Never Drank the Kool-Aid: Book Review

Never Drank the Kool-Aid: Essays
by Touré

Journalist Touré, the Oscar Wilde of the ghetto, is the author of the novel Soul City, the short story collection The Portable Promised Land, and has written for such important publications as Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Tennis magazine.

However, readers of this site may remember him most for his stint as the "angry black guy" in an early season of MTV's seminal reality series The Real World. Who can forget when the Midwestern white girl, Becky (or Tonya or whatever), would regale us all with her typically naive views on race relations, and ol' Tour-ay would be like, YOU IGNORANT WHITE BITCH!

Ah, the 1990s.

Never Drank the Kool-Aid is a collection of articles he has since written for the aforementioned newspapers and magazines, as well as a few pieces that weren't quite good enough for publication elsewhere and yet are included here none the less. If you've followed hip-hop journalism at all in the last 10 years or so, it's likely you're familiar with his work.

Articles in this collection include:

• The one where Biggie Smalls gets shot and the author claims he's through with rap music
• The one where DMX, drink in hand, drives his Cadillac Escalade like a forking maniac
• The one where Fiddy's baby's mother shows off the baby's new bullet proof vest
• The one where Suge Knight holds the author over a piranha tank and makes him erase his tape
• The one where the drummer from The Roots claims that crack is responsible for hip-hop

And a whole shiteload of other ones.

As with any collection of this type, obviously some articles are going to be better than others. The very best articles here are some of the best articles I ever read about hip-hop anywhere, which is, granted, not saying a whole lot, but still. The worst ones aren't as bad as they are boring and pointless.

For example, did I really need to read a completely serious, six pages long profile of Beyonce from Destiny's Child? At least Dale Earnhardt, Jr.'s daddy died in an horrific car wreck. Call me when Stage Daddy Knowles runs his Bimmer into a concrete wall at 600 miles per hour. (Seriously, that'd make for a good story!)

And then there's the whole chapter where the author attempts to combat homophobia in hip-hop (the true scourge of this generation) by showing how secretly teh ghey rap is. Um, yeah. Whatever.

That said, this is still an easy recommendation for anyone who likes to read about pop culture in general and hip-hop in particular, especially if you didn't get a chance to check these stories out when they were first published.