Never Drank the Kool-Aid: Essays

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More About This Book

Overview

His name is Touré—just Touré—and like many of the musicians, athletes, and celebrities he's profiled, he has affected the way that we think about culture in America. He has profiled Eminem, 50 Cent, and Alicia Keys for the cover of Rolling Stone. He's played high-stakes poker with Jay-Z and basketball with Prince and Wynton Marsalis. In Touré's world, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. sits beside Condoleezza Rice who sits beside hip-hop pioneer Tupac Shakur, and all of them are fascinating company.

Never Drank the Kool-Aid is the chronicle of Touré's unparalleled journey through the American funhouse called pop culture. Its rooms are filled with creative, arrogant, kind, ordinary, and extraordinary people, most of whom happen to be famous. It is Touré's gift to be able to see through the artifice of their world and understand the genuine motivations behind their achievements—to see who they truly are as people. This is a searingly funny, surprisingly unguarded, and deeply insightful look at a world few of us comprehend.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In a varied collection of lucid, colorful pieces, journalist Toure, author of the novel Soul City and the story collection The Portable Promised Land, takes readers from the inner sanctum of Prince's Paisley Park to Jennifer Capriati's practice court, Lauryn Hill's Christmas party and beyond. Deftly organized by theme, the book comprises mainly magazine articles dating from 2005 to the mid-'90s, and its title refers to the author's insistence that he never bought into the philosophies of the people he profiled but rather aimed "to understand who they were beyond the image they want us to think they were." He succeeds with meteoric personalities, like Eminem and Al Sharpton, and with people like junior-tennis phenom and eventual professional bust Al Parker Jr. Toure has a knack for putting his subjects at ease, and he blends their intriguing candor with apt observations on the nature of their careers. He describes his own place in events without overshadowing the story itself. He's just interested in bringing us along for the ride, even if that means sitting shotgun while DMX pulls a full-speed 180 in a Cadillac Escalade on Sunset Boulevard. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Collected dispatches of the de Tocqueville of the Hip-Hop Nation. Journalist Toure's (Rolling Stone; the New Yorker) impassioned, insightful and stylish articles on hip-hop make up the bulk of these collected pieces, and their cumulative effect is staggering; Toure employs his sly voice, clear sense of mission and novelist's eye for the telling detail to elevate his profiles and interviews above conventional celebrity journalism, creating a political and personal manifesto that is provocative and deeply felt. As the author grapples with hip-hop's place in American culture and his own complicated responses to it, his subjects come to startling life: Embattled rapper 50 Cent's girlfriend proudly displays their young child's pint-sized, bullet-proof vest; genial MC DMX casually recalls the time he stabbed a first-grade classmate in the face; fearsome record exec Suge Knight decorates his offices with framed portraits of Lucille Ball and Elvis Presley; and soul diva Alicia Keys confesses her painfully conflicted reaction to post-9/11 patriotism. Fascinating bits of off-the-cuff sociology abound: The author compares rap collectives such as the Wu-Tang Clan and the Junior M.A.F.I.A. to traditional African family structures; the plight of the gay rapper is frankly addressed; graffiti artists play cat-and-mouse with authorities in the pursuit of their ephemeral art. To lighten the mood, Toure takes on Prince and Wynton Marsalis in one-on-one games of basketball, and the doyens have rarely come off so likable and human. Venturing beyond black popular music, Toure proves equally adept at limning compelling portraits of tennis players, race-car drivers and Ivy League counterfeiters. Toure includes asearing personal essay, What's Inside You, Brother? (tapped for The Best American Essays 1996), near the end of the book; it's a tour-de-force of punishing, articulate introspection that clarifies and deepens the searching tone of the preceding work. Like his subjects, Toure occasionally indulges in boastful self-mythologizing-the book's title is a testament to his incorruptibility, and a piece on his bad-boy sexual exploits seems ill-considered. Still, this is a wholly involving and piercingly intelligent examination of contemporary popular culture.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780312425784
  • Publisher: Picador
  • Publication date: 2/21/2006
  • Edition description: First Edition
  • Pages: 416
  • Sales rank: 310,846
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 0.92 (d)

Meet the Author

Touré is the author of the novel Soul City and the story collection The Portable Promised Land. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, his writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Tennis Magazine, The Best American Essays, and Da Capo Best American Music Writing, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

1 I'm Audi
It was a wonderful world (Biggie Smalls) 15
2 Sensitive thugs
The family man (Eminem) 21
The life of a hunted man (50 Cent) 34
DMX drives crazy, but he loves you 44
I'm scared to death, but I gotta live (Biggie Smalls) 54
The toughest record exec ever (Dick Griffey) 59
3 Big Willies
Best rapper alive (Puff Daddy) 75
Hiphop's biggest kid grows up (Russell Simmons) 80
The power of radio (Andre Harrell) 93
Al Sharpton has a dream 96
Ships passing in the night (Barack Obama and Colin Powell) 111
4 Icaruses
Invincible man (Tupac) 117
The Ivy League counterfeiter (Cliff Evans) 125
The greatest tennis player you've never heard of (Al Parker, Jr.) 136
Inherit the wind (Dale Earnhardt, Jr.) 150
The mystery of Lauryn Hill 160
5 Almost famous
A woman possessed (Beyonce) 173
The next queen of soul (Alicia Keys) 183
Lauryn in love (Lauryn Hill) 195
D'Angelo is holding your hand 206
Kurt is my copilot (Dale Earnhardt, Jr.) 216
6 Get up, get out, and get involved
Jay-Z has got guts 233
Do you like my Jesus piece (Kanye West) 241
You can call him Prince 248
Wynton Marsalis wants to kick your ass 270
Just Jen (Jennifer Capriati) 283
7 Microphone fiend
"Crack is responsible for hiphop" (Ahmir Thompson, aka ?uestlove) 297
8 Strange fruit
Condoleeza Rice is a house Negro 317
Show me the money (Michael Jordan) 321
The five-mic personality, or why I hate Mary J. Blige 325
9 Somehow, there's love in the hiphop nation
I live in the hiphop nation 333
Love your Niggas 339
Are gay rappers too real for hiphop? (Caushun) 345
Hiphop familigia (Junior M.A.F.I.A. and the Wu-Tang Clan) 350
No drinks in '96! (Funkmaster Flex) 355
10 Boys will be boys
Trainspotting 361
Night moves 364
Bling-bling makes the dictionary! 366
An invitation to carnal Russian roulette or memoirs of a sexual desperado 368
11 Who do you think you are?
What's inside you, brother? 377
A funky fresh talented tenth 386
The blackest tennis club in the world 389
12 I can't take it
At Jam Master Jay's funeral 401

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