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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the summer of 1974, after nearly twenty years of one-night stands, sluggish record sales, and the complications inherent in maintaining a variety of hair styles, George Clinton, a thirty-three-year-old former barber from Plainfield, New Jersey, scored a hit with his band, Parliament. The song, "Up for the Downstroke," had a hook that "embedded itself so deeply in the recipient generation of black young . . . that a quarter-century later suburban-bred scriptwriters of ESPN sports highlight shows still routinely enliven their copy with references to basketball players 'getting up for the downstroke,' " Arthur Kempton tells us in his moving, dense, and fascinating book, "Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music" (Pantheon; $27.50). In it, Kempton examines the lives and careers of rhythm-and-blues ("boogaloo") stars and star producers, beginning with Thomas A. Dorsey, an early-twentieth-century gospel-music pioneer and onetime advocate of the low-down; turning to Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records and the world's most successful black record producer from the late nineteen-fifties to the seventies; and ending with the rise and fall of...
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