Ready to hear the call of opportunity

City Kid

A Writer’s Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success

Nelson George

Viking: 248 pp., $25.95

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Nelson George is a true hyphenate -- journalist, music critic, cultural critic, filmmaker, novelist -- whose many endeavors have met with more or less equal success in his nearly 30-year career. George’s strong suit has always been putting his heart and personal convictions into his authorial voice, making potentially academic analyses of race and other matters accessible while at the same time reminding us that analyses of race are no substitute for the power and complexity of black experience itself. As this author of a respected book on Motown history might say, ain’t nothing like the real thing.

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A goal-oriented person

His new book, “City Kid: A Writer’s Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success,” is therefore, something of a letdown. It covers a lot of bases -- all of George’s life -- but ultimately doesn’t drill very deep and lacks his characteristic passion. It could be that George’s genius is in his writing about music and culture, not himself. Still, I was surprised that many of the descriptions are primary-color and that the narrative, though often entertaining and even poignant, noncommittal. Often he follows trenchant observations with flippancy that feels jarring. Explaining why an aunt relocated to L.A. from Louisiana in 1952, he writes: “There were jobs in the factories open to blacks, and she found the whites, while largely racist, were too busy enjoying the surf to be interested in lynchings.” Though there’s some general truth in that, it’s more of a good sound bite -- which George admits he became very practiced at, as a TV pundit -- than anything else.

I must confess that I bristled at George’s whole take on Los Angeles, which is predictably East-Coast centric. He is careless with a few details -- he calls Wilmington Avenue, in Watts, Wilmington Boulevard. Worse, he fails to see any irony of flying into riot-torn L.A. in 1992 and worrying mostly about a clear passage down La Cienega to the Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood (fortunately, he reports, everything seemed “normal” in that part of town). He sits atop the hotel, sipping cranberry juice and marveling at the smoky skyline; he seems to have less empathy for the burning neighborhoods below than an interest in making this apocalypse fodder for his next music-urban history project. As an observer of black music and its close connection to black social conditions and as an observer of the growing scene of West Coast gangsta rap that was being sensationalized by white America even at its inception, George should have had more to say. I expected more.

Perhaps I was expecting too much. Born in 1957, George is a product of the first generation of blacks to mature immediately after the civil rights era. The window of opportunity seemed suddenly thrown open, and George is ready to take advantage. Full of ambition and determined above all to make his mark -- in his case, as a music writer and artistic impresario -- he is self-absorbed almost by necessity. This is a black generation that has an unprecedented opportunity to invent itself, and George is perfectly suited to the task. He does come to it prepared. He lives out the classic American myth of bootstrap success, with a racial twist: Growing up barely working-class in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, he educates himself constantly about music, criticism and literature so that he can ultimately best the white boys at the game they’ve owned for too long. George admits he did this obsessively, because he not only loved writing and music but also felt a kind of panic about not doing it: In the early 1980s, as his career was just getting underway, he says he tossed in his sleep, worrying that some white writer out there was working harder than him, always a few steps ahead. “I don’t think I was at rest the entire decade,” he recalls.

I don’t begrudge George the success he obviously worked hard for (he does have admirable “ass power,” a phrase passed on to George by Quincy Jones; Jones uses it to describe the singular focus of musicians like Michael Jackson, who sit in a studio chair recording a cut until it’s done right). Yet he sometimes manages to minimize that success with celebrity-minded gush that includes overwrought talk of fabulous parties, name-dropping, gratuitous descriptions of sex at his Fort Greene brownstone and, perhaps most annoyingly, references to his third book, “The Death of Rhythm & Blues,” as “a real work of history.” By the time he has enough juice to help out a struggling comic named Chris Rock in 1988, he’s quite taken with his new status as kingmaker. “I was busy,” he writes of his initial reluctance to meet with Rock. “I’d recently concluded my eight years at Billboard [magazine], and was focusing on novels, more long-form nonfiction, and a screenplay that would end up as the Halle Berry vehicle ‘Strictly Business.’ ” This billboarding -- excuse the word -- has the unfortunate effect of making George sound like the wannabe that he isn’t anymore.

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There from the start

The best parts of the book are pre-biz, when George is a bookish, big-dreaming city kid in Brooklyn. Stories of certain boyhood moments are funny and downright arresting: his spiritual alignment with Captain America or the pluses and pitfalls of embracing the symbolism of the 1968 message movie “Planet of the Apes.” You can see the seeds of a media critic being planted, and it’s fun to watch.

Despite the book’s shortcomings, George the person -- not the auteur -- is what I took away. For it’s not George’s confidence or connections that charm but his early, driving uncertainty and sense of wonder that he never quite loses. That’s the success, post-soul or otherwise, that really counts.

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