Description

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Hip-hop icon Chuck D presents a gorgeously illustrated Pilates exercise program for people of all ages, including the over-forty crowd

LEGENDARY HIP-HOP ARTIST CHUCK D has been touring the world ever since his band Public Enemy put out their first album in 1987. Now, at age sixty-three, Chuck is frequently asked how he manages to still put on such high-energy performances. His response is simple: he practices Pilates, a form of exercise and body conditioning that has become increasingly popular over the last decade (though it was originally developed by Joseph Pilates in the early twentieth century).

Chuck's appreciation for Pilates took a major leap in 2016 when he was setting out on a rigorous tour schedule with a powerful and energetic new band called Prophets of Rage (a supergroup including members of Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine). Over the next four years, the group would perform to more than two million people across the globe. As Chuck admits, he simply could not have delivered on such a massive level without his practice of Pilates, under the guidance of trainer Kathey Lopez. In RAPilates, Chuck and Kathey present an illustrated program of Pilates exercises for people of all ages, including the over-forty crowd.

The volume includes introductions from both Chuck and Kathy, which are followed by more than thirty mat-based Pilates exercises that are carefully explained by Kathy and beautifully illustrated in Chuck's inimitable style that he has demonstrated in his previous books of visual art, including STEWdio and Summer of Hamn. Like those two books, RAPilates is published on Chuck's Enemy Books imprint, which is hosted by Akashic.

About the Author

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CHUCK D is the leader and cofounder of the legendary rap group Public Enemy, a social activist, multimedia producer, visual artist, digital music pioneer, and author/illustrator of STEWdio: The Naphic Grovel ARTrilogy of Chuck D and Summer of Hamn: Hollowpointlessness Aiding Mass Nihilism. He has been featured in more than one hundred documentaries on music, technology, politics, and race, and cocurated the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap. He has also been a national spokesperson for Rock the Vote, the National Urban League, Americans for the Arts, and the National Alliance of African American Athletes. As part of Public Enemy, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and earned a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

KATHY LOPEZ earned a comprehensive certification for all equipment used in the Pilates method with the prestigious Romana's program and received her Classical Pilates Certificate for Power Pilates in 2012. She owns Studio Be Pilates in Ventura and resides in Ojai, California.

Praise For…

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Chuck D's excellent STEWdio (yes, Chuck D of Public Enemy) is a literal diary of stray thoughts, three books of them, in a box—and some of the most compelling reading I've done this year. In one-page panels recalling a meld of eighth grade homeroom sketches and the exuberantly unstable lines of Basquiat, Chuck offers portraits of collaborators, tales of loss and quarantine, nights huddled before cable news.

— Chicago Tribune, on STEWdio

The Public Enemy mastermind combines art and hip-hop rhymes to provide his compelling, personal views on the chaotic years between 2020 and 2022 . . . In an engaging, distinctly hip-hop style, Chuck D reveal important lessons from the early pandemic years.
— Kirkus Reviews, starred review of STEWdio

This box set of three full-color paperback bound books is an engaging time capsule capturing the thoughts and artwork Chuck D created from the start of COVID-19 through the first year of the Biden administration. The cofounder and front man of legendary hip hop group Public Enemy unleashes his commentary on contemporary events with the activist instinct that made the hip hop pioneers a social message phenomenon.
— Ebony, on STEWdio

"Summer of Hamn is billed as a depiction of gun violence in America, a collection of Chuck's graffiti-style drawings and verse—all compiled in what he calls 'the madness' of last summer. 'Every day there were things that were macabre that didn't even make the news because people had become immune,' he says. He turned to illustration because people listen more than ever with their eyes. 'A picture is worth 10,000 words nowadays,' he says. A drawing today can get the type of response that a rap record used to get 35 years ago, he adds, especially if it's something he's uploaded to Instagram or Facebook or X."

— The Guardian, on Summer of Hamn

With his latest work of graphic nonfiction, Chuck D uses his art and hip-hop rhymes to show how the US has been held hostage by gun violence and a growing sense of hopelessness . . . A focused, fresh, urgent text filled with pictures worth 1,000 words and rhymes worth thousands more.
— Kirkus Reviews, starred review of Summer of Hamn