Customer Reviews

Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic

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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.

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.