Stanley Crouch "The All-American Skin Game, or Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990-1994."
Always brilliant, ever-controversial, and very often surprising, Stanley Crouch offers trenchant essays on topics including jazz (he was for many years the jazz critic for the Village Voice), American literature, gangsta rap, modern American films and the issue of race.
Crouch may startle with some of his opinions, but the clarity of his prose and the intelligence of his arguments ensure that the reader will understand why he holds his outspoken opinions.
In this collection of essays long and short, the hugely controversial critic and author of "Notes of a Hanging Judge" gives us a refreshingly iconoclastic view of race in American culture and society. Whether Crouch is writing about the U.S. Constitution as blues, or jazz (Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis), he is always incisive and provocative.
In speeches, essays and reviews from publications like the New Republic, Crouch offers eloquent, pungent takes on racial politics, literature, film and music. The author made his name as a jazz critic, and he invokes jazz to proclaim that our society's "multiple miscegenations" are proof and source of enduring vitality and renewal. Thus, he has no truck with racial balkanizers or those who claim rapsters as the soul of black authenticity.
Hardcover, 1995.
New book. Very minor shelf wear from rubbing.