world just before it was lost... One of the most impressive music books of recent years

Scintillating... Brilliant... Cohn was the first writer authentically to capture the raucous vitality of pop music. His writing here still sizzles and crackles

Cohn takes the reader on a journey as illuminating and unnerving as I have read in a long time... Even if you have no interest in rap music, or popular culture, it is a book that is worth reading... It is also Nik Cohn's best book yet

Saddening, exhilarating, pungent and poignant

His best book since the great Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom.... Cohn is an iconoclastic writer... Triksta shines

His [Cohn's] book, street-sharp and witty and a stark expose of urban decay in a waning city, is made more poignant by the post-Katrina afterword included in this edition

His descriptions of the parts of the city devastated by poverty, neglect and crime way before Hurricane Katrina is hard-hitting but impossible to turn from, and his prose is as taut, hip and self aware as it's ever been. His portrait of a generation without hope crippled by rage with hip hop the only escape... is both grimly funny and heartbreaking

'One of the finest and most significant post-war journalists and probably the first person to write seriously about pop music...The writing is clear and dramatic; it grips from the first sentence and never lets go'

Nik Cohn was brought up in Derry, Northern Ireland. His books include I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo, Ball the Wall, The Heart of the World, Need and Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap. He also wrote the story that gave rise to Saturday Night Fever and collaborated on Rock Dreams and Twentieth Century Dreams with the artist Guy Peellaert. He lives in New York.

What lunacy would cause a 55-year-old white male to embroil himself in the world of New Orleans rap - as ideas man, talent-spotter, lyricist, and would-be producer? Nik Cohn has loved (and hated) hip-hop since its birth and loved (and hated) New Orleans for even longer - an addiction he's never wanted to kick. But nothing prepared him for the experience of being pitched, more or less by accident, into the role of Triksta, rap impresario. 
 
A white alien in a black world, with no funding or qualifications, and not a clue what he was doing, he had to rethink himself from scratch. Surrounded by a cast that included such names as Choppa and Soulja Slim, Big Ramp and Lil T, Bass Heavy, Fifth Ward Weebie, and Shorty Brown Hustle, he entered a world of tiny backstreet studios, broken-down slums and gun turfs. 
 
Triksta is the story of a three-year odyssey to the heart of rap, and New Orleans, and self-knowledge.

The Heart of the World

A totally unique account of travelling the length of Broadway, brilliantly evoking both its magic and its darker side, from the author of Awopbopaloobop Awopbamboom.

The verbal energy that pours off these pages is enough to transform the hell of places like Times Square into a roughhewn heaven, neon lit and open all night. The history of Broadway has been written before but never better...Overflowing with voluble "animal spirits," it is a feast for anyone who loves good stories. The only thing wrong with it is, it isn't longer.

Not since Damon Runyon wrote his fables of Harry the Horse, Sleepout Sam Levinksy and Lone Louie, has Broadway had a chronicler to do justice to its picaresque excess...The Heart of the World is a walk up Broadway, an imaginative leap into its past and its present. Runyon wrote fiction based loosely on fact. Cohn writes fact with the vividly colourful brush-stroke of fiction

Cohn's walk up Broadway is a fascinating trip for, though the Great White Way has fallen on desperate times, he manages to fit in a lot of the street's history along with his vivid stories about its sleaze-ridden present. His style is electric, crackling with one-liners

A kind of day trip through an X-rated Disneyland, full of hucksterism and magic and tawdry, hard-luck scenes...Cohn weaves a story retrieved from all the histories of New York: the tales of Wall Street and ward-boss politics, of theater and finery and sex, money, power.

Here comes everybody, a cavalcade of misfits, each their own short story, and Cohn in the role of recording angel

Of course I'm a Nik Cohn fan. His name is actually kind of a password. If somebody says they know about Nik Cohn, you know that person is literate -- and cool

Published in 1991, The Heart of the World is a collection of oral histories about life on Broadway… The worlds Cohn describes are long gone, replaced by shopping malls and Starbucks. I’d rather remember it his way.

Nik Cohn had planned a trip around the world, but when a friend told him that Broadway is 'the world within itself', he started walking up the Great White Way, from Battery Park to Times Square. Escorted by a drum-playing Russian taxi driver, fuelled by duck soup and whiskey and sleeping in crackhouse hotels, Cohn encountered pickpockets, dancers, old  magicians, disgraced politicians, epic storytellers, part-time messiahs, and an unforgettable transvestite called Lush Life. Hallucinogenic history, rogues' gallery, personal odyssey, this extraordinary saga is also an extended love letter to a dream of New York now lost.

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom

Pop from the Beginning

'The definitive history of rock 'n' roll' Rolling Stone

Set the template for a whole new style of rock journalism, informed, irreverent, passionate and polemical.

The best writer about pop music...an inspiration.

The book to read if you want to get some idea of the original primal energy of pop music. Loads of unfounded, biased assertions that almost always turn out to be right. Absolutely essential.

Cohn was the first writer authentically to capture the raucous vitality of pop music

The defining text of what its subtitle calls ''the Golden Age of Rock.'' Spun out in a series of perfectly turned, pocket-size biographies -- Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Brown, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, the Who --  it is the closest thing there is to a rock version of Vasari's ''Lives of the Artists.''   It is a book full of attitude, shrewd (and sometimes cruel) judgments, youthful cynicism and aching love

The first best book on rock 'n' roll and still the best first book to read.

Scholars of rock and roll still revere him for Awopbopaloobop, a passionate argument for the primacy of the three-minute pop song...A book ostensibly about popular music, but really about youth, innocence and rebellion

Nik Cohn began to write this book in the late 1960s with a simple purpose: to catch the feel, the pulse of Rock. Nobody had written a serious book on the subject before, and there were no reference books or research to refer to. The result is an unruly, thrilling and definitive history of an era, from Bill Haley to Jimi Hendrix, full of guts, flash, energy and speed. In vividly describing the music and cutting through the hype, Nik Cohn engendered and perfected a new form: rock criticism.

Nik Cohn

There will always be an England, no doubt, but what sort of England will it be? Cohn takes a long wild ride through a country he calls the Republic - a nation within a nation, populated by the many millions who have either fallen out of the Britannic mainstream, or chosen to jump. He meets the rising stars of a new culture, and also the casualties. Their collected stories, both weird and wonderful, combine to form a tapestry quite unlike any notion of England that has ever existed before. It is a land made up, among others, of outlaws and insurgents, rampaging natives, second-generation immigrants, visionaries, born-agains, football fans, fetishists, New Age travellers, anarchists, DJs, street-fighters, graffiti artists, Rastas, Odinists, Elvis impersonators, fire-swallowers and even the Antichrist. Loud and angry, and charged with furious energy, their voices define a world cut loose from tradition and all certainty. Gone bananas, in fact. Nik Cohn's republic may not be the only England out there. But it's the most vivid.

Nik Cohn

Books by Nik Cohn

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