Scars Of The Soul: Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises

Description

This collection of essays is a confessional, stylistic account (in the Joan Didion tradition) of coming of age in the Bronx alongside the birth and evolution of hip-hop culture. This collection presents a mosaic of seminal figures in hip-hop, documentary essays exploring the social decay of hip-hop, and a substantial element of memoir, as well as observations on the generational issues of urban America. With a foreword by acclaimed poet Saul Williams, Scars exposes the motivations and aspirations of a culture whose spiritual centre was the Bronx.

Miles Marshall Lewis was born in the Bronx in 1970 and currently splits his time between New York City and Paris, France. He is the author of Scars of the Soul (Akashic, 2004), and is a former editor of Vibe and XXL. His work has been published in The Nation, The Source, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Essence, and other Saul Williams is an interationally acclaimed poet and actor. He co-wrote and starred in the film Slam, was featured in the documentaries Slam Nation and I'll Make Me a World, and rapped to Rick Rubin-produced tracks on his hybrid album Amethyst Rock Star. Following The Seventh Octave.

"Lewis has composed an observant and urbane B-boy's rites of passage, one which deftly transports us from the Boogie Down--better known as the Bronx--to the Champs Ilysies. Herein find a hiphop bildungsroman told in prose full of buoyancy and bounce, generously stocked with revelations about black transatlantic culture and romance that are as much a generation's as the writer's own." --Greg Tate, author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk