As they wanna be

Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies

Brian Coleman ’92

(Villard Books/Random House, 2007)

Music writer Brian Coleman says he always wondered why the greatest hip-hop recordings have not come with liner notes, and he makes up for the lacuna here with help from his friends—about 75 of the most famous and infamous rappers. Coleman writes not so much as a critic, although he has all the tools, but as a hard-core fan, who once hosted a WZBC music show and is otherwise a proper public relations officer at Timberland in New Hampshire. Even at 500 pages, the book is a lightning-fast read, flush with stories about 36 “immortal” hip-hop albums, including titles—such as Firing Squad by M.O.P. and As Nasty as They Wanna Be by 2 Live Crew—that readers who are not hard-core fans might recognize. He interviews and profiles rappers like Ice-T, who, during an earlier career, made a small fortune as a burglar in Los Angeles, and who takes credit for telling Madonna to “show more cleavage” when he was a stage manager of an L.A. nightclub in 1984–85. (Coleman refers to a “not-yet-famous” Madonna, but she was, inconveniently, famous by then.) Writing expressly for “hip-hop junkies,” Coleman does not try to explain this genre to people like me, whose only passionate thoughts about many of these tracks would be how to keep them away from my kids. But he does let the artists defend themselves, and occasionally hang themselves, as when 2 Live Crew’s “Luke,” as he is known, says (“very seriously,” the author interjects) that he and his bandmates never had to worry about going to jail for rape because “the girls pretty much knew” what would happen to them once they entered the hotel room. Luke was telling the story behind one song with a four-letter word in the title, a telling that, for a moment, seemed to make off with the meaning of the book’s sincere dedication—“To every hip-hop pioneer in this book, for never raising your hand and asking for permission.”

By nature

The Wild Horses of Shackelford Banks

Carmine Prioli, MA’71

(John F. Blair Publisher, 2007)

On the breathtaking barrier island of Shackelford Banks, off the coast of North Carolina, pony-sized horses roam freely along the nine-mile swath of shoreline. For 400 years or longer, the breed has survived the droughts and hurricanes that made the island an unruly habitat for humans; in 1986, the equines took over Shackelford, under a federal wildlife plan. Today, people can ferry across to the island and visit the horses, but they must leave their four-wheelers behind and otherwise submit to the discipline of National Park Service “horse-watching programs.” The Shackelford ponies have an able chronicler in Carmine Prioli, a professor and director of graduate programs in the English department at North Carolina State University. Together with photographer Scott Taylor, Prioli illuminates the modern-day paradox of “wildlife management” in this account of the roughly 130 horses now living on-island. They are, Prioli says, one of the “wildest and most controlled animal populations on earth.” Prioli writes about scientists who manipulate the conditions in which the horses are born, acquire social status, forage for food, survive hurricanes, and die—guarding, for instance, the local ecology. He delves into mysteries, like where the horses came from (legend has it they escaped Spanish shipwrecks in the 1500s, though they’re more likely the offspring of domesticated animals brought over later by the English), and how they’ve survived all those hurricanes (they’re good at riding out storms in the island’s dense forests, for one thing). Prioli also takes up the question of whether these feral creatures are truly wild. A strict-constructionist minority of ecologists believes that as descendants of domesticated animals, these horses have no business reigning over Shackelford, one of the few wilderness preserves left in the American Southeast. Prioli himself grazes comfortably on the wilderness-management paradox, sympathetically reporting on a contraceptive program at the Park Service that aims to “prevent the birth of foals that would not enhance the herd’s gene pool,” while arguing convincingly that “on a day-to-day basis” the ponies “could not be more wild.” “With only rare exceptions,” he writes, “rescuing a stranded foal, for instance, or euthanizing a hopelessly injured animal, Shackelford’s horses live and die without human interference.”

By nurture

Northborough in the Civil War: Citizen Soldiering and Sacrifice

Robert P. Ellis, MA’62

(The History Press, 2007)

Glimpses of Medford: Selections from the Historical Register

Barbara Kerr ’83, editor

(The History Press, 2007)

On a trip to Charleston this past summer, I sought out a “walking history tour” given by a guide whose brochure flashes a quote from the New York Times calling him “refreshingly candid and provocatively Southern.” That he was. Taking us through the narrow, cobblestone streets, and past the manicured gardens and pastel-colored houses of the city’s historic district, this middle-aged, well-dressed gentleman treated us to editorials like, “Freeing the slaves had nothing to do with the North’s interest in fighting the Civil War. Absolutely nothing.” Soon after I returned home, Robert P. Ellis’s book landed on my desk, reminding me that our guide, on this point, could have been charitably described as “politically incorrect,” and possibly without the leavening of the adverb. Telling a more tempered story, Ellis, a Worcester State College emeritus professor of English, chronicles the Civil War–era happenings of Northborough, a small town in the center of Massachusetts. By way of introduction, he floats the question of whether small New England towns played an outsized role in turning the Civil War’s purpose from quelling internal rebellion to emancipating African-American slaves, but does not dwell on this question in the chapters that unfold. Instead, through his accounts of Northborough’s soldiers, preachers, housewives, and others, he gives us Northerners who in 1860, when South Carolina seceded and other states threatened to do so, did look upon themselves primarily as patriots responding to the threat of disunion, as my guide said; but many eventually came to “see the struggle metamorphosing into a war against slavery,” says Ellis. Northborough sent more than half of its approximately 750 sons into battle, ultimately for an emancipation that was not formally proclaimed until mid-war. “Twice as many Northborough soldiers died in those four years as perished in all subsequent wars,” Ellis reports (though an overall figure was apparently hard to come by). “Villagers who worked on farms and in small shops were suddenly playing their parts in a stark drama whose denouement no author had written and no participant could foresee.” Local histories are naturally of interest, most of all, to the locals, but Ellis’s work shows how an account of a single community can help keep the grand narrative on track (and tour guides honest).

In Glimpses of Medford, Medford Public Library assistant director Barbara Kerr pieces together a history of another small community even closer to Boston, and after a brief, elegant introduction, a panegyric to “long-ago Medford,” she lets the townsfolk speak for themselves. All of the items in this lively collection are from the Medford Historical Register, which was published quarterly from 1898 to 1940, and all of the articles, stories, and reminiscences were written by amateur historians. Having just read Ellis, the first selection I turned to was about Medford’s slaveholders, written by homegrown historian Walter H. Cushing in 1900. After relating some vital statistics from old records, he writes of how slavery in Medford began to wane around the time of the Revolutionary War. “Not that our ancestors believed [slavery] wrong,” Cushing is quick to clarify, but slaveholding came to be judged “economically unprofitable.” On that critical point of moral principle, it seems that some New Englanders, at least, had a terribly long way to go.

William Bole

William Bole is a writer based in Massachusetts. A list of recently published books by alumni, students, and faculty is maintained at bcm.bc.edu/readerslist. Publishing houses and authors are invited to send books or book announcements to the editors.

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