Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

Category: Books

Article Pitchfork November 25, 2009 Link Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy Edited by Nikolaos Kotsopoulos; Black Dog publishing This thick tome might as well be called the field guide to krautrock (“notice the long, unkempt hair and colorful plumage on Gerd”). The original genre tag in part represented the condescension directed toward this vibrant […]

Book Review Playboy.com March 2009 Link Author: Michael Lewis Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. Number of Pages: 352 Pages Cover Type: Hard Cover Populist anger may be boiling over against Wall Street and its recently chastised traders. But when they’re inflating our own nest eggs and driving up our own investment returns, we don’t mind […]

Book Review Playboy.com November 2008 Link Execution’s Doorstep: True Stories of the Innocent and Near Damned by Leslie Lytle Northeastern University Press, 300 pages, Hardcover $29.95 Reviewed by Patrick Sisson In many prison dramas, punishment for wrongfully imprisoned inmates comes at the hands of monstrous fellow convicts or sadistic guards. But in real life, the […]

Book Review Playboy.com July 2008 Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop by Emma Pettit Black Dog Publishing, 144 pages, Paperback $29.95 Reviewed by Patrick Sisson In an essay at the end of Old Rare New, music critic Simon Reynolds observes that, “used CD stores really are like the mass graves of mass culture.” It’s […]

Book Review Playboy.com May 2008 True Norwegian Black Metal by Peter Beste Vice Books, 208 pages, Hardcover $60.00 Reviewed by Patrick Sisson The members of the seminal Norwegian black metal band Mayhem remembered their former vocalist Dead, who committed suicide in 1991, in their own way. According to legend, bits of his skull were made […]

Review Playboy.com May 2007 Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar By Dori Hadar Princeton Architectural Press, 192 pages, Paperback $24.95 Record collectors live for the moments when obsessive hunting for rare vinyl unearths an undiscovered treasure. Dori Hadar, a Washington D.C. criminal investigator and DJ, discovered a different kind of rarity […]

Review XLR8R March 2007 Link The history of the Black Panther Party is filled with the bold-faced names of key leaders, martyrs, and political prisoners. But as Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (hardcover; Rizzoli, $35) demonstrates, those images of raising fists and black berets wouldn’t have become such iconic images of black […]

Review XLR8R July 2006 Link Vancouver’s Douglas Coupland defined youth in the early ’90s with works like Generation X and Shampoo Planet, coaxing deeper meanings from a tech-obsessed generation’s collective neuroses. Nearly 15 years later, Coupland faces the question: Will he become obsolete, or merely retro, like some adored but aging game console from childhood? […]

Feature URB May 2005 Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore remembers endlessly listening to a homemade tape filled with his favorite hardcore songs. He recalls touring the country during the ’80s in a van with a monstrous, sticker-stained boom box blasting tunes. And he still treasures the mix tapes bestowed by older and wiser friends and […]