Though sometimes too slow and a touch, well, normal, Clinton’s memoir proves a treat for the many who love his work.
Uncle Jam’s funkadactic crusade continues in a book that, though less rollicking than a fan might expect, still kicks it.
“When I’m asked about something serious, I try to make jokes because deep down, I know that I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.” Thus says Clinton, the mastermind behind Parliament/Funkadelic, aka P-Funk, and the author of such classics as “Maggot Brain” and “The Electric Spanking of War Babies.” It’s not exactly Socrates’ “I know only that I know nothing,” but Clinton is a born, if rough-speaking, philosopher, as when he allows that, though he’s not so inclined, he never minded playing with gay musicians: “I don’t give a fuck who he’s fucking. Can he drum?” Clinton, with a helpful hand from pop ghost Greenman (co-author of Questlove’s Mo’ Meta Blues, 2013), recounts coming up on gritty East Coast streets, where, in between working as a barber, he engaged in various felonious acts while seeking fame on the Motown funway. That changed with his “introduction to three important letters: L-S-D,” along with the recruitment of players such as Eddie Hazel and later William “Bootsy” Collins, who took R&B, mixed it with rock, turned it into funk, and then took the whole enterprise into outer space. (Clinton opens with an anecdote in which Mylar space suits figure prominently.) Sadly—but fittingly, as it turns out—Clinton’s tale begins to limp halfway in, as acid-funk glory slowly begins to erode in the face of one lawsuit after another. He closes in the glow of a comfortable semiretirement tinged with a hint of sadness: “Kids today don’t know the difference between me and Snoop Dogg, or me and Stevie Wonder. Everybody who’s old is old.”
Though sometimes too slow and a touch, well, normal, Clinton’s memoir proves a treat for the many who love his work.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476751078
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
PERSPECTIVES
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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