Publisher's Weekly Review
The iconic music-and-dance television show that defined the look and moves of Black America gets a fond though unfocused retrospective in this nostalgic history. Music historian George (The Death of Rhythm and Blues) recounts Soul Train's run as a pioneering showcase for African-American music and pop culture, recalling the bell-bottoms, platform shoes, and planetary afros of its 1970s heyday, the on-set drama of ambitious young dancers jostling for camera time, and the show's centrality in the 'hood as a Saturday tele-ritual that inspired fashion and dance floor trends. The story loses steam as it chugs into the 1980s and 1990s, when crossover acts abandoned the show for whiter audiences, viewers departed for music-video channels, and producer/host Don Cornelius, once the epitome of cool with his elegant suits and suave baritone, fell behind the times in his estrangement from the hip-hop scene. George relies heavily on interviews from the eponymous VH1 documentary; some of these reminiscences, like Rosie Perez's exuberant recollection of dancing, are a hoot, but the narrative stalls during lengthy monologues, including four solid pages of Cornelius's congressional testimony against gangsta rap. Still, George captures some of the energy and creativity of black youth cult busting out of the ghetto. Photos. (March 25) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Music critic and novelist George (The Plot against Hip Hop, 2011) runs down the story of the barrier-breaking and hugely influential television show Soul Train, which for 35 years delivered love, peace, and soul to households everywhere in the form of hit songs, innovative dance moves, and freaky, fantastic fashions. Inspired by the civil rights movement, Chicago radio reporter turned television trailblazer Don Cornelius, whom George describes as the epitome of cool, boldly carved out the first mass-media space for black dance by black dancers presented by a black producer. In this lively, documentary-style biography of an instant hit show with remarkable draw and staying power (1971-2006), George considers Cornelius' complexities (he took his own life in 2012), recounts the appearances of stellar performers (James Brown, Patti LaBelle, Kurtis Blow), profiles the show's most memorable dancers (Damita Jo Freeman, Jeffrey Daniel, Jody Watley, Rosie Perez), and chronicles the launching of dance trends (locking, waaking, the electric boogaloo). George's swift ride through the decades of Soul Train is a kaleidoscopic trip through one of the brightest zones in the evolution of American culture.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN I WAS growing up in Chicago, there was no rowdier time in our house than Friday night, when my mother, my three siblings and I stayed up to watch "Red Hot and Blues" on Channel 26, Chicago's first UHF station. Part advertisement and part dance spectacle, it was our chance to celebrate the end of the week, listen and dance to our favorite R&B songs and howl at the cheesy commercials delivered by pitchmen selling used cars and ugly furniture: "You'll do well to see Dell's - Dell's Furniture." (Even hearing the voice was enough to send us all into fits of laughter.) Just as attractive as the music was the lineup of shabbily dressed kids from the West Side who gathered in front of the camera to dance - a great counterpart to us shabbily dressed kids from the South Side. The show was the highlight of our week. That show, started in 1967, was the precursor to a later version hosted by a young man named Don Cornelius. It wasn't long before he went national with a much more refined concept, the show that generations of us know as "Soul Train." Two recent books chart the rise of this African-American cultural phenomenon: "The Hippest Trip in America," by the filmmaker and cultural critic Nelson George, and "Soul Train," by Ahmir Thompson, known as Questlove, beloved of a generation of culturally conscious lovers of hip-hop as the drummer for the Roots (the house band on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon"). Both books are packed with reporting, not only on the rise of Don Cornelius and his vision of a stylish and beautiful African-American dance show, but also on the back story of dancers and musicians whose careers were built through what became the "Soul Train" brand. The difference is in sensibility. While George writes with the ease and credibility of a critic and journalist, Questlove writes with a fan's passion. George is at his best in uncovering hidden details of the politics and deal making that made Cornelius an early and unsung entrepreneur of black culture, as important as Berry Gordy. Though he gives only passing credit to "Red Hot and Blues" as an influence on Cornelius, he is very good at chronicling the support of Johnson Products, a black hair-care business, in helping "Soul Train" make the move from local hit to national phenomenon: "Johnson Products and Don initially hoped to expand the show to 24 cities, but the response was tepid. . . . 'We realized that that kind of experience and skill in terms of personnel were falling all over themselves in Los Angeles looking for work. . . . If you wanted to do "Soul Train" in a bigger way, you had to go to L.A.'" The move was part of what George refers to as a larger "media civil rights movement," which "led previously reluctant mainstream businesses to distribute black content, and banks to invest in products aimed at black consumers." He tells the story of a rival show, "Soul Unlimited," put together in 1973 by Dick Clark of "American Bandstand," and how it was short-circuited by black leaders like Jesse Jackson and one very well-connected black producer, Clarence Avant. The combination of these cultural and political stories, along with those of everyone from Jody Watley to Questlove himself (who earns an entire chapter as a "Soul Train" fanatic), makes "The Hippest Trip in America" the definitive book on "Soul Train." BY CONTRAST, QUESTLOVE has written a coming-of-age story with "Soul Train" as his muse and first love. His detailed, nearly obsessive knowledge of each episode allows him to isolate those shows with particular meaning for him, and permits us to glimpse his formative years growing up within a family of musicians. Charmingly divided into parts named after Cornelius's signoff line, "love, peace and soul," the book's structure allows Questlove to pay tribute to the "Soul Train" Line itself (you know you've danced on your own version of it at somebody's wedding) as well as the musicians who inspired him, the fashions that influenced his own style and the dancing that continually amazed him. Describing his response to the introduction of a Gladys Knight and the Pips video of "Save the Overtime (for Me)," Questlove writes: "When Don introduced the video, my 12-year-old self saw this as a chance to take a four-minute break and grab another bowl of Captain Crunch. The maniacal cries of my cousin Marquis had me rushing back to the TV before I could even reach the kitchen. 'They're spinning on their heads,' Marquis cried. 'The Pips are spinning on their heads.' . . . I missed the entire rest of the episode after running outside my grandmother's house to tell all of my friends what I just saw. . . . I was the little boy who cried 'break.'" In some ways, the subtitle of Questlove's delightful picture-laden book - "The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation" - is a misnomer. Many people of every generation who can still move are popping and locking and bumping to the music we first heard on "Soul Train." Just as my mom danced with all of us in the show's early days, my husband and I are dancing with our teenagers to the reruns, teaching them about old-school music and holding Don Cornelius in blessed memory. ROSEMARY BRAY MCNATT, the incoming president of Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif, is a former editor at the Book Review.
