The Grey Album

"It's the perfect combination of remembrance and cultural critique."—Wesley Morris, Slate

"Equal parts blues shout, church sermon, interpretive dance, TED talk, lit-crit manifesto and mixtape, the poet Kevin Young's first nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, is an ambitious blast of fact and feeling, a nervy piece of performance art . . . The book, which takes its title from Danger Mouse's mash-up of the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album, is its own kind of collage. It rummages around in the work of African-American writers and musicians—from Bessie Smith and Langston Hughes to Lauryn Hill and Colson Whitehead—and makes a series of sly arguments for black art's centrality in American culture writ large . . . [Young], who was born in Lincoln, Neb., in 1970—he got his B.A. from Harvard and his M.F.A. from Brown—moves easily from humor to bleaker, more complex material . . . He's a deft reader of the artists themselves, and a committed sampler of other people's work. I'd guess that fully one-quarter of the words in The Grey Album aren't his own. He mixes and matches quotations well; it's one of this book's joys . . . The Grey Album is most lovely, I think, in the acknowledgment Mr. Young gives to the writers and musicians whose work nourished him. He'll have you rushing to read the improvisational poet Bob Kaufman, to cook from Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking or to listen to Jimi Hendrix's 'Star-Spangled Banner' or N.W.A.'s 'Straight Outta Compton' with fresh ears. I kept notes in the margins with the titles of at least a dozen songs—from the blues to rap—that I'll want to download. He puts buzz in your brain . . . This book is the work of a man who, correctly, calls himself 'a poet and a collector and now a curator,' one devoted to saving 'what we didn't even know needed saving.' The Grey Album, warts and all, is a rallying cry."—Dwight Gardner, The New York Times