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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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