No, I’m not talking about audio CD or DVD versions of J.K. Rowling’s best-selling sorcerer tales—I’m talking about two Boston brothers who so love the Harry Potter series that they formed a band in honor of it, that is, Harry and the Potters. Their MySpace mantra: “We play songs about books!” Speaking of tunes, titles include “Save Ginny Weasley” and “The Yule Ball” (both from the band’s debut, Harry and the Potters).

Music and book lovers, you might’ve found your perfect match. And libraries looking to incorporate live music into their outreach programs, take note because these boys actually tour, and word on the street is that they’re good, for muggles anyway.

In other Potter news, the contract that Scholastic required librarians to sign if they were ordering Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows through Baker & Taylor is sparking more headlines. The AP wrote a story on it last week, though surprisingly, it didn’t address the fact that the fax number suffered, er, complications, which made for a lot of peeved librarians (see my blog Have Harry on Order from B&T? Sign the Contract!).

In my first performing arts assigning (I recently adopted the section from Heather McCormack), the grand theme was pop celebs writing. Due out in May from three big publishers, we have Don’t Hassel the Hoff, David Hasselhoff’s autobiography from Thomas Dunne, Alice Cooper, Golf Monster: A Rock ‘n’ Roller’s 12 Steps to Becoming a Gold Addict from Crown, and Criss Angel’s Mindfreak coming from HarperCollins, complete with “40 mindfreaks you can master.”

 This odd little group, linked primarily by the similar chuckle they brought forth as I flipped through them (after all, they feature two TV stars and one musician; cover sports, magic, and memoir; and appeal to vastly different audiences) somehow seems more than the trashy celebrity cash-in book. Nicole Ritchie’s disparaged dip into writing comes to mind: see Bookroom classics “Anticlimactic didactic,” on Judith Regan’s less-than-classy buys, and Heather McCormack’s reaction to book awards season, ”The biggest losers.”

 Maybe it is the artist behind these performing arts titles—whether he is a master of rippling muscles, shock rock, or street magic—that makes these books worth looking at for something a little more than dissing a now-defunct publishing powerhouse or dreaming up awards for the biggest literary bombs. Or maybe they’ll go down with an even bigger splash!  Look for reviews in forthcoming issues.

When this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees were announced (the actual ceremony is on March 12), I had the sneaking suspicion that Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five would be the first practitioners of hip-hop to make the cut. A quick check of the inductees since the hall’s inception indicates as much, and while I’m not stunned, I’m also somewhat perplexed.

Sure, it’s the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but this is America, the melting pot, a metaphor that can be applied to our native music. Everything, in theory, mixes, and the results are often exciting and, as in the case of hip-hop, world-shaking. Before it even turned 25, hip-hop music and culture boasted a global audience, from Brazil to Japan. And already seven years into the 21st century, hip-hop still has a hold on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart.

Strangely, as popular as hip-hop is, it still doesn’t generate that many hit trade nonfiction books (the magic formula seems to be put “Tupac” or “Notorious B.I.G.” in your title). For the most part, I still see the stuff of African American studies syllabi, a la T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (April, NYU Press). Commercial houses, meanwhile, will try their luck this spring with the anthology Beats, Rhymes, and Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip-Hop (May, Harlem Moon) and Roni Sarig’s Third Coast: Outkast, Timbaland, and How Hip Hop Became a Southern Thing (May, Da Capo).

Then, again, I shouldn’t forget street lit. We tackled the genre in a collection development article last summer (“Streetwise Urban Fiction”), and it’s no stretch to say it’s probably the most powerful propagator of the “thug rapper” lifestyle outside of MTV. This platinum-selling pulp will be the subject of our best sellers list in July, and our own Barbara Hoffert moderated a panel on street lit at lasts year’s Day of Dialogue in Washington, DC. For a recap complete with authors and titles mentioned, click here.

“The world’s forgotten boy”—that is, Iggy Pop, born James Osterberg in Muskegon, MI, in 1947—has finally gotten a biography on par with his musical achievements and brain-blowing stage antics. For Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed (April, Broadway Books), British journalist Paul Trynka worked his contacts like a Russian masseuse to produce what our reviewer Matthew Moyer calls “a complete portrait of the man and his work—from mayhem in Detroit with the Stooges to making albums with David Bowie in Berlin.”

As if Matthew’s impassioned assessment of the book isn’t enough (for the full monty, see the April 1 issue), his illuminating interview with Trynka will appear in the same issue, about a month after the release of Iggy and Stooges’ first studio album in decades.

For Iggy-related books, see our reviews of Martin Roach’s Morphing the Blues: The White Stripes and the Strange Relevance of Detroit and Roger Crimlis and Alwyn Turner’s Cult Rock Posters. And this just in from Arts & Humanities Editor Mirela Roncevic: although then pushing 60, a few years ago Iggy posed, often in the buck, for a serious of striking photos collected in Gavin Evans’s Biopic. Too nude and rude for the pages of LJ, but we’re still punk rock.

I seem to be fast designating myself as the resident hip-hop book reviewer. Look for a review of Newsweek reporter Alison Samuels’ Off the Record (Amistad) in the Nov. 1 issue. I recently snapped up the galley of Total Chaos, a book of essays on the art and culture of hip-hop edited by Jeff Chang, author of the popular Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. 

Also on my shelf are Making Beats, a book on sampling by Joseph Schloss, Russell Simmons’ Life and Def, and Heather’s copy of Never Drank the Kool-Aid. (On an unrelated side-note, look for Simmons’ (estranged?) wife’s book, Fabulosity, on our Nov. 1 self-help bestsellers list.)

The hip-hop library that was being established before I was reading about hip-hop is pretty well endowed, too. LJ called It’s Not About a Salary by Brian Cross, published in 1994 and focusing on LA, “the best available work on a music genre that’s here to stay.”  With Tricia Rose’s Black Noise, we have what LJ considered “the first detailed exploration of rap music within its social, cultural, and artistic contexts,” published in 1994 as well.  Another formative text is Hip Hop America (1998) by the prominent critic Nelson George.

What hip-hop books are coming in and going out of your library?