Imatge de l'autor
5 obres 274 Membres 7 Ressenyes 1 preferits

Sobre l'autor

Ben Westhoff is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vice, Pitchfork, and the Wall Street Journal. He spent three years as the Music Editor at L.A. Weekly, and is the author of Dirty South; Outkast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who mostra'n més Reinvented Hip-Hop. mostra'n menys
Crèdit de la imatge: Ben Westhoff

Obres de Ben Westhoff

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Coneixement comú

Altres noms
WESTHOFF, Ben
Data de naixement
20th Century
Gènere
male
Nacionalitat
USA
Lloc de naixement
Waterloo, Iowa, USA

Membres

Ressenyes

Decent, if you haven't read much about the opioid crisis in the US. The author does get repetitive, especially about China and the chemicals/drugs that come from there.
 
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pacbox | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | Jul 9, 2022 |
I feel like the author's intent was more about himself and his big white guilt than it was about the life of Jorell Cleveland, who lived in Ferguson, MO, where Michael Brown was killed. Jorell and Ben met through the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, and it worked very well while Jorell was a little kid, not so much as he became a teen, joined a local street gang and became fascinated with handguns. Perhaps Ben should have seen the signs, or maybe he was powerless to prevent Jorell's turning to heroin and to petty beefs on the streets, but the worst part is that it almost seemed an inevitability. Maybe of Jorell's mom was in his life, or if his dad wasn't struggling to care for ten children, or if he had had a Black Big Brother, or a teacher who cared, it would have made a difference. So much for the theory that all it takes is one good adult to help a kid get to and stay on a happy path. Ben's need to discover who murdered Jorell seemed more self-serving than anything else - what good did it do for Jorell or his family? For a better book in this sad vein, I recommend The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs.

Quote: "Simply by virtue of being a white journalist, I was able to bring attention to Jorell's life."
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froxgirl | Jun 18, 2022 |
The very day I finished this book, I read that Death Row Records had just been sold to Hasbro. Technically, Hasbro bought the parent Entertainment One megacorp that counted Death Row as part of its portfolio, but it's fun to imagine telling Suge Knight 20 years ago that his record label that produced some of the all-time hip hop classics would one day be owned by a toy company. Whether hip hop will eventually loom the largest in historical memory depends on how exactly the demographics of musical canonization shake out in the future, but even though hip hop didn't come from the West Coast, it's that sound that will be the main argument that the genre deserves as much respect as any other style of 20th century music. Westhoff is a bona fide superfan of the genre - a white guy from the Midwest, naturally, that often-derided but crucial fan constituency - who made it his mission to show how exactly LA's music scene went from living in the shadow of New York to setting the standard for what hip hop should sound like, and even more crucially what it should mean to the audience. He succeeds wonderfully, and even though everyone involved in that scene is now hawking endorsements for a living (Snoop being the ultimate example of the transformation from wanted criminal to universally beloved pitchman), Westhoff shows how they became megastars by translating frustration, rage, and rebellion into art.

Westhoff mostly focuses on N.W.A. personnel (Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, DOC), along with Snoop, Tupac, and some East Coast figures (Biggie, Puff Daddy) who moved between the two coasts, and he provides lots of context behind the albums, so it vastly improves on entertainment products like 2015's Straight Outta Compton by connecting more dots and providing more answers (though the real best exploration of hip hop remains Fear of a Black Hat). As charming as it might be for some to see bits of trivia like the "Bye, Felicia!" scene, most of the real story of every musical group is in the business negotiations with lawyers, labels, distributors, and every other necessary parasite. Artists make music for fun and personal fulfillment, but you can't make more than an album or two without getting paid, and so the tension between the art and the commerce sides of the music industry is overlaid on all of the other well-known drugs/crime/violence issues that plagued the West Coast scene. This means the book overlaps more with 2017's The Defiant Ones, which focuses on Dre and producer Jimmy Iovine. Iovine in particular was crucial to the band's success, as shown for example by his marketing strategy for The Chronic's first single "Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang":

"We can't get it played on the radio," Jimmy Iovine said the radio guys told him.
"It's 'Satisfaction,'" he retorted.
"Radio doesn't think so. They think it's a bunch of black guys cursing who want to kill everybody."
Iovine decided to create a minute-long commercial, consisting of nothing but the song. "Don't say who it is, and buy it on fifty stations, drive time. I want the program directors to hear it in their cars."

