Tattoo Nation: Portraits of Celebrity Body Art - Hardcover

Rolling Stone

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9780821227817: Tattoo Nation: Portraits of Celebrity Body Art

Synopsis

One hundred photographs from "Rolling Stone" magazine celebrate the art of the tattoo in shots of musicians, actors, and other pop icons, including Drew Barrymore, Eminem, Melissa Etheridge, and Ozzy Osborne.

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About the Author

David Ritz is a three-time winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and has coauthored a number of best selling biographies, including those of Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and the Neville Brothers.

Reviews

Popularized by sailors and bikers, tattoos have become indispensable fashion accessories for rockers and rappers, whose professional responsibility it is to embody exotic, outlaw primitivism to the public. Hence this coffee-table collection of photographs of tattooed celebrities culled from the pages of Rolling Stone. The portraits here, by famous celebrity and fashion photographers, are heavily weighted toward sleeveless, scowling male musicians, whose remarkably consistent tattoo tastes run to a comic book aesthetic of gothic lettering, deaths heads, dragons and babes (until they age and begin inscribing wives' and childrens' names into their flesh). Accompanying interviews and captions allow the subjects to pontificate on the personal significance of their tattoos ("Weed was the biggest part of my life at that point," muses Crazytown's Shifty Shellshock of his marijuana-leaf tattoo). While fans of the celebrities pictured here will swoon over the lush photos, the book fails to make the case for tattoos as real works of art capable of signifying something to onlookers as well as to their owners.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780821228173: Tattoo Nation: Portraits of Celebrity Body Art

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  082122817X ISBN 13:  9780821228173
Publisher: Bulfinch, 2005
Softcover