Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos
Subtitle: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture
Publisher: Perennial
Published: February 1994
Language: eng
Number of pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780060922016
First sentence: If you ask anyone who is not black, not under 20, and not a resident of Harlem or the South Bronx who started the rapping deejay style, they will undoubtedly cite the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight."
Description: From the author of The Death of Rhythm & Blues and Elevating the Game comes a volume of social commentary that rockets through the last two turbulent, audacious, angry, energetic decades of Black urban culture to form the definitive take on contemporary African American life. In Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos, Nelson George chronicles the saga of post-soul culture, which, he believes, hinges on the aesthetic metamorphosis of two important movements - hip hop music and Black film - and gives shape and voice to the four African American character types of the book's title that have emerged from the fallout of desegregation and have been crucial in redefining this country over the last twenty years. In this first collection of essays, George covers music, film, sports, publishing, politics, and city life uptown and down.^

He ponders the first unheralded dis-chords and gritty, aural graffiti of today's B-boy rappers, and the powerful message-laden music of Tracy Chapman; the thematic films of Spike Lee; the Brooklyn-beginnings of Willie Randolph; the novels of Toni Morrison; the Supreme Court appointment of Clarence Thomas; the politics of Al Sharpton; and much more. With moving personal strokes, he also paints everyday life in the Black community: the tragic and questionable murder of a promising Harlem youth by a white police officer; the issue of light versus dark skin; the indignities and humiliations experienced daily by Black men in today's society. Virtually every aspect of Black urban America is explored in these pages as he introduces roisterous rappers and legendary hoopsters, streetwise hustlers and influential filmmakers, unsung session men of the Motown sound and crack dealers.^

Few are better placed to sum up the last twenty charged years than Nelson George, who reports from the front lines of Black urban culture in his long-standing and widely-acclaimed Village Voice column, "Native Son," and whose sharp commentary has won him national recognition as one of the country's most insightful journalists on African American issues. The result of this richly rewarding body of work, written with snap and verve, is a thoughtful, incisive, critical history of the monumental changes and transitions in the era he dubs "Post-Soul Culture."