There are many interesting counterfactuals that Westhoff proposes:

"Daily Beast writer Rich Goldstein pointed out that 1988 was a huge year for record sales, led by George Michael's Faith and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, each of which sold over ten million copies. In those pre-internet days, there weren't very many places to hear about new music, and not many places to buy it. All of N.W.A's publicity was great, but that didn't matter if you couldn't actually consume their songs. "Had Straight Outta Compton been played on MTV, listened to on the radio, and been available for purchase in big-box retailers like Walmart, there is a good chance it would have eclipsed the Dirty Dancing soundtrack," Goldstein theorized."

And the saddest parts of the book are of course the discussions of the tragically brief and violent lives of many incredibly talented people, most notably Biggie and Tupac. All of the surviving members of N.W.A. lament how short their collaborative period was before it fell apart, and one can only imagine the works that they and the rest could have created if they hadn't hated each other:

"Tupac claimed to have directly influenced Biggie's style. "I used to tell the nigga, 'If you want to make your money you have to rap for the bitches. Do not rap for the niggas,'" he said. "The bitches will buy your records, and the niggas want what the bitches want." As proof that Biggie had heeded his advice, Tupac cited the difference between the aggressive "Party and Bullshit" and softer Ready to Die hits tracks "Big Poppa," which appealed more to the ladies. Soon as he buy that wine, I just creep up from behind / And ask what your interests are, who you be with?"

But as unfortunately truncated as many of their careers were, their surviving works are legendary, and books like Westhoff's are a testament to how brightly stars can shine in such a brief period.
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aaronarnold | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | May 11, 2021 |
Not just about fentanyl, this book is about new psychoactive substances (NPS) that have relatively swiftly come to dominate the drug trade, whether or not people know they're purchasing them, or even want to buy them in the first place. If you're frustrated at your inability to buy things for your home and everyday life that aren't made in China, know that the drug addicted among us are probably equally as frustrated.

This book is very exhaustive about how this happened, why this is happening, and goes into a lot of detail about every aspect of the situation: from users, to dealers, to policymakers. I think it's a very eye-opening look that might surprise those of us who aren't in to the drug scene, or last toked up so many years ago, back in the "good old days" when you didn't have to worry about getting sold something toxic from a chemical lab.

Harm reduction strategies will go a long way to undoing some of the damage, but what I wonder is how things like the decriminalization and statewide legalization campaigns in the US has done to lower synthetic cannabinoid usage, for example. Probably there wasn't enough data by the time this book was published. But I think that would go a long way to indicating whether or not an end to prohibition will help to pull the plug on a lot of the shady black market dealings. I mean, this problem is NOT going to go way under our current system. But if people can buy (heavily regulated and heavily taxed) their drugs without having to resort to the black market in the first place, then the black market will become a much less attractive option. I think that was alluded to in the mentions of many countries that aren't experiencing issues, because even the black market knows they can't get away with selling shitty stepped-on crap in certain areas.

I'm tired of public policy officials shrugging their shoulders and just pouring more money into our OBVIOUSLY failed "war on drugs"... something needs to change, and the longer it takes, the more people are going to die in the process.
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Marcat
lemontwist | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | Apr 7, 2021 |

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Obres
5
Membres
274
Popularitat
#84,603
Valoració
3.8
Ressenyes
7
ISBN
37
Llengües
2
Preferit
1

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