No beat, and you can’t dance to it.
The most successful producer in rap…is duller than Perry Como?
Hip-hop journalist Ro (Raising Hell, 2005, etc.) recounts the storied career of Andre “Dr. Dre” Young, arguably the most significant producer in the history of rap music. His accomplishments are legion: As a co-founder of the controversial group N.W.A., he helped establish the genre of “gangsta” rap, which focused on violent, reportorial tales of street life, in stark contrast to much of rap music’s historically light-hearted, party music approach. As a producer, he pioneered a sonically rich palette of layered drum machines, synthesizers, samples and live instruments that came to be known as “G-funk,” a highly commercial sound that defined the West Coast hip-hop approach. As a solo artist, he released The Chronic, one of rap’s defining albums. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded Aftermath Records, and he has been instrumental in establishing the careers of such luminaries as Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, 50 Cent, The Game, Eve and many others. He has successful soundtracks on his resume, has directed music videos and even acted in some small film roles. It is a mystery, therefore, that in Ro’s chronicle he comes off as a singularly uninteresting person: A remote perfectionist and workhorse with little direct exposure to the “thug life” he so lucratively celebrated, Dre seems to have spent the majority of the past 20 years behind a mixing board, cranking out hits like some marijuana-driven savant. The occasional glimpses of Dre the man are unflattering; he has run into trouble for striking women, and many of his collaborators have alleged that Dre has taken more credit for his productions than he perhaps deserves. Ro’s journalistic approach is impressive in its comprehensiveness, but the endless dry descriptions of contract negotiations, petty intramural beefs and depressingly frequent violent outbursts quickly become monotonous. The lack of musical or socio-cultural analysis leaves the book an impressively researched but dryly assembled resume.
No beat, and you can’t dance to it.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-56025-921-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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