Near the end, the author addresses cultural appropriation, as well, acknowledging that “this book shouldn’t exist”—not by a...
An illumination of hip-hop, race, religion, and America, through a close reading of an influential debut album.
On the surface, this book commemorates the 25th anniversary of “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” but there is much beneath the surface, making for a conceptually audacious critical study about the conceptual audacity of the Wu-Tang Clan—and well beyond. Ashon (Strange Labyrinth: Outlaws, Poets, Mystics, Murderers and a Coward in London's Great Forest, 2017, etc.) investigates how avant-garde jazz musicians, whose styles were dismissed at the time as nonmusic or anti-music, led to howls from the hip-hop abyss to an even more powerful and popular artistry initially dismissed as nonmusic: no musical instruments, no conventional melodies, no singing. He also explores how that music and its culture has since swallowed up the culture at large as well as the affinity that radical black American artists have felt for Asia in general and kung fu movies in particular, identifying with the other as it battles cultural oppression. In perhaps the most audacious chapter—or “chamber,” as it references the title of the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut, which itself references the title of a kung fu movie—the author declares, “hip hop is a martial art. That is the key insight of the Wu-Tang Clan….It doesn’t share certain practices with a martial art. It actually is a martial art….The legendary MC and thinker KRS-One describes hip hop as ‘a mental survival tool for the oppressed,’ and once you begin to tunnel down into what that might mean, the parallels become clear.” Ashon also devotes considerable space to religious esoterica, the pseudoscience of race, guns, and drugs, recording technology and economics, the Staten Island Indian tribes, and the cultural history of 42nd Street.
Near the end, the author addresses cultural appropriation, as well, acknowledging that “this book shouldn’t exist”—not by a white author from an ocean’s remove, but, “I wrote it anyway, even knowing I shouldn’t.” Hip-hop fans and anyone interested in the deeper seams of American culture will be glad he did.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-571-35000-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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