A trooper had escorted them from Georgia. Pedro, the lanky bassman, had counted his change inside a convenience store and thought he had been shorted; after that the clerk fell into character and a tragedy was averted by Kofi, the shorthaired lead singer, who strode across the parking lot in tie-dyed jeans to interrupt his […]
Introduction As we opened our eyes on the morning of September 11, 2001, few of us realized how many goodbyes that day would bring: to people we loved and places we knew, to our plans for the future and our sense of control over our lives, to the trust we had in our safety and […]
Preface Hiphop is dead. Writing Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don’t Have Bruises, I worked backwards from this foregone conclusion, then changed my opinion very early on. Living in the South Bronx at the time hiphop culture was born, moving to the northeast Bronx neighborhood of Co-op City and […]
Following is a breakdown of some of the record labels that are partially or fully owned by the four international conglomerates that control ninety percent of the music industry. This is only a brief sketch; it does not include the many record companies that were distributed through the Big Four (but not necessarily owned by […]
For two decades now the high-minded phrase “Jazz is America’s Classical Music” has served as a kind of marketing jingle for the music during the culture wars. As popularized by Billy Taylor, Grover Sales, and others, the slogan became a patriotic rallying cry in the eighties—and the perfect topic sentence for a challenge-grant application—by those […]
Playing President is not a book title selected casually, but a distilled opinion gleaned over forty years of journalism, covering our most important democratic exercise. After decades spent interviewing dozens of leading presidential candidates, including those who ended up in the highest office, I came to the conclusion that the process endured in obtaining electoral […]
Chapter 1: Music Must Change Society offers many labels for people who run against the grain. But it’s the people on the so-called fringes who actually bring change. Without rebels, rabble-rousers, malcontents, or whatever label we choose to apply, the culture would remain static. Look around the world at cultures that squash expression—their resistance to […]
The hate mail printed on the back of your book suggests that you have thick skin. Was your skin always so thick, or is this something that has evolved over time? Yes, my skin has become a thick calloused hide, due to all the fan letters I have received during my 15-year career as a […]