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Summary
Summary
*Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism*
*A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Criticism and Essays Pick for Spring 2012*
The Grey Album, the first work of prose by the brilliant poet Kevin Young, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
Taking its title from Danger Mouse's pioneering mashup of Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' The White Album , Kevin Young's encyclopedic book combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical choruses to illustrate the African American tradition of lying--storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, "jazzing." What emerges is a persuasive argument for the many ways that African American culture is American culture, and for the centrality of art--and artfulness--to our daily life. Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.
Author Notes
Kevin Young is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Ardency and Jelly Roll: A Blues , a finalist for the National Book Award. He is a curator and the Atticus Haygood Professor at Emory University.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this elegant and informative study, poet and English professor, Young weaves a saga of African-American culture, in particular literature and music. Young moves through slave narratives and spirituals and beatniks and funk in a multifaceted yet coherent work comprising history, analysis, and theory. Young offers fresh, incisive assessments of myriad writers and musicians, performers all of the storytelling and counterfeiting conventions and traditions. He focuses on George Moses Horton, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Langston Hughes before shifting the focus to music, where his attention encompasses, among other genres, be-bop and hip-hop, the blues, and soul music. He includes unlikely figures throughout in this "story of what I read, heard, and saw at the crossroads of African American and American culture": Eliot, Pound, Picasso; the cakewalk, the quilt; the Rolling Stones. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Young (Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, 2011) is an incandescently innovative poet and a self-described collector and curator profoundly inspired by music (from spirituals to the blues, bebop, funk, and hip-hop), African American history, popular culture, and literature (Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker). In his first prose book, an expansive and radiantly interpretive exploration of black creativity, he proves to be an exceptionally fluent, evocative, deep-diving, and bracing critic. Young's intention is to spotlight the centrality of black people to the American experience, to the dream of America, and his unifying theme is the notion of lying the artful dodge and storying, the black codes and fictions African Americans use to escape and deflect racist reality. From the black trickster tradition to comedian Bert Williams, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman (the black Rimbaud ), Charlie Parker, James Brown, Danger Mouse (the source of the book's title), and many other artists, Young reads, listens, and observes with acute, questing attention, following underground railroads of meaning and tracing artistic lineages and bursts of fresh invention. As intricate and ingenious as his critiques are, Young is confiding, poignant, appreciative, witty, and poetic: I don't mean to taxonomize but to rhapsodize. Take it from me mean mean mean to be free. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FROM the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched. Slave bodies lied to their masters. Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal. The trickster was born. In his new work of literary and cultural criticism, "The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness," the accomplished poet Kevin Young unearths, orchestrates, improvises and imagines lies and more lies - in short, American history. Young places the trickster near the axis of black American culture. "A tradition of counterfeit and fiction, of storying," he writes, "has just as much place in African-American letters as our rituals of church or prayer or music." Separated from their families, blacks created a communal story from fragments. Condescended to, suppressed, effaced, ripped off and covered, black artists have resorted throughout American history to subversive styles of artistic expression largely revolving around the "trickster" as mask and music. How much of Young the Author is in the trickster tradition? He's escaping even as he's explaining. "The desire to escape America is as American as you can get," a friend warns him. One rides Young's groove from slavery to hip-hop, a line that looks like this: the slave poet Phillis Wheatley, whose authorship had to be proved by white "experts" before her book could be published; another slave poet, George Moses Horton, who sold his poetry in thwarted attempts to buy his own freedom; the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, in whom Young sees "modernism's not-so-modest beginnings"; Zora Neale Hurston, who "collected 'lies' as a folklorist but lied just to get by"; Robert Johnson, evoked via W.E.B. Du Bois's description of "two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder"; Louis Armstrong ("entertainer is no less a mask than cool is for those who came later"); bebop, which Young sees as the early flowering of a "postmodern black aesthetic"; the obscured Beat poet Bob Kaufman ("anonymity is not indeterminacy, but rather, namelessness as a state of grace, an acceptance of being part of the unnameable universe"); Otis Redding, who reverse-engineered the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," laying bare its black influences; Jimi Hendrix, who commandeered the national anthem, turning it into a "benediction"; Afrika Bambaataa, sampler of Kraftwerk, who "renamed himself in order to craft something interplanetary, his earlier identity erased so effectively few if any know it"; Lauryn Hill, whose "Miseducation" album represents "the possibilities of a post-soul aesthetic"; Jay-Z ("the maker as mogul, translating the street game to the corporate one - and making this somehow the stuff of realness"); N.W.A., following in the Jamaican and African-American tradition of "bragging and hyperbole as a form of critique"; Danger Mouse, the D.J. who merged the vocals from Jay-Z's "Black Album" with the unlicensed beats from the Beatles' "White Album" to create his own illicit "Grey