MOVERS AND SHAKERS.('Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music')(Book Review)

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 the sad, lost gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur, who was killed in 1996--a death that some dismissed as just another deal in the business of show called boogaloo.

What Clinton "showed" with "Up for the Downstroke" and subsequent records, and what made him a pivotal figure in the history of rhythm and blues, was his ability to make the genre relevant in a world then consumed by disco and rock. Clinton produced his own records, and the song's distinctive hook and over-all construction, with "jazzy time changes and horn figures, pitch-perfect jingles and tone-deft atmospherics," were an amalgamation of several black musical motifs. A historian of the dance floor, Clinton borrowed from James Brown's principle that musicians could build a panoply of sound around a single strong, consistent beat (Brown called it "the one"). To that, Clinton added witty free-form lyrics and rhymes that owed a lot to Sun Ra's "arkestrations." He steered boogaloo away from the blues' devastating stories about black heartache, and turned up its funk quotient.

But Clinton's most lasting contribution was to mix and record boogaloo with a level of technical sophistication heard generally only in recordings by white rock groups such as Queen and Kiss. (Clinton went on to produce the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among other white acts.) Before Clinton, a great deal of boogaloo's force came from the way it was recorded: in the most rudimentary manner possible, the better to retain its "primal" quality, or blackness. By mixing the raw and the cooked, Clinton came up with a stew that acknowledged boogaloo's past while presaging its future. He was the bridge between the funky honkings heard on Jim Stewart, Estelle Axton, and Al Bell's Memphis-based Stax recordings in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, which featured such indispensable artists as Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, and Isaac Hayes--a boys' club of lonely and jubilant warbling--and the chic, postmodern, rap-influenced aural-verite heard on albums by artists such as OutKast, Jill Scott, and De La Soul today.

Another important ingredient in rhythm and blues, after "the one," is the tension between the religious and the secular: the soul longs for release from this mortal coil--specifically, from the pain of racial prejudice and perpetual economic insolvency--and at the same time the flesh longs for a more immediate physical release. Kempton reveals this tension in his excellent portrait of Thomas Dorsey. The son of a onetime minister, ...