Showing posts with label african-america n. Show all posts
Showing posts with label african-america n. Show all posts

Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era Review

Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era
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Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era Reviewi liked how this book captured the time period and showed the images and spoke on how preception was. you feel the atmosphere and see a shift from the way things were. of course hollywood is and will always be color struck, however there was a certain manner at presenting actors and actress's during this time. very compelling book.Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era OverviewThis is the second volume of Thomas Cripps's definitive history of African-Americans in Hollywood.It covers the period from World War II through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, examining this period through the prism of popular culture.Making Movies Black shows how movies anticipated and helped form America's changing ideas about race.Cripps contends that from the liberal rhetoric of the war years--marked as it was by the propaganda catchwords brotherhood and tolerance--came movies that defined a new African-American presence both in film and in American society at large.He argues that the war years, more than any previous era, gave African-American activists access to centers of cultural influence and power in both Washington and Hollywood. Among the results were an expanded black imagery on the screen during the war--in combat movies such as Bataan, Crash Dive, and Sahara; musicals such as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky; and government propaganda films such as The Negro Soldier and Wings for this Man (narrated by Ronald Reagan!).After the war, the ideologies of both black activism and integrationism persisted, resulting in the 'message movie' era of Pinky, Home of the Brave, and No Way Out, a form of racial politics that anticipated the goals of the Civil Rights Movement. Delving into previously inaccessible records of major Hollywood studios, among them Warner Bros., RKO, and 20th Century-Fox, as well as records of the Office of War Information in the National Archives, and records of the NAACP, and interviews with survivors of the era, Cripps reveals the struggle of both lesser known black filmmakers like Carlton Moss and major figures such as Sidney Poitier. More than a narrative history, Making Movies Black reaches beyond the screen itself with sixty photographs, many never before published, which illustrate the mood of the time.Revealing the social impact of the classical Hollywood film, Making Movies Black is the perfect book for those interested in the changing racial climate in post-World War II American life.

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Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington Review

Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington
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Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington ReviewDinah Washington, like Etta James and Esther Phillips, is one of the underrated singers of the post WWII era, and very little has been written about her. So when I saw this book and who its author was,(Nadine Cohodas, who wrote a superb history of Chess Records,Spinning Blues Into Gold), I eagerly anticipated reading it.
After finishing it, unfortunately I'm still waiting for the definitive biography of the Queen. It's very apparent that Cohodas did a lot of research, but the result was turned into a laundry list of club dates, recording sessions, clothes inventories, and rotating musicians and husbands which becomes numbing. What is missing is context and interpretation of these events aside from the repetitive assertion that Washington was narrowly promoted and marketed because of race. I wasn't looking for sensationalism or psychobiography from this book, but I was hoping to gain some insight into Dinah Washington's life, or music, and the lack of analysis left me still wondering both who she was and how she created such wonderful music.Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington Overview

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Slow Fade to Black (Galaxy Books) Review

Slow Fade to Black (Galaxy Books)
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Slow Fade to Black (Galaxy Books) ReviewEverything arrived in perfect orderSlow Fade to Black (Galaxy Books) OverviewSet against the backdrop of the black struggle in society, Slow Fade to Black is the definitive history of African-American accomplishment in film--both before and behind the camera--from the earliest movies through World War II.As he records the changing attitudes toward African-Americans both in Hollywood and the nation at large, Cripps explores the growth of discrimination as filmmakers became more and more intrigued with myths of the Old South: the "lost cause" aspect of the Civil War, the stately mansions and gracious ladies of the antebellum South, the "happy" slaves singing in the fields.Cripps shows how these characterizations culminated in the blatantly racist attitudes of Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and how this film inspired the N.A.A.C.P. to campaign vigorously--and successfully--for change.While the period of the 1920s to 1940s was one replete with Hollywood stereotypes (blacks most often appeared as domestics or "natives," or were portrayed in shiftless, cowardly "Stepin Fetchit" roles), there was also an attempt at independent black production--on the whole unsuccessful. But with the coming of World War II, increasing pressures for a wider use of blacks in films, and calls for more equitable treatment, African-Americans did begin to receive more sympathetic roles, such as that of Sam, the piano player in the 1942 classic Casablanca.A lively, thorough history of African-Americans in the movies, Slow Fade to Black is also a perceptive social commentary on evolving racial attitudes in this country during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

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Redefining Black Film Review

Redefining Black Film
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Redefining Black Film Reviewtook forever to ship to me. i wish i would've just bought it in the store bc i missed out a week of reading for class. Order in advance in order to get it on time or else just buy in the store.Redefining Black Film Overview

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A Lifetime To Get Here: Diana Ross: The American Dreamgirl Review

