Here is the entire history of pop Los Angeles in all its splendor and excess… Barney Hoskyns has spent the better half of a decade researching this definitive account of a dysfunctional artistic community. From the days of the thriving jazz clubs in the forties to the menace of West Coast gansta rap in the nineties, the sound of this bleached, irrigated dreamscape is here in all its warped glory. Hoskyns travels through fifty years of music history to unravel its unrealities. The result is a riveting account of, as he writes, “the peculiarly California interplay between light and darkness, good and evil.”
