by Luc Sante
17 Jul 03 Issue
Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music
by Arthur Kempton
Pantheon, 498 pp., $27.50
The boogaloo is, or was, one of the thousand dances the land was full of in the 1960s, enumerated in inventory songs such as James Brown's 'There Was a Time' and the Isley Brothers' 'Nobody But Me': the skate, the swim, the pony, the monkey, the camelwalk, the shing-a-ling. Arthur Kempton notes that it made its debut as the title of a million-selling but faintly remembered 1965 release by the Chicago duo Tom and Jerrio, a song that launched two major catch phrases of the era, 'sock it to me' and 'let it all hang out.' The boogaloo outlasted many of its competitor dances, or at least its name did, even making the transition into Spanglish as bugalú.
Somewhere along the line, perhaps around the time most people forgot its steps, the name metamorphosed into a sweeping term that could encