An entertaining, thoughtful account of the music business, one that would-be machers will want to study closely.
“I always know in a few seconds.” Music mogul Reid reveals the secrets of the producer’s trade.
Exhibit A is a young man named Usher Raymond IV, who came into the Atlanta headquarters of LaFace Records at a time when the label was suffering the inevitable growth pains, among them demands from its lead act, the hip-hop group TLC, for more money. Money is, as might be expected, a constant presence and preoccupation in Reid’s narrative, but happily, not at the expense of the music. He writes of having grown up in Cincinnati in the shadow of the King Records building, James Brown’s label. “Rhythm intoxicated me,” he writes, “and eventually it occurred to me that I wanted to play along.” He did so as drummer and driving force for the regionally popular combo called The Deele, which crafted hits for itself and other acts—notably Pebbles, whom Reid would marry. None too star-struck with himself, the author writes of learning his way around the music business, motivated in part by the desire to get out of his mother’s home: “I had no real prospects in the music business,” he notes, “but that didn’t occur to me.” Instead, he kept at it, realizing, critically, that he had a good brain as well as talent. He worked hard to learn as much as he could about that business and eventually stepped from behind the drum kit to take the lead first as a producer, then as a label owner, and then as an executive for the biggest hit-makers—a job, he notes, that is full of infighting and ugly politics. Throughout, Reid conveys his love of music and his open-minded search for new talent, no matter what the genre, including recent discoveries the Kongos and Meghan Trainor. (Incidentally, Usher passed that audition in a few seconds, and the rest is history.)
An entertaining, thoughtful account of the music business, one that would-be machers will want to study closely.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-227475-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
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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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