River left empty for obligatory Klosterman blurb.

​Yes, tonight at Housing Works longtime Voice pal Will Hermes assembles hip-hop Godfather DJ Kool Herc, Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, Laurie Anderson, Salsa legend Larry Harlow, and former Voice music editor Robert Christgau to discuss the city's music scene(s), as they unfolded from 1973 through 1977. This period is also the subject of Hermes's recent book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, a remarkable side-by-side examination of downtown rock, loft jazz, salsa, disco, early hip-hop, and whatever else was going on sonically, tracking each genre as it evolved over the period. Hermes has been part of a few excellent panels lately, joining Mark Yarm, Marcus Reeves, and Marisa Meltzer at the Brooklyn Book Festival and Nitsuh Abebe at a recent Love Goes To event, but this looks like the best one yet.

And in slightly nerdier news, on Friday, Steven Shaviro, whose essay on Greil Marcus and the Pointer Sisters was one of the highlights from Zer0 Books's extraordinary The Resistable Demise of Michael Jackson, speaks uptown at Columbia's Center for Ethnomusicology, where he'll deliver a paper entitled, "Splitting the Atom: Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision." Apparently, he'll be focusing on the music video for the Massive Attack song of the same name, embedded below.

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The mysterious case of Soula Coaster's disappearance

This isn't a surprising development, but it's an unfortunate one. There seems to be some unexplained drama with the R. Kelly life-changer Soula Coaster: Diary of Me, the cover of which made the rounds this morning. Online bookseller Indigo has the title listed for pre-sale, along with the release date of next Tuesday, November 15. But Soula Coaster has been pulled off Amazon with the ominous "We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock" disclaimer. And the project's co-author David Ritz, a celebrity biographer who not only released books with Grandmaster Flash, Ray Charles, and Tavis Smiley (plus Snoop from The Wire!), but famously co-wrote "Sexual Healing" with Marvin Gaye, confirmed via email that the title wouldn't be released next week.

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​Along The Watchtower, the debut novel by Constance Squires, is a story of an Army brat whose tumultuous upbringing was kept steady in part by her discovery of rock and roll. It's published Tuesday, and in honor of its impending release and the coming holiday—don't forget, Monday's America's birthday!—we asked her to select 10 songs that, were she to program the music for this country's celebratory pool parties and barbecues, she'd put on everyone's playlist.

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​Tonight, Voice contributor and hip-hop sommelier Ben Westhoff will read from Dirty South, his look at the populist rise of rap music from the southern states, at Williamsburg's Book Thug Nation. The book focuses on the bigger names to have emerged from the south, with chapters based around Big Boi and Andre 3000's creative tensions, Lil Wayne's sensational ascent to stardom, the Geto Boys' early days, and Soulja Boy's ability to use a laptop and two cellphones while eating McDonalds (page 237, rap scholars). Here are five prompts for the post-reading Q&A segment, should you want to start a dialogue with Westhoff.

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​When rappers reference items they consume--whether Cristal, Clarks Wallabees, or chronic--listeners seek them out, either out of curiosity or a desire to be like their heroes. And thanks to hip-hop's tendency to occasionally serve as an educated, sound-advice-giving older sibling, those references can sometimes motivate listeners to pick up a book. I always loved reading, but sometimes I needed a bit of advice as far as what to check out next, and the literary references dropped by MCs often served as my introduction to new wings of the library. Here, in no particular order, are ten books that rappers have turned me on to over the years.

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​Tonight is a fine night for staying indoors and listening to people chat about music, and New York has two fine options: Friend of SotC Daphne Carr is throwing a party for her 33 1/3 series entry on Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine at The Sackett (661 Sackett Street, Brooklyn); there will be "periodic readings and remarks," and Christopher "Whiney G." Weingarten and Laylo will spin hip-hop and darkwave/industrial, respectively. Also, the best "1989 look" will win a prize! And the folks at Rolling Stone have teamed up with the "read more Internet" site Longreads to host a Night Of Long-Form Journalism at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe (126 Crosby Street, Manhattan); Rob Sheffield, Jeff Goodell, Brian Hiatt, and Mark Binelli will be on the panel, which will be led by Will Dana. Both events start at 7 p.m.

Stephen Slaybaugh

Bob Pfeifer.

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Cleveland Confidential Book Tour, moderated by Luc Sante and featuring Cheetah Chrome, Mike Hudson, and Bob Pfeifer plus Eric Davidson
powerHouse Arena
Saturday, April 9

Better Than: Watching the East River burn while sitting in a swank DUMBO loft.

There must have been something in the water in mid-1970s Cleveland that can account for the city's knack for spitting out the blistering bands it did. In fact, there was: the layers of crud and steel mill runoff that float atop the Cuyahoga River actually caused it to flare up and ignite several times, most notably at the tail end of the '60s. The Cuayhoga River Fire in 1969 proved to be the spark for the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act of 1972, but no amount of legislation could protect the citizenry from what was bubbling up in the warehouses and tenements along the river's banks.

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​Also-beloved friend-of-SOTC Ben Westhoff's new book, Dirty South: OutKast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop, will be available on May 1st from Chicago Review Press. This excerpt focuses on Southern pioneers Geto Boys and particularly beloved rapper Scarface, with whom Westhoff spoke not long before the emcee was incarcerated for failure to pay child support.

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​Recently, beloved friend-of-SOTC Rob Trucks (last seen chatting with the Big Star tribute crew and exploring Bob Dylan-centric Greenwich Village landmarks) published a book on Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, adding to the venerable 33 1/3 series the tale of the fraught, outrageously expensive, doggedly uncommercial follow-up to Rumours, one of the best-selling albums of all time. Trucks spoke extensively with FM boss Lindsey Buckingham, and also grilled Tusk fans who now make up such bands as Animal Collective, Camper Van Beethoven, the New Pornographers, Wolf Parade, and the USC Trojan marching band. Pick up the book here; below, please find an excerpt that at least begins to explore how much Tusk cost to make, and who was sleeping with who while they were making it.

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​"I knew this was something I had to do, so I went ahead and did it." Thus did Malice, the currently non-Kanye-affiliated half of SOTC-beloved rap duo Clipse, explain his decision to write Wretched, Pitiful, Poor, Blind, and Naked, a somber autobiography tracing the coke-rap kingpin's highs, lows, and newfound embrace of Christianity. (Read our own J. Pablo's full interview with him here.) This is all profoundly abnormal as far as rapper-penned memoirs go, as Malice will be glad to explain to you in person, at an "official book signing" event scheduled Friday afternoon from 3 to 6 p.m. at Vinnies Styles in Bushwick. DJ Boof and Mo' Brown will also be in attendance, if those names mean anything to you. You can buy the book online right here in the meantime; he's been promoting it via a series of revealing videos, the strangest (and most Vaseline-based) of which you will find below.

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