I ripped off the hed from Eric Arnold's reviewof Angry Black White Boy (Crown/Three Rivers Press), the new novel by Adam Mansbach - Berkeley resident, novelist, poet, and arts writer (for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, among other things.
According to Arnold, Mansbach's novel is a portrait of "a confused yet proud individual searching for his own place within the larger confines of American society. Here's the twist: Unlike Richard Wright's famous Native Son character, Detornay is white."
Mansbach explains: "Fundamentally, I agree with the notion that people are so reluctant to talk about race that you have to push them hard on it...You gotta kick 'em in the ass. You can't really be too subtle. You gotta really just come with it."
If you interested in the subject - and you should be - Mansbach explored the efforts of hip-hop's intellectual pioneers in the June 25, 2003 SFGate.com, using Eminem as the foil. His thoughts are worth considering, and besides, he references Jeff Chang's terrific new book, Can't Stop Won't Stop (he must've gotten a way advance copy, since the book only dropped a couple of months ago).
"Our generation is a different breed, intellectually," says Jeff Chang. "We've grown up with multiculturalism, grown up in a world where pop culture has always mediated how we analyze the world. We're not afraid of the media anymore; there's a constant dialogue in hip-hop about the gaps between our reality and the ways we're represented. We're naturally interdisciplinary; we mix signifiers, we break everything down to bits and bytes and rebuild something new."
Chang - who wrote a column for me at the Bay Guardian for several years - is winding up a book tour that played like a hip-hop thre-ring circus. Along those lines, he rolled through our L.A. hipster loft space last night with Lee Balliger from Rock and Rap Confidential and his friend Carvel (and if anyone knows how to reach Balliger, ask him to ask his son to email me some Prince info. Thanks...).
