Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers' Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music

by Rickey Vincent, Boots Riley (Foreword)

Connecting the black music tradition with the black activist tradition, Party Music brings both into greater focus than ever before and reveals just how strongly the black power movement was felt on the streets of black America. Interviews reveal the never-before-heard story of the Black Panthers’ R&B band the Lumpen and how five rank-and-file members performed popular music for revolutionaries. Beyond the mainstream civil rights movement that is typically discussed are the stories of the Black Panthers, the Black Arts Movement, the antiwar activism, and other radical movements that were central to the impulse that transformed black popular music—and created soul music.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction, Race, Art

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Jakub Łukowski]

I don't know why, but when Rickey Vincent writes about music and culture, it's like reading the best crime novel. His previous book about funk is my personal bible, and this is a next chapter :P
A mine of knowledge about the times of Black Power and the Black Panthers Party, and all in the context of music.

[Sheehan]

I read about the Black Panther Party (BPP) house band, The Lumpen, in another article a while back, was pleased to come across a whole book about the group.

Turns out there is not a huge amount of primary source data and resources for the research of this book, so props to the author for seeking out the original members of the Lumpen for some righteous oral history of their experiences.

The majority of the book could be called "The Lumpen and BPP through the music looking glass", the author successfully uses temporal and thematic intersections of The Lumpen and BPP with popular music, with political activism, black nationalistic theory and implications for Oakland and nationally.

There were definitely some novel issues and interesting anecdotes I had not read elsewhere; and the balance was a thoughtful survey of the nexus of funk/soul and politics of the 60's and 70s.

"All power to the people" for real.

[Andrea]

a great read

[Scott Neigh]

A history of the Black Panther Party's band...but also a book that talks about the Panthers more generally and to a certain extent the larger movement, about Black music in that era, and about how those things wound together and shaped each other. I learned a lot from reading it.

For one thing, before I ran across this book I had no idea that the Panthers even had a band, so all of that was completely new to me. But it was also useful in thinking about the Black Panther Party as a whole. I know there are many more in-depth books out there, of course. I've read plenty of things talking about that era, and talking about movements in that era means at least mentioning the Panthers. But it's been a long time since I've read anything that focuses on them. I think I particularly appreciated that reading this reminded me that a lot of how they get talked about in popular discourse today reifies, de-historicizes, and distorts them. Reading this book helped me re-connect to the reality that the Panthers were a product of a particular moment, that they were never a static thing and had some pretty dramatic shifts in their politics and tactics over their relatively short existence, and that they faced their own (often dramatically more intense) version of the internal and external dynamics that lots of radical organizations face.

I also learned a ton about the music. Despite the fact (or perhaps because) I had a father who was a musician and I also have a brother who is a musician, I have a somewhat peculiar relationship to music. Among other things, whereas I demonstrate interest in most things by learning about them, I have never really done that when it comes to music. Which means that I'd heard of plenty of the songs and groups and musical traditions mentioned in this book, but I really couldn't have told you much about them, or where they fit into larger histories of music or of the social world beyond that. And I really appreciated getting at least the beginnings of a sense of some of that – not that the book contains just a sense, but rather I'm sure I won't retain too much more than that.

I read this book as part of a larger effort to think through the relationship between grassroots struggle and various kinds of cultural, intellectual, artistic, and media-related making. I won't get into how it fed into that process for me, but I will say that it felt useful. It was useful to get a sense of the political differences within the larger movement on the role of cultural activities, and the political differences within the Panthers. It was useful to get a really rich sense of the importance of context in thinking about what art and culture and writing and music do in the world. It was useful to see how someone who has obviously thought long and deeply about these questions decided to write about them.

An interesting and useful book that's definitely worth reading.

[Sarah]

This is the definitive text on the topic of The Lumpen. Read it if you're interested in this very odd page in Black Liberation history. Heck, read it anyway!

[Kristin]

Vincent is a good story teller, but the purposefully fragmented and meandering structure sometimes undercuts the story. The book lacks that clear coherent throughline and often repeats material first introduced in chapters 1-2 in the later chapters. The character sketches of particular artists' engagement with Black Nationalism and Black Panthers are engaging and offer new insights to these figures. Thus, a 3 star.

[Mills College Library]

781.64409 V773 2013