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Synopsis
The memoirs of a journalist and former editor of ex-hip-hop bible The Source intersperse interviews with personal narrative. A personal look at hip-hop's expansion, culturally and economically, from local invention to international megaforce.
Review
With the kind of devotion Ovid could get with, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds lets you know straight away: his memoir, Gunshots in My Cook-Up, is a love story. By page two, he effuses, "[Hip-hop] crawls in my gut as it does in yours, lover of hip-hop. Idealism. Love. Total submission. No food as filling, no liquor more potent."
Since his Guyanese youth, Hinds' passion for the boom-bap has burnt unfettered — from the time Public Enemy's Chuck D loaned his crew $5,000 to his editorship of The Source, when it was still the "hip-hop bible," to his definitive but short-lived hip-hop culture dot-com with Russell Simmons. Like a lover, Hinds writes with nurturing grace and protective criticism of his own entanglements with folks such as P. Diddy and Lauryn Hill, and, in one of the book's most moving chapters, his close physical proximity to Biggie's murder. The first-name-basis adulation might flunk were Hinds not such a fine writer, busting out tough critiques and pages of boardroom gossip (including especially relevant fodder for the never-ending Source vs. Eminem melodrama) pertinent to players behind and beyond the velvet rope.
His most eloquent sentiments bloom from passion: "[Hip-hop is] a mass of people, an entire generation, listening with fist-clenched approval of the dope stuff and snickering dismissal of wack sh*t. . . it's the kid, once ignored by mainstream society, who grew up large and shook the tree." Hinds' memoirs extend, gift-like, to the hip-hop generation; there's some love and idealism for ya. (JS)
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Synopsis
The Rolling Stones filtered through the dirty lens of '60s counterculture. From behind a speaker at Altamont to Brian Jones’ parents’ couch, Stanley Booth writes with the grace and restraint of a casualty.
Review
In 1969 the Rolling Stones, though still considered dangerous and fashionable (and fashionably dangerous), were done to death. "Street Fighting Man" wasn't a call to arms, but merely a rock song. Guitarist Brian Jones was dead. The police raided Mick Jagger’s flat, finding drugs and a nude Marianne Faithful. Altamont was just around the corner. But Stanley Booth, a young, Twain-obsessed writer from Georgia, was transfixed. Not by the music (though he dug that, too), but by Keith Richards' blue-gummed honesty, Charlie Watts' quiet politeness, Mick Jagger's material hunger, and, most of all, Jones, a ghost even in life.
Through sheer will and Southern charm, Stanley Booth quickly became part of the Stones' inner circle. With immediacy and sympathy, Booth depicts the band as rich gypsies afraid of their violent, ever-closing shadows. Through chapters alternating between oral history and diary, he separates the Stones from their superstar billing, becoming an active participant in his own story while remaining a cool observer as he recounts boring afternoons and endless recording sessions. He exposes everything — not just the "World's Greatest Rock 'n Roll Band" in all its debauchery and finery, but an entire generation seeking help, cause, and excitement.
Like Faulkner let loose in a swamp, Booth spins detail into theory, widening his web from the Stones to '60s culture at large, all without pomposity or condescension. It cost Booth 15 years and a suicide attempt to write True Adventures, struggles he discusses at length in an added epilogue, in which he scoffs at his young arrogance and ambition. Yet this mix of unbridled hope and wary cynicism make the book a stunning piece of literature that perfectly captures the lives of six men in the eye of a cross fire hurricane. (JM)
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Synopsis
Female writers rant about rock's boys club, rave about the Stones, and ruminate about Olivia Newton-John masturbation fantasies. What they don't say: Is female music criticism the same thing as feminism?
Review
Rock, like love, is a battlefield: punk against bourgeois, poor against rich, young against old, us against them. "Part of me says, 'We'll fight them on the beaches, and we'll make them give in and see that we're right, and they'll march shoulder to shoulder with us and we'll be equal,'" writes Leslie Barman in the introduction to Rock She Wrote. "And part of me says, 'F*ck them, we'll have our own revolution.'" But before launching our Molotov cocktails, "we" have to admit that not everyone agrees who "them" is.
In this collection of female writers' music essays, criticism, confessions, and interviews, it's not just a Y-chromosome that divides allegiances. NME scribe Vivien Goldman rages eloquently with Fela Kuti against the National Party of Nigeria; theorist bell hooks aptly challenges Madonna's appropriation of blackness; and Rollerderby columnist Lisa Carver even takes herself on, confessing "Why I Want to Rape Olivia Newton-John (Because I'm a Troubled Young Lady)." At times, writers tend to conflate class and race with feminism instead of arguing how each issue informs the other. That so many of the talented female scribes choose to focus on "women's issues" seems to further ghettoize them: when you're only writing about sexuality, gender, and Gene Simmons' lipstick, readers might mistake you for someone who can't recite the more general, masculine (by default) history of rock 'n roll.
But when Ellen Willis admits to loving the Rolling Stones despite their misogynistic lyrics, her words describe the virtues of Rock She Wrote as well: "A liberating form can transcend its regressive content," Willis opines. Rock's very presence has more political significance than its weakest lines. Now that readers value the names in the table of contents, the battle can be fought one byline at a time. (MEM)
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| NONFICTION |
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Hellfire
by Nick Tosches
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| Published: |
May 1982 |
| Pages: |
304 |
| Publisher: |
Grove Press (reprint) |
Links:
Tosches bio
Interview with Tosches
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Synopsis
This biography colorfully describes the extraordinary and rambunctious life of the still-active '50s rock 'n roll pioneer, Jerry Lee Lewis.
Review
With a keen sense that popular culture is a mortal sin (when practiced correctly) in the eyes of religious moralists, Nick Tosches could not have dreamed up a better biographical subject than Jerry Lee Lewis. Dubbed at an early age "The Killer," the piano-pounder from Ferriday, Louisiana, whose error-filled ways were never quite checked by his punishing Christian guilt, pilgrim-progressed through the world singing such lurid songs as "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" to the chagrin of his cousin, evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, and protectors of polite civilization in the '50s. Yet he has endured, on a path as bumpy as an alligator's back. Jerry Lee's transgressions, as recounted here with a sinner's nonjudgmental relish, include bigamy, adultery, assault, drug abuse, theft, tax evasion, and some of the greatest rock 'n roll (and country) records ever made.
Notwithstanding his many marriages, Lewis has never been a lovable character, and this is at once the tale of an erratic, incorrigible ne'er-do-well and a great cultural figure. As in his subsequent books about Dean Martin and Sonny Liston, Tosches is equally dedicated to exploring both those elements. That the story reads like fiction is testimony to both the stubborn star's wild ride and the author's colorful representation of it. He combines exacting research and incisive analysis with fanciful but pitch-perfect recreations of thoughts and conversations. All it takes is a tossed-off description like "…there she lay with lifted skirt and liquored breath, all flashing lights and fury: Dallas" to recognize an author equipped to properly unlock the religious/sexual duality of "Great Balls of Fire." (IR)
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