Scrappy kids dive into public pools and hit line drives with broken bats. The parade is coming all night, blowing up dust in the crossroads, churning with music, mad for music, swearing “I Would Die 4 U,” grinning just a little so the initiated will feel the love burning like Jimi’s guitar at Monterey. Sitting on that float decorated with bombed churches and flogged backs, baseball bats and basketballs, Fishbone records and railroad tracks, are Lead Belly and Howlin’ Wolf playing dusty blues for Big Pun. Especially one with such good music - the poems in “Brown” dance through bebop and into James Brown’s megafunk. Kevin Young’s necessary new book of witness creates a parade through time, and I love a parade. Luis Alberto Urrea did such a fine job capturing this book in his 2018 New York Times review, that…well…why should I even try?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |