Crossovers Book

1CA Change is Gonna Come 1D is a hugely ambitious attempt to explore the roots of Black music in America (from the blues to hip-hop), the political conditions this music emerged from, and how that music went on to influence political organisations like the Civil Rights Movement.

The goal of the author Craig Werner, Professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin, is to cover all of the "moments of resistance, celebration, (and) joy" that have reverberated through black music across the last 50 years. It is a hugely comprehensive study of how race and protest have driven the music of the last half century. This means 1CA Change is Gonna Come 1D sweeps in everything from civil rights and the Vietnam War through to the Aids epidemic and Bill Clinton 19s triangulations; and, in musical terms, it encompasses everything from Sam Cooke and Sly Stone, on to Curtis Mayfield and Bob Marley, through to Public Enemy and the conscious hip-hop of the 1990s.

The great joys in Werner 19s text are the unexpected tangents he drifts off on and the unlikely connections he makes; for example, his analysis of the black roots of such white artists as Bruce Springsteen and The Clash, and the debt that early hip-hop owes to Jamaican soundsystem culture.

While Werner is undoubtedly an adherent of the progressive left, he is not afraid to excoriate his own side. One of many surprising arguments he puts forward is how he believes the ham-fisted way that Affirmative Action was introduced ushered in the Presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Werner is also eager to critically re-evaluate genres previously left out of the traditional narrative about rock and politics. He describes how the much-reviled Disco scene of the late 1970s actually offered an arena where women, blacks and gays could feel a sense of freedom and unity.

1CA Change is Gonna Come 1D was originally published in 1998 and, as an analysis of the interchange between music and political activism, it has perhaps been surpassed by such works as Dorian Lynskey 19s 1C33 Revolutions per minute 1D. And, at times, this is quite a sad book, given how many of the political hopes of artists and activists alike for black empowerment remain unfulfilled, with much of their original idealism burnt out through a mixture of addiction, disillusionment or compromise. In effect, 1CA Change is Gonna Come 1D serves as an elegy for the lost dream of Martin Luther King.