The Cooke chapter is the book's long, effective centerpiece. Though most of the research for Boogaloo is secondary -- the Cooke section draws heavily on Daniel Wolff's Cooke biography -- Kempton talks about the music, parsing songs like A Change Is Gonna Come. And he also acts as a general analyst of the race-and-class game, sometimes assuming knowledge (apparently without having conducted many interviews) of a particular person's deep psychology. This is a perilous game, but Kempton plays it with gusto.
Kempton tends to construct boa-constrictor sentences with pile-up metaphors. (Parts of the book were adapted from articles written for The New York Review of Books; the author is the son of the journalist Murray Kempton, who wrote about politicians like an art critic, often for the same publication.) And at times his writing turns sophistic, dancing in obscure circles of logic. "Once Cooke knew that white people liked the abstraction of him that appeared on television," he writes, "he worked at composing his public surface into an abstaction of the qualities he thought they liked."
But in certain matters Kempton's overnuanced style is a blessing: He is great at pitting white reactions against black reactions to various kinds of black music. He describes the rock 'n' roll "caravan" shows that Cooke performed in during the late 1950s thus: "There was no use here for the skills admired here in the `deep,' gut-twisting singers of his former workplaces; these white kids had backward reactions, shrieking through the fast songs and sitting restively through the slow ones."
By the time he gets to Suge Knight, proprietor of Death Row, the story loses focus, growing cold and distant. The book becomes bogged down in details about Tupac Shakur's crime record and the general litigious atmosphere around Knight's outfit.
Although in earlier chapters Kempton writes so that you can hear the music, both as it played out in theaters and on a record, here he begins the information-bank plunge, citing New York Times articles about the white suburban hip-hop audience. Tellingly, he calls NWA's song **** tha Police a "song," in quotation marks, implying that he holds his nose with one hand while typing with the other. But he doesn't deal with the elements of NWA that made them so effective in the boogaloo business either, the fact that that song, irresponsible as it was, and miles away from Sam Cooke's natural and practiced brilliance, had, in fact, an incredible power.
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