I read many American music critics—including Sasha Frere-Jones, Kelefa Sanneh, Jeff Chang, Jon Caramanica, Jon Pareles, Oliver Wang and Stanley Crouch—to get a feel for my own writing, and Greg Tate is the man that I admire most. His writing is sharp, provocative, and he always speaks his mind. Below is an except from his “Hardcore of Darkness: Bad Brains” to illustrate my point:

Hardcore? [Bad Brains] take it very seriously. You say you want hardcore? I say the Brains’ll give to you hardcore straight up the ass, buddy. I am talking about like lobotomy by jackhammer, like a whirlpool bath in a cement mixer, like orthodontic surgery by Black & Decker, like making love to a buzzsaw, baby. Meaning that coming from a black perspective, jazz ain’t it, funk it ain’t hardly, and they’ll probably never open for Dick Dames or Primps. Even though three white acts they did open for, Butch Tarantulas, Hang All Four, and the Cash, is all knee-deeper into black street ridims than the Brain ever been and ain’t that a bitch?

The essay came from his Flyboy in the Buttermilk, a book I have not one but two copies of. I thought I lost one so bought another one, but then found the other one.

Beside Tate’s book, Oliver Wang’s Classic Material: The Hip-hop Album Guide is a collection of hip-hop reviews that I come back from time to time for inspiration. One of my favorite pieces from the book is on Jay-Z contributed by Elizabeth Mendez Berry who is a brilliant critic I come to respect after reading up on her works, particularly with “Love Hurts.” In comparing Jay-Z with Che Guevara, she concludes her essay with:

Guevara abandoned a cushy career in medicine to pursue his lifelong goal, the creation of his an egalitarian society uncorrupted by decadence or deprivation, whereas Jay corrupted his community by selling street medication. Later, Che left the relative comfort of celebrity in communist Cuba to stir up revolution throughout Latin America, while Jay ditched dope-dealing for the relative comfort of Big Pimpin’ rap. Che died trying to change the world. Jay lives large in the world order. But even if you can knock Jay-Z’s logic, you can’t knock the hustle.

Damn, she sure knocked the hell out of Jay-Z’s logic, and I just love the way she ended the essay with the title of his track “Can’t Knock the Hustle” (his flow is virtuoso).

Great designers don’t steal. We take inspirations wisely. With Thuy Nga’s Vi Yeu album cover, one could argue that it was inspired by Vanity Fair. Whoever photographed the cover just failed to move beyond what he or she has been influenced by. Let’s be real. Whatever design you come up with, people have done it. Just point out a project and the design observers like Steven Heller and Mirko Ilic will show you where they have seen something similar. In fact, that is exactly what they have done in The Anatomy of Design. With forty-nine projects selected, they unveil an array of sources where the designers might have picked up. The purpose of the book is not to point out where the designers have copied their work from, but to show how designers could still come up with their original work drawing from their inspirations. At the end, what makes your final piece distinctive is your own design sensibility, not the ones that influenced you.

In design, nourishing your creativity is part of the game. Like flowers, once your creativity runs dry, your design will die. The question then how do you stay on top of the game and how to maintaining your creativities? In his new book, Analog In, Digital Out, Brendan Dawes gives us a personal tour into his daily creative-seeking journey. From riding the train to work everyday to listening to Thelonious Monk while working to observing how people travel whilst waiting for his flight departure, Brendan shares how these day-to-day experiences could feed his mind beyond what the web, books, and magazines within the field could offered. While the concept of searching for inspirations outside your circle isn’t new to me, what makes this book worth reading is how he actually puts these discoveries to work and continue to be inspired.

Can depressing songs really fuck you up? Tom Reynolds was screwed by nihilistic shit so bad that he has to pen a book entitled I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard. Instead of analyzing how the suicidal tunes make you want to blast yourself, Reynolds makes them sound depressingly hilarious with his wit, incisive, heartless and sometimes silly criticisms.

