Blood Beats: Vol. 2 / the bootleg joints
by Ernest Hardy
Writing from a critical center that is melanin-based/ feminist/ pro-queer/ unabashedly-leftist, LA-based writer Ernest Hardy (a Sundance Fellow and member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vibe, the LA Times, the LA Weekly and more) pens essays, interviews and reviews whose subject matter ranges from underground hip-hop and American indie film to modern French cinema, from revealing interviews with Carl Hancock Rux, Sarah Schulman, Meshell NdegeOcello, visual artist Mark Bradford, legendary French filmmaker Agnès Varda and Ledisi to essays on the Fugees, Kanye West, Eminem and gay hip-hop porn.
ISBN-10: 0-9656659-9-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-9656659-9-5
Specs: Softcover, 399 pp.
Price: $19.95
Pub. Date: February 2008
Cover photo copyright © 2006 by Alex Demyanenko
Cover design: E.M. Corbin
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Praise for Blood Beats: Vol. 2
Ernest Hardy has long been the culture critics’ critic, a rare writer whose every opinion we read and debated and measured our own against. Blood Beats: Vol. 2 shows why: the expansive mind, the humanistic ear, the timely question, the passionately committed voice. There may be no better guide through pop’s image-storm of identities than Mr. Hardy.
—Jeff Chang, editor of Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop
I’m not sure whether Ernest Hardy is a pen name or not but his writing is everything his name implies. His dissections of pop culture are neatly carved into well-thought proportions over which he pours a tangy, sometimes biting, down-home styled gravy. To read his work is to think twice. He raises the question that only someone who truly believes in the power of art would seek to answer.
—Saul Williams
