Synopses & Reviews
The much-anticipated paperback edition of Arthur Kempton's story on the art, influence, and commerce of Black American popular music
Praise for Boogaloo:
"From Thomas A. Dorsey and gospel to Sam Cooke and the classic age of boogaloo ('soul') to George Clinton and hip hop, this comprehensive analysis of African-American popular music is a deep and gorgeous meditation on its aesthetics and business."
---Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard
"Surpassingly sympathetic and probing. . . . a panoramic critical survey of black popular music over seventy-five years. . . .There is no book quite like it."
---New York Review of Books
". . . moving, dense, and fascinating. . . ."
---New Yorker
". . . a grand and sweeping survey of the history of soul music in America. . . . one of the best books of music journalism. . . ."
---Publisher's Weekly
". . . a fascinating and often original addition to the extensive literature. . . . an astute and witty account. . . . there is plenty in Boogaloo to set the mind and heart alight, as well as some flashes of brilliance and originality rare in music writing today."
---Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
Boogaloo: of course, a popular dance of the late sixties, but really the synonym of choice for soul music or rhythm and blues among the cognoscenti; the word sweetly conjures the miscegenetic essence of American culture.)
A stylish and profound scholar of African-American popular culture, among other accomplishments, Arthur Kempton gives us a book that, in form and substance, is unlike any other. To tell the story of black Americans in the 20th century, he deftly interweaves in Boogaloo five narrative strands by turns, his contrapuntal themes being the lives and times of Thomas Dorsey, the Father of Gospel Music: Sam Cooke, perhaps the greatest soul singer ever; Berry Gordy, creator of Motown and popular music entrepreneur par excellence; funk visionary George Clinton; and the slim shady triumph of hip-hop.
Engaging and sharp, Boogaloo offers a refreshing, cliche-free perspective on the relationship between blacks and whites in the Formation of a common American culture.
Synopsis
''Boogaloo'' is the synonym of choice for soul music, or rhythm-and-blues, among the cognoscenti. In this far-reaching study, Arthur Kempton reveals the tensions between the sacred and profane at the heart of soul music and the centrality of blacks in the evolution of America's contemporary popular music and culture. What that culture is, how its authenticity is measured, who owns it--these are the questions that fuel Kempton's narrative. At the center of the discussion: Thomas A. Dorsey, the ''Father of Gospel'' as well as a player of the blues; Sam Cooke, who got his start in gospel and became perhaps the greatest soul singer ever; Berry Gordy, who knew how to sell the tension between the sacred and the profane and created Motown in order to do so; George Clinton, the funk visionary who transmogrified sacred into profane; and hip-hop, the most powerful examples of which evince an essentially religious sublimity. With his fierce intellect and his encyclopedic knowledge of black culture, Kempton gives us a refreshing, cliche-free perspective on the relationship between black and white in the formation of a common American culture.