He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, even though he worked with renowned acts like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu and influenced the music of superstars like Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson. He died at the age of 32, and in his lifetime he never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialized in symphonies and taught at universities.

Best-selling author and Sundance award-winning director Questlove harnesses his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and his deep curiosity about history to examine America over the past 50 years. Choosing one essential track from each year, Questlove unpacks each song’s significance, revealing the pivotal role that American music plays around issues of race, gender, politics, and identity.

America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights—after all, history books were written by white men with their perspectives at the forefront. It could even be said that the devaluation and erasure of the Black experience is as American as apple pie. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history.

Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output, it’s about your relationship to the world.

Senior editor at L.A. Magazine RJ Smith saw his first book, The Great Black Way, win the coveted California Book Award. With The One, Smith profiles one of the 20th century’s most innovative musical icons, the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown. Drawing on extensive research and captivating interviews, Smith chronicles Brown’s rise from abject poverty to the pinnacle of fame, while also detailing Brown’s work as a civil rights activist and entrepreneur.

In Creative Quest, Questlove synthesizes all the creative philosophies, lessons, and stories he's heard from the many creators and collaborators in his life, and reflects on his own experience, to advise listeners and fans on how to consider creativity and where to find it. He addresses many topics - what it means to be creative, how to find a mentor and serve as an apprentice, the wisdom of maintaining a creative network, coping with critics and the foibles of success, and the specific pitfalls of contemporary culture.

Wisdom and musings on creativity and life from one of the world’s most beloved musicians, producers, and mentors, Quincy Jones. 12 Notes is a self-development guide that will affirm that creativity is a calling that can and should be answered, no matter your age or experience.

In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl's halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That's how this extraordinary autobiography began. Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to this audio the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs.

The blues grew out of the plantations and prisons, the swampy marshes and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. With original research and keen insights, Ted Gioia - the author of a landmark study of West Coast jazz and the critically acclaimed The History of Jazz - brings to life the stirring music of the Delta, evoking the legendary figures who shaped its sound and ethos: Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and others.

From Prince's superstardom to studio seclusion, this second book in the award-winning Prince Studio Sessions series spotlights how Prince, the biggest rock star on the planet at the time, risked everything to create some of the most introspective music of his four-decade career. Duane Tudahl takes us on an emotional and intimate journey of love, loss, rivalry, and renewal revealed through unprecedented access to dozens of musicians, singers, studio engineers, and others who worked with him and knew him best.

In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. For years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films. Now, with Cinema Speculation, the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans—and all movie lovers—could have hoped for. Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time, this book is as intellectually rigorous and insightful as it is rollicking and entertaining.

An inside look of a former deejay turned promotion man, Tom Petty and Me chronicles the career-changing moments in the life of Jon Scott. Through many serendipitous moments, Jon appeared at the right time to help get Tom's first album played on the radio, and that changed the professional lives of both men.

Nothing Compares 2 U is an oral history built from years of interviews with dozens of people who were in Prince's inner circle - from childhood friends to band members to girlfriends to managers to engineers to photographers, and more - all providing unique insights into the man and the musician. This revelatory book is a deeply personal and candid discussion of who Prince really was emotionally, professionally, and romantically.

The story of Stax Records unfolds like a Greek tragedy. A white brother and sister build a record company that becomes a monument to racial harmony in 1960’s segregated south Memphis. Their success is startling, and Stax soon defines an international sound. Then, after losses both business and personal, the siblings part, and the brother allies with a visionary African-American partner. Under integrated leadership, Stax explodes as a national player until, Icarus-like, they fall from great heights to a tragic demise.

Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for more than a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote “3 Chains o’ Gold”, Prince’s “rock video opera”, as well as the star’s last testament. According to Prince's former fiancée, Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like”.