Black Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement

Black Power Music! is a boldly conceived, brilliantly executed, and surpassingly timely volume that eloquently explains how Black Power Music was able to reconstitute African American culture in the decade 1965 - 1975. Professor Rabaka's originality in using ideas from disciplines traditionally kept apart enables him to find the consilience that binds these disciplines together vis-à-vis black power music, to succeed where others have not. The volume's ambitious thesis is as compelling as it is clear, and the discussion of the cultural and intellectual politics of sex and gender in Chapters 4 and 5 ought to be required reading in many disciplines.

 John Michael Cooper, Southwestern University, USA

Black Power Music! is a cogent studied of the connections between the Black Power Movement and Black popular music of the 1960s and 1970s. Taking a cue from Black Power and Black Arts participants themselves, it successfully argues that much of that music was an integral part of Black Power. While that argument has been made previously, never before have the material links between Black power and Black popular music been studied in such detail.

James Smethurst, W.E.B. Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst