Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema Review

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Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema ReviewI highly recommend this book. It is very enjoyable and informative reading that is right on target for insight into the Black Urban Culture, the rise of Hip Hop and it's influence on Black produced American film. It was used as a main text for a Rap and Black Cinema university course successfully. Although very sociology based, it was understood by college students of other majors who appreciated the book's honesty of a much maligned topic.Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema OverviewIn this engaging and provocative book, S. Craig Watkins examines two of the most important developments in the recent history of black cinema—the ascendancy of Spike Lee and the proliferation of "ghettocentric films." Representing explores a distinct contradiction in American society: at the same time that black youth have become the targets of a fierce racial backlash, their popular expressive cultures have become highly visible and commercially viable."Watkins is at his most sophisticated and persuasive when he explains the surprising success of hyper-talented, entrepreneurial, and energetic black artists."—Archon Fung, Boston Book Review

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Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy (LSU Press Paperback Original) Review

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Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy (LSU Press Paperback Original) ReviewBlue Smoke is such an entertaining read that it would be easy to overlook the scholarship behind it. In using Broonzy's career to tell a larger story about African American lives Roger House refrains from padding the book with information designed to show off his research. Instead he writes as economically as Broonzy sang. I love everything about Blue Smoke. The layout is lovely, the photographs well chosen, the discography a welcome addition and the content as enjoyable as it was informative. Starting with Broonzy's parents and interspersing details about African American life into the Broonzy family story, House shines a light on economic opportunities, the migration, racism in blues music and (of course) music as a method of detailing social conditions. Using Broonzy's recordings to tell the story of so many could easily have come off as contrived or forced, but Roger House makes it seem the most logical and straightforward way to address the subject. Working with Broonzy's dual careers (the white expectation for blues music required it's own type of minstrel show while the black audiences appreciated Broonzy's more contemporary work) the author combines all into something greater than I expected. While Blue Smoke does address the story of lives in America under Jim Crow, it is also an excellent biography of the artist. I gained a greater appreciation for Broonzy's work in Europe as well as becoming familiar with work I'd overlooked in his discography. A great book and one I absolutely recommend.Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy (LSU Press Paperback Original) OverviewA contemporary of blues greats Blind Blake, Tampa Red, and Papa Charlie Jackson, Chicago blues artist William "Big Bill" Broonzy influenced an array of postwar musicians, including Muddy Waters, Memphis Slim, and J. B. Lenoir. In Blue Smoke, Roger House tells the extraordinary story of "Big Bill," a working-class bluesman whose circumstances offer a window into the dramatic social transformations faced by African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. One in a family of twenty-one children and reared by sharecropper parents in Mississippi, Broonzy seemed destined to stay on the land. He moved to Arkansas to work as a sharecropper, preacher, and fiddle player, but the army drafted him during World War I. After his service abroad, Broonzy, like thousands of other black soldiers, returned to the racism and bleak economic prospects of the Jim Crow South and chose to move North to seek new opportunities. After learning to play the guitar, he performed at neighborhood parties in Chicago and in 1927 attracted the attention of Paramount Records, which released his first single, "House Rent Stomp," backed by "Big Bill's Blues." Over the following decades, Broonzy toured the United States and Europe. He released dozens of records but was never quite successful enough to give up working as a manual laborer. Many of his songs reflect this experience as a blue-collar worker, articulating the struggles, determination, and optimism of the urban black working class. Before his death in 1958, Broonzy finally achieved crossover success as a key player in the folk revival movement led by Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, and as a blues ambassador to British musicians such as Lonnie Donegan and Eric Clapton. Weaving Broonzy's recordings, writings, and interviews into a compelling narrative of his life, Blue Smoke offers a comprehensive portrait of an artist recognized today as one of the most prolific and influential working-class blues musicians of the era.

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Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture Review

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Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture ReviewWomen of Blaxpolitation is an important treatise into an often overlooked topic in film studies and broader cultural studies. Exploitation cinema was a major force in 1970's culture that yields its influence on modern film and popular culture in movies like Quentin Tarrantino's Death Proof and thousands of B-grade films produced on the independent front. Too often people assume that women in these films were simply eye candy or lambs to the slaughter but in reality power exudes from many of these women . . . super heroes of the feminine upheaval that came with the women's liberation movement. It is refreshing to see a book on this subject exploring the power to transfrom that these women had written by a female scholar, rather than the male perspective. This is a thoughtful book worth adding to your library.Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture OverviewWith the Civil Rights movement of the sixties fresh in their perspective, movie producers of the early 1970s began to make films aimed toward the underserved African American audience. Over the next five years or so, a number of cheaply made, so-called blaxploitation movies featured African American actresses in roles which broke traditional molds. Typically long on flash and violence but lacking in character depth and development, this genre nonetheless did a great deal toward redefining the perception of African American actresses, breaking traditional African American female stereotypes and laying the groundwork for later feminine action heroines. This critical study examines the ways in which the blaxploitation heroines of the early 1970s reshaped the presentation of African American actresses on screen and, to a certain degree, the perception of African American females in general. It discusses the social, political and cultural context in which blaxploitation films emerged. The work focuses on four African American actresses—Pam Grier, Tamara Dobson, Teresa Graves and Jeanne Belle—providing critical and audience response to their films as well as insight into the perspectives of the actresses themselves. The eventual demise of the blaxploitation genre due to formulaic plots and lack of character development is also discussed. Finally, the work addresses the mainstreaming of the action heroine in general and a recent resurgence of interest in black action movies. Relevant film stills and a selected filmography including cast list and plot synopsis are also included.

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