Recent Writing:
On A Tribe Called Quest, Packages, and Portals
in “A Record Could be Your Whole World: Vinyl Records as the Total Artwork of the Late Twentieth Century,” Luke Wood & Bruce Russell (Eds.), Ilam Press (Ōtautahi/Christchurch, 2024)
As someone for whom music has been (and continues to be) an important, formative, educational part of my life, I was pleased to be invited to contribute to “A Record Could be Your Whole World,” an incredible book that explores the unique role played by records in western culture in the late twentieth century from the perspectives of 18 writers, artists, musicians, and designers, each reflecting on their personal and cultural relationship with a specific album.
I chose to write about what is probably my favourite hip hop collective, A Tribe Called Quest (
@atcq ), and their seminal 1993 record “Midnight Marauders,” which I consider to be a prime example—in album cover, in lyrics, in production—of both a “package” (an aesthetic and conceptual gesamtkunstwerk assemblage of histories, references, people, places) and a “portal” (citing the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, the record as a threshold that you can cross, that opens up worlds for you.)
The book is astutely edited by self-described “exit-level” designer and teacher/musician Luke Wood (
@shakinlukewood ) and Bruce Russell, experimental musician, teacher, and member of legendary NZ music/art trio The Dead C.
Luke also happens to be the founder and boss of the only academic record label that I know of, Ilam Press Records, a vinyl-producing offshoot of the eponymous Ilam Press (
@ilam_press ) publishing imprint he established at the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts. Mr. Wood designed and hand-printed every copy on the department’s Risograph machine and the book was on sale from the Ilam Press Records Bandcamp site until it already recently, unsurprisingly, sold out.
Limited copies are still available from a number of independent record shops and booksellers around the world, including
@flyingnun ,
@unitybookswgtn , and
@flyingoutmusic here in Aotearoa and my beloved
@cafeotodalston in London. I highly recommend getting hold of a copy, run don’t walk!
