This is admittedly a peculiar book about a peculiar fascination: our peculiarly American notions of racial difference and the forms of pleasure, sometimes sadomasochistic in nature, that have sprung from the national idea because of them. It features a peculiarly African American twist on Marx's and Engels's observations about capitalism's commodity-feitish effect - the transformation of a marketable object into a magical thing of desire. It is my belief that capitalism's original commodity fetish was the Africans auctioned here as slaves, whose reduction from subjects to abstracted objects has made them seem larger than life and less than human at the time...American music industry's never ending quest for a white artist who can competently perform a Black musical impersonation: Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Britney Spears, 'N Sync, Pink, Eminem - all of those contrived and promoted to do away with bodily reminders of the Black origins of American pop pleasure. Soul culture succinctly describes the folkwasy African Americans concoted in the desegregating American of hte 50s and 60s as the civil rights movement was on the ascendency. Post-Soul is how George describes the African-American culture that emerged out of hte novel social, economic, and political circumstances of the 60s. Post soul would include plays of Ntozake Shange, the novles of Gayl Jones, the films of Spike Lee, the music of Fishbone, songs and cosmetic surgery of Michael Jackson, art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and post-modern expression par excellence, hip-hop.
Everything but the burden edited by Greg Tate