just as gripping for someone who couldn’t pick Puff out of a lineup." One title on the list:
The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnas (2011)Read about the other entries on the list.
In many ways, the emotional core of The Big Payback, Dan Charnas’s exhaustive history of how hip-hop became a billion-dollar industry, is the story of a corporate failure: that of Macola Records, a comparatively tiny vinyl-pressing plant in Los Angeles that issued the debuts of many of that city’s formative rap stars. While the agreements for these pressings promised Macola a share of the profits, they were all done over handshakes; when the real money came knocking, Macola and its founder, Don McMillan, were cut out entirely. Across the rest of the book, no other executives — mostly stemming from the Def Jam family tree — would be so naïve. Charnas, who last year published Dilla Time, a biography of the late J Dilla, draws on his experience as a writer for The Source and employee at Profile Records and Rick Rubin’s American Recordings to render the often ugly truth about the parts of the rap business that never make it onto wax.
--Marshal Zeringue