A Lifetime To Get Here: Diana Ross: The American Dreamgirl
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A Lifetime To Get Here: Diana Ross: The American Dreamgirl ReviewNot since J. Randy Taraborelli's first Diana Ross book (the glowing "Diana: A Celebration of Her Life and Career", circa 1985) have I been so excited to read about Diana Ross. The cover, the facts, and the insider tidbits make this an enjoyable read for this ardent Supremes fan. I especially like the behind the scenes of the Supremes aborted - Return to Love tour as well as the stolen moments at certain venues that I was in attendance -- makes it all the more enjoyable to read. Overall, the book succeeds in making Ross look like the super human being that she is as well as a great super star that she became. I think the Billboard charting information is a real added plus to this book.A Lifetime To Get Here: Diana Ross: The American Dreamgirl OverviewThis unauthorized biography of entertainment legend Diana Ross strives to give a balanced account of her life and career while giving her the historical due that seems to have escaped her previously. Captured in vivid detail are her groundbreaking performances leading the Supremes, the renowned concert in Central Park amidst a raging thunderstorm, and the peaks and valleys of the more than 40 years of her ongoing stage, studio, and screen career. The book steers clear of dry biography, in that it is interspersed with entertaining essays that capture the effect her life and career have had on fans throughout the years. This book is a must-read for anyone with an appreciation for popular culture over the last half century.

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Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra Review

Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra
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Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra ReviewFirst let me say that I am a bigtime Sun Ra fan. If someone did not like Sun Ra's music, this book would probably not be as much fun, but it still might be interesting - say, a three-star rating instead of a five.
Ra has made much of his swing era big band background, having arranged for and performed with Fletcher Henderson ca. 1947, during that band leader's years of decline. This book documents something much less obvious: Ra's indebtedness to doo wop, R&B and even mood music. Who would have guessed the resemblance to Les Baxter? I now hear both Ra and Baxter with new ears. Starting in the first chapter, the book provides important background available nowhere else, such as detailed description of the 1930s Birmingham social clubs, a little known musical scene.
About two thirds of the way through, the narration freezes and the book gets bogged down in describing Ra as a philosopher and poet. This is rather thin soup. Szwed tosses out twenty-dollar terms like "gnosticism" without giving any clear evidence that he, or Ra for that matter, really understands them. Fact is that Ra's genius was largely intuitive, and his uses of Egyptian history and futuristic technophilia were largely metaphorical posturing. Ra's philosophy and poetry are valuable only because he was a musical genius. Students of the music should remember that the programmatic content was used ritually in performance but in no way validates his music or makes it better.
The chapters covering the 1930s through 1960s are fairly detailed. In contrast, the narration about Ra's last 15 years (1977-92) is curtailed (perhaps by a deadline), and we get barely one page per year of activity. A complement to Szwed's book is Robert Campbell's discography, The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra (Cadence Books), which gives very few pages to the early years but becomes thick by listing recordings made in the 1980s, when technology had made live recordings commonplace.
...I am about to read John Szwed's book for the fifth time. After reading it the second time, I was so sorry to finish I had to start over again. That's why I wish there were more about his late recording and touring career.
If you don't know Sun Ra's music, start with the Evidence CDs and get with it. If you already know and like Ra's music, then you will enjoy this book.Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra Overview

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Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday Review

Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
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Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday ReviewDavis work is a powerful re-reading of Blues women, and firmly places them in the center, rather than the margin, of Black oppositional and autonomous culture discourse. The book is mostly devoted to the work of Gertrude Rainey and Bessie Smith, but there are important sections devoted to Billie Holiday as well. In each case, the Davis argues for a more complete contextual understanding of Blues women music as introducing gender issues, breaking discursive taboos, and forging meaning within the context of an imagined community of Black women's lives.

To begin with, Davis convincingly argues that Blues women were on the vanguard in breaking down taboos concerning domestic violence and male subjugation, as many Blues songs concerned these matters. Davis uses powerful works such as "Rough and Tumble Blues," "See See Rider Blues," and "Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair," to demonstrate that Blues women were willing to engage in oppositional, if allegorical, violence in the service of personal autonomy. Even man songs that seem to demonstrate acquiescence, even masochism, in the face of male abuse can be seen to have an ironic, subversive, or didactic quality that belies a simplistic surface reading.

Davis also takes on the common notion that Blues music doesn't include social protest, an interpretation that has been pushed by white commentators, such as Samuel Charters, and black commentators, such as Albert Murray. Davis argues that Blues music inherits from Slave musical culture a coded approach to naming and resistance that demands more than a surface analysis of the lyrics, and takes into account the role of music as a lyrical interlocuter. Focusing on tunes such as "Backwater Blues" and "Washwoman's Blues," Davis almost always effectively demonstrates that coded protest is still protest, and that women's blues historically anticipated and grounded mass movements in the areas of civil rights and feminism, while remaining linked with West African hermeneutic structure of naming and interpretation, such as "nommo."

In terms of Religious content, Davis forcefully recounts how women reconfigured a secular existential (or even "Devil's") music as prayer itself, magically and aesthetically conjured to exorcise emotions such as "the blues." At the same time, she harshly criticizes the Black church for adopting Christian dualisms concerning the moral status of body and spirit, which she sees as sexualized forms of racism and sexism--- since both blacks and women have been semiotically linked with earthiness and body as opposed to spirit by while male elites. Celebratory Sexuality, on the other hand, has always, according to Davis, been an oppositional aspect of black working-class consciousness. This extends beyond sexuality to an affirmation of Black folk religious life (such as Hoodoo) and crossing of class boundaries in the Blues, which Davis contends is a major reason Blues music was ignored and even distanced by Black elites during the Harlem Renaissance.

