Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic [Paperback]

Mark Anthony Neal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0415926580 | ISBN-13: 978-0415926584 | Edition: First Edition

In Soul Babies, Mark Anthony Neal explains the complexities and contradictions of black life and culture after the end of the Civil Rights era. He traces the emergence of what he calls a "post-soul aesthetic," a transformation of values that marked a profound change in African American thought and experience. Lively and provocative, Soul Babies offers a valuable new way of thinking about black popular culture and the legacy of the sixties.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From Sanford and Son to Snoop Doggy Dog, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic looks at the last three decades of black images and representations. State University of New York, Albany, professor of English and Africana Studies Mark Anthony Neal focuses on the way that music, film and television were altered on the one hand by integration and on the other hand by the pessimism and social unrest among black Americans in the '70s and '80s. Neal also discusses the work of young black intellectuals of the "post-soul" generation, the first to be part of an integrated yet increasingly isolated academy.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Neal (African American studies & English, SUNY, Albany; What the Music Said: Black Popular Music & Black Popular Culture) has written a provocative study of African American popular culture since the Black Power and Civil Rights era. Using his wide knowledge of popular culture and political events, he argues that the media's integration of blacks in the 1960s, with television shows like Julia and I Spy, was at best a partial bow. Introducing a new concept of "Post-Soul Aesthetic" to black cultural criticism, Neal thoughtfully asserts that contemporary black culture, especially rap and hip-hop music, provides a much more satisfying and varied, if often ambiguous and problematic, mirror of black values and models. His sources range from music to comic strips like Boondocks to comedians like Eddie Murphy. This is a very important work, marred only by a tendency to use too much postmodernist jargon, which will discourage general readers. Recommended for large academic libraries. A.O. Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; First Edition edition (November 4, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415926580
• ISBN-13: 978-0415926584
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #161,561 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching. He is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003) and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005). Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2nd Edition which will be published by Routledge in April of 2011 Neal's next book Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities will be published next year by New York University Press.

Neal hosts the weekly webcast, 'Left of Black' in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University (Duke on Demand). A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal is a weekly columnist for theLoop21.com and also contributes to several on-line media outlets, including The Root.com, theGrio.com, SeeingBlack.com and Britain's New Black Magazine. Neal maintains a blog at NewBlackMan (http://newblackman.blogspot.com/). You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Book December 23, 2007

By T.

Format:Paperback

Neal's Soul Babies is a good book on black music through a postmodern lens. A lot of the concepts he talks about are dense, but he does write in a compelling way, and the subject matter (ranging from Good Times to R Kelly) is interesting as well. If you want to approach black popular culture from an academic, intellectual way, then this is an excellent book. If you are looking for a coffee table book with pictures, this ain't the book.

1 of 22 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars It's A Dirty Shame to Condemn Them. October 30, 2006

By Betty Burks

Format:Paperback

These interracial children will never be accepted by the whites or the blacks as belonging to their race; they will always be misfits as kids and as adults. It wasn't meant to be in God's plan for this world. Who Takes The Blame? August 13, 2006

In February, 1969, a study titled "Black-White Contact in Schools: Its Social and Academic Effects" was published by Purdue University sociologist Martin Patchen. In it, he concludes "Available evidence indicates that interracial contact in schools does not have consistent positive effects on students' racial attitudes and behavior or on the academic prformance of minority students." In March, it was declared that the AIDS virus started in Africa and on the Caribbean island, Haita and spread to the United States via tourists. Get this! Susan Sontag decided in 1988 that "the virus was sent to Africa from the U.S. as an act of bacteriological warfare" as a conspiracy.

July, 1985, a survey conducted in New York City using the HIV antibody test finds that of frequent drug users, 87 percent carried the infection. The majority of the addicts were black and Hispanic. In August 1988, on Zachary's birthday, Jean-Michael Basquiat died in New York village of a heroin overdose at the age of 27 (Zach was 26 then). He was a graffiti artist whose pieces sold for $50,000 at the time of his death. There was a lot of debate about his artistic worth.

This book traverses the years 1979 to 1989 in America and is mostly about the singers and groups in the entertainment area but also writers which proliferated during that time. It is the time of affirmative action and Clarence Thomas who was married to a Causcasian woman but courted the office girls and almost lost his nomination. I watched it all on t.v. The girl took all the blame, and she was honest and above-board, blameless. The results of overcompensation has caused much turmoil for us all in America and some are deceitful by trying to pull the wool ober the eyes of political figures to the detriment of everybody.