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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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