Funky, detailed, and, with elbows thrust out, it’s all rock-and-roll.
An earnest musicologist explores the makings of 20th-century “Aframerican” music: doo-wop to soul, rhythm and blues to hip-hop, gospel to gangsta.
Black music, Kempton tells us, has been the object of white depredation since the days of W.C. Handy. Born in the ubiquitous church choirs, nurtured on black vaudeville’s “chitlin’ circuit,” the art refused to be kept within bounds. Ma Rainey mixed gospel and blues; Sister Rosetta Tharpe broke out of the “race record” market. White cover versions of black records became unnecessary. Thomas A. Dorsey (“Father of Gospel” and author of “Precious Lord”) tutored Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin. It was Curtis Mayfield’s time, no longer Stepin Fetchit’s. Sam Cook (later more elegantly “Cooke”) warbled “You Send Me” and crossed over. James Brown did his considerable thing. In Detroit, Berry Gordy Jr., an inept pimp but a remarkable musical autodidact, established Motown, America’s greatest black musical enterprise, allowing Smokey Robinson and Diane Ross to soar. In Memphis, Stax Records had Otis Redding. Suge Knight marketed “ghetto niggaz” like Ice-T. Until he succumbed to a hail of bullets, Tupac Shakur vied with Dr. Dre. With a sensibility as black as any white author could possibly muster, Kempton raps about scuffling and struggling, road perks of drugs and sex, all the stuff about the boyz that didn’t make the trades. The prose, fervid and relentless, describes people not simply employed, but indentured. Major labels steal from sharecropper artists; banks hold “the whip handle” to wield “an overseer’s lash.” It’s all boogaloo all the time, with no mention of any noteworthy interchange with country and western (“hillbilly,” as Kempton disses it), Fisk Jubilee music, or the Brits. The syntax is so elaborate that verbs are hard to find. There are no photos or discography, and a companion CD would have been wonderful. Yet the text, in its way, is significant.
Funky, detailed, and, with elbows thrust out, it’s all rock-and-roll.Pub Date: June 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40612-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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