With the list including Ray Peterson’s “Tell Laura I Love Her,” The Carpenter’s “Good-bye to Love,” Phil Collin’s “In the Air Tonight,” Celine Dion’s “All By Myself,” and Bonnie Taylor’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Reynolds discusses the lyrics (mostly his own interpretation of the stories), examines the vocal deliveries (how horrible Mariah Carey sounds when she takes the chorus of “Without You” to the next octave), and scrutinizes instrumental sounds that make you want to pull your hair out. Even though Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” made the cut, I ain’t mad at him. The song meant to be miserable, and she was “telling a story nobody wants to hear.” Who wants to listen to a song about lynching with “bulging eyes,” “twisted mouth,” and “burning fresh?” But I must confess that I dig the part where she mournfully croons, “Here is fruit for the crows to pluck / For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck / For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop / Here is a strange and bitter crop.” I guess I am pretty fucked up myself for enjoying such a horrendous image.

Besides a few truly depressing songs like “Strange Fruit,” Reynold’s list includes sorry-ass songs like Kenny Rogers’ “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” Apparently, the song is about a “cold heartless bitch Ruby” who goes out of town to fuck other men while her husband who is a crippled Viet Nam vet rolls around in his wheelchair. Reynolds points out that listening to the song makes “you feel guilty about even having legs.” You may say that he’s a soulless dickhead, but that what makes his writing appeal to me. At least there’s another asshole who is unapologetic about what he thinks.

Typography is both fun and challenging for designers. Selecting the appropriate typeface to communicate the message is not as easy as it seems. I see bad use of types everywhere from bathroom posters to Vietnamese album covers. Most often, designers just slap on new and fancy fonts just to make their works look cool. If you are one of those designers (you know who you are), Imin Pao and Joshua Berger’s 30 Essential Typefaces for a Lifetime is an invaluable investment. The book featured fifteen san serifs (including Avenir, Futura, and Myriad) and fifteen serifs (including Bembo, Minion, and Times New Roman) that you might want to use for your projects. With a brief history, purposes’ suggestion, and well-chosen, real-world examples of each typeface, the book should not leave the designers’ desk. I know it won’t leave mine. And just to show a quick inspiration from the book, I played around with my banner’s assignment for Vassar’s October Break. The experimentation is nothing fancy but gets me to think about communicating with types.

As blogging gains its popularity (even people with Yahoo mail can blog), fun and worth-reading contents are hard to find. No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog aims at providing you tips on how to make your entries more enticing than your mundane life. From “Fifteen Minutes to Fame” to “Think Like A Writer,” Margaret Mason who is the owner of MightyGirl.com (used to be one of my frequent stops) presents her ideas in a short, concise, witty with the blog-formatted approach to help people write down their own experiences. Although my main interest for Visualgui.com is “unprofessional criticism” on music, design, or whatever interests me, I could use some of Margaret Mason’s advices to juice up my posts. So flip through the book, find something provokes your head, and set your blog on fire.

“Why is abbreviation is such a long word?” Why do we use redundant words such as honest truth? And if we rearrange the letters in funeral, we get real fun, which the opposite meaning. These are some of the absurdities in the English language that graphic designer and typographer Teresa Monachino points out in her Words Fail Me—a book inspired by her Italian mother who had trouble understanding the idiosyncrasy of English. With clean and simple design, witty wordplay, and clever use of typography, Monachino illustrates how those words fail her.

Read Midnight Lightning not because I am interested in Jimi Hendrix’s life, but because I dig Greg Tate’s writing. He sure is one fine critic I have mad respect for. Tate describes Hendrix as “[T]he electric guitar’s Einstein if not its Edison.” And he isn’t ashamed to admit that he felt in love with Hendrix the “dreamfucker” as he analyzes Hendrix’s lyrics, “I make love to you in your sleep and yet you feel no pain because I’m a million miles away and at the same time right here in your picture frame.” Speaking of Hendrix’s sex life, Tates invited Michaela Angela Davis, a fashion and beauty editor for a major African American women’s magazine, to compliment on Hendrix’s pimp juice and for “how liquid and languid he was, and how drippy that made him always seem. Like he was surrounded by a lot of water and could still set shit on fire—literally! He was also drippy without seeming soft or gay and that was because he was not afraid to embrace his inner pimp… I’ve never wished I could have fucked him, but I have wanted to fuck that feeling he was having when he played… watching Hendrix fuck those amps was some of the best sex I’ve ever seen.” Tate also featured a portion of the book to a number of people who were close to Hendrix to speak about him. While these chapters are informative, they could not carry the engaging level Tate could.

In “The Presence Is Always the Point,” which included in Considering Genius, a collection of Stanley Crouch’s writings on jazz, he argues “[t]hat jazz is a music built on adult emotion while rock is focused on adolescent passion created another problem for jazz musicians who tried fusion.” I share his view on rock (not as sophisticated as jazz), but I disagree with his position against Miles Davis’s fusion direction. Davis never lost the complex emotion in jazz when he combined the two styles. Listens to Bitches Brew, one can still hear Davis’s deep expression that came out of his trumpet. Although we both have different views on jazz-rock and hip-hop, I still have respect for Crouch as a jazz critic who speaks his mind with an intellectual voice.

What makes Crouch’s essays intriguing to read is that he does not use heavy technical terms (something I avoid to do myself), yet he could let us hear the sound of jazz through his eloquent pen. If one would like to learn about several important jazz figures—such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Ahmad Jamal, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington—“The Makers” section is perfect for that, especially the piece on Bird. Crouch started out castigating Clint Eastwood’s Bird (film) and Chan Parker’s To Bird With Love (a book filled with photos), and then told the story of legendary Parker through his own research.

Even though the “Battle Royal” section, which featured eight short pieces Crouch wrote for JazzTimes, is brief, the writings are filled with controversial topics. One comes to mind is the dismissal of John Coltrane. McCoy Tyner, Coltrane’s pianist, left the band because he was “unable to deal with many squeakers, howlers, shriekers, and honkers his boss was invited onto the bandstand.” Yet, one important detail that fascinated me the most in this book is when Crouch’s father made a comment about Billie Holiday: “You should have heard her singing one to a woman. That was when she was really singing. I saw her romancing a girl with her voice just a couple of blocks from here at an after-hours joint up near Adams Boulevard on Central Avenue. She was fine and mellow all right but she was in her element when she was trying to pull a girl up next to her.” Holy shit!

Criticism plays a significant role in jazz. The critics not only helped spread the aesthetic qualities of the music, but also pushed the color line and challenged the racial equality in America. As someone who has been obsessed with jazz over a year ago, I spend innumerable amount of time catching up with jazz recordings, read the history of jazz, and digest doses of jazz-related essays. Yet, my knowledge is nothing compares to the level of details and researches John Gennari, an assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont, pour into his stellar Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics.

With thorough documentation (57 pages of notes), gripping narration, and open-minded observation, Gennari captured one of the fascinating and engaging aspects of jazz: it’s writing. Blowin’ Hot and Cool sets off in 1935 with John Hammond and Leonard Feather—two white critics who started the jazz criticism movement—then progresses all the way up to Gary Giddins, Stanley Crouch, and my main man Greg Tate who is a brilliant, contemporary writer. What intrigues me the most about this book is that whatever the controversial issues were—critics vs. critics, white vs. black, musicians vs. writers, traditional vs. modern, politic vs. racism, underground vs. commercial—Gennari provides readers both side of the story and backs up his analysis with quotes and excerpts.

Again, as a jazz enthusiast as well as my interest in music criticism, Blowin’ Hot and Cool is an invaluable gem. It is more enriching than the nineteen-hour documentary of Ken Burns’s Jazz and much better represented than The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. And I strongly agree with Gennari that: “Somehow this jazz writing seemed more important, more necessary than the writing about rock and pop music. Many rock musicians were well-known celebrities; we saw them on television. We love their music because it was accessible. Those of us who were musical dabblers played rock and funk because they felt like native languages. If we ventured into jazz, it was as a second language, and it came with no guarantee of an audience.”