Davis's discussion of Billie Holiday is short (two chapters) but powerful, in which she argues that Holiday subversively appropriated the saccharine Tin Pan Alley love song format she was given as Slaves would have appropriated the English language upon their arrival in the North Americas. Holiday worked little in the formal Blues, but was nontheless grounded in the Blues idiom, from which she drew inspiration, and a subversive presentation of white romantic life to Black audiences. In this vein, such songs as "Strange Fruit" fit more coherently, and the ironic (and yet utopian) edge in her voice professes to the truth of Black women's lives, even in ways that on the surface seem to be feministically regressive.

There are isolated examples where Davis is less successful than at other times, but on the whole, her argumentation is strong and fearless, and her analogical and narrative analysis of the music along with lyrics adds, rather than detracts, from her argument.Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday Overview

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

Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture
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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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Angel on My Shoulder: An Autobiography Review

Angel on My Shoulder: An Autobiography
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Angel on My Shoulder: An Autobiography Reviewafter being a fan of nat king cole in the fifty's ibecame interested in natalie after hearing her cd "UNFORGETTABLE" i knew nothing about her life and was amazed that she shared so much of her bad times. was touced by the way she poured her heart out. i am happy that she trusts in GOD and wasn't afraid to share all he has done to keep her safe.Angel on My Shoulder: An Autobiography Overview

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Moonwalk Review

Moonwalk
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Moonwalk ReviewFor all those people who choose to believe the crap that's written about Michael Jackson, I suggest you all take a look inside yourselves. This book Moonwalk is a a wonderful book giving Michael's point of view of his rise to fame, his family, and his relationships. This book was written in 1988, several years prior to the madness that surrounded him. I'm insulted that the people who are selling this book are actually selling it for 1 cent! That is ultimate disrespect for a person who has given us so much joy and great music for 40 years of his life. He deserves to be seen as a human being, not the freak that the media and the American public make him out to be! This other book that the so called critic is recommending "Be Careful Who You Love" is just another smear campaign. It's bad enough this man's life has been in shambles the past few years. But all the public wants to do is to continue to beat him into the ground until their's nothing left. Michael Jackson is simply a man who has tried all his life to help others. Now he's being crucified because of the lies of some very greedy people. Try reading all the facts before you continue to judge someone.Moonwalk OverviewThe #1 New York Times bestseller! Michael Jackson's one and only autobiography – his life, in his words. With original Foreword by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a new Introduction by Motown founder Berry Gordy, and an Afterword by Michael Jackson's editor and publisher, Shaye Areheart. "I've always wanted to be able to tell stories, you know, stories that came from my soul. I'd like to sit by a fire and tell people stories – make them see pictures, make them cry and laugh, take them anywhere emotionally with something as deceptively simple as words. I'd like to tell tales to move their souls and transform them. I've always wanted to be able to do that. Imagine how the great writers must feel, knowing they have that power. I sometimes feel I could do it. It's something I'd like to develop. In a way, songwriting uses the same skills, creates the emotional highs and lows, but the story is a sketch. It's quicksilver. There are very few books written on the art of storytelling, how to grip listeners, how to get a group of people together and amuse them. No costumes, no makeup, no nothing, just you and your voice, and your powerful ability to take them anywhere, to transform their lives, if only for minutes." –Michael Jackson, in MoonwalkFrom the 1988 edition: Megastar Michael Jackson's singularly brilliant career and intensely private lifestyle have become a magnificent obsession for millions of rock fans and celebrity watchers throughout the world.His double-platinum singles rocket to the top of the music charts with a velocity equaled only by the inevitable accompaniment of wild rumors about his eccentric personal life.Now for the first time, Michael Jackson breaks the fiercely guarded barrier of silence that has surrounded him in a remarkably candid and courageous book — Moonwalk.In this intimate and often moving personal account of Michael Jackson's public and private life, he recalls a childhood that was both harsh and joyful but always formidable.Michael and his brothers played amateur music shows and seamy Chicago strip joints until Motown's corporate image makers turned the Jackson 5 into worldwide superstars.Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 have combined sales of over 200 million albums.He talks about the happy prankster days of his youth, traveling with his brothers, and of his sometimes difficult relationships with his family over the years.He speaks candidly about the inspiration behind his music, his mesmerizing dance moves, and the compulsive drive to create that has made him one of the biggest stars in the music business and a legend in his own time. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Thriller as the biggest-selling-album of all time.In Moonwalk, Michael Jackson shares his personal feelings about some of his most public friends…friends like Diana Ross, Berry Gordy, Quincy Jones, Paul McCartney, Fred Astaire, Marlon Brando, and Katharine Hepburn.He talks openly about the crushing isolation of his fame, of his first love, of his plastic surgery, and of his wholly exceptional career and the often bizarre and unfair rumors that have surrounded it.Illustrated with rare photographs from Jackson family albums and Michael's personal photographic archives, as well as a drawing done by Michael exclusively for this book, Moonwalk is a memorable journey to the very heart and soul of a modern musical genius.

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