Jay-Z's Decoded Book

Shawn Carter and (one of my favorite people on twitter) Dream Hampton set to release Jay-Z's intimate memoir/lyric book Decoded in November. What-in-the-what is that cover you ask? Well, it is an image from Andy Warhol's 1984 "Rorschach" paintings. What is the book about? Here's an excerpt and explanation:

“When I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted it to do three important things. The first was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics—not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC—are poetry if you look at them closely enough. The second was I wanted the book to tell a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history. And the third piece was that I wanted the book to show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.” - Jay-Z

Publisher Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group plan to release the 336-page Decoded as an eBook, iPhone/iPad application, and hardback on November 16th.