Album," which gives Young's book its name. What does the trickster-curator want? For one thing, to overthrow the literary executor of black writing. To Young, white critics who read slave narratives "simply in terms of authenticity do two quite damaging things: first, they read (white) skepticism back into the slave's writing and thus limit the 'freedom' of black authorship; second, they ignore or downplay the African-American trickster tradition, itself related to black rhetorical strategies like lying." It is not just creation per se but specifically creation of the counterfeit that "provides a means of black acquisition of authority (even as so-called authenticity is called into question)." The figure in the carpet is "the notion of lying - the artful dodge, faking it till you make it - the forging of black lives and selves in all their forms." This lying can manifest in the "storying" of Hurston, "the 'lies' black folks tell to amuse themselves and to explain their origins," or in "counterfeiting," a term Young uses to "discuss ways in which black writers create their own authority in order to craft their own, alternative system of literary currency and value, so to speak, functioning both within and without the dominant, supposed gold-standard system of American culture. . . . For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie - forging an identity, 'making' one, but 'lying' about one too." Young is "interested in the ways in which black folks use fiction in its various forms to free themselves from the bounds of fact." The problem is, one reads the scholarship and misses the party. A potentially incendiary throw-down gets lost in a redundancy of too-long, too-close readings. Black life has taught America how revolutionary pleasure is against the capitalism of the Pilgrim, the plantation and plagiarism. "Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain," Young argues. "Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous." The historical remix is in session. Do you hear the thrumming bass line? A core conviction of the book is "the centrality of black people to the American experience, to the dream of America." Young understands that language is a weapon and that black self-defense necessitates a radical reimagining of the English language. "We are, after all, not immigrants but imports to this experiment America, lending not just everyday artifice to our experience in English but true violence" - dismembering and reassembling the master narrative. To complete the remix, Young needs to remake modernism and postmodernism. He nominates the blues as a fount of modernist artistic impulses, and he promotes James Weldon Johnson's "Book of American Negro Poetry" as a gathering that "should be thought of as one of the heights of modernism." Young wonders if the "it" in Ezra Pound's dictum "Make it new" might refer not to "tradition but the Negro." "White folks projected back onto blacks the kind of pastiche or 'blank copy' that Fredric Jameson saw as one of the fundamental qualities of postmodernism - a full century before the idea took hold. In this, those of us in the postmodern era may glimpse a fascinating, racialized aspect of the postmodern - its possible black origins." Young wants what everybody else wants. He wants the zeitgeist (the stealth-made man's moment is now). He wants it all. The party is on, but it's deadly serious. The curatorial trickster claims American language as black music. "At our peril we ignore the fact that black vernacular, like the blues, both has a form and performs. . . . For just as there would be no American music without black folks, there would be very little of our American language." The mask drops; Young exercises power. "It is black culture that is the dominant culture. English broken here." This Young is a musician with muscle. The story could be called "How Blacks Invented America." In the end, the trickster's desire isn't to replace white America (which, after all, the trickster's black America helped construct), but instead to remix the destroyed dream of integration as panacea and say, as Dr. King said, "I must confess that I am not afraid of the word 'tension.'" Did I dream this book or did it just kill me and the dream? America is built on the tension between black and white. "The Grey Album" is angular scholarship for whites, a storying songbook for blacks. Who is the liar, who the thief, who is telling whose history, and who is keeping score? Young forces us to contemplate who controls the music. Black life has taught America that 'pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.' David Shields's new book, "Jeff, One Lonely Guy," written with Jeff Ragsdale and Michael Logan, has just been published.
Kirkus Review
Jelly Roll, 2003, etc.) and academic (Atticus Haygood Professor/Emory Univ.), takes nearly 400 overstuffed pages to arrive at a two-page consideration of the titular Danger Mouse mashup of Jay-Z and the Beatles. Many readers may be enervated by then. Young uses "storying"--the "lies" spun by black artists to form their personal and artistic identities--as the purported foundation for his sprawling tome, which stretches from the post-slavery 19th century to the rap era. Writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and poets--especially Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Bob Kaufman--are the focus in the early going, though prewar blues and such performers as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday also figure prominently. Young's shotgun methodology and his propensity for pointless riffing and overwrought observation obscure any thread that might keep readers in touch with his supposed theme. The writing becomes a farrago of unfocused research, leaden academic language, incongruous snippets of autobiography and excruciatingly contorted textual readings. Even his most personal and thoughtful chapter, about Beat master Kaufman, manages to dilute the poet's crackling musicality. In later chapters, the author makes a case for postwar African-American music--bebop, soul, the free-swinging rock of Jimi Hendrix, disco, hip-hop--as foundational postmodernism. Though he manages to drop sharp, highly personalized science about the import of rap artists like Run-DMC, Public Enemy and NWA, his explications are so fatiguing that readers will lose patience before Young closes his argument. Young strives for encyclopedic scope, but the narrative is ultimately shapeless. An imaginary textbook for a daunting Black Studies course that very few students would want to take for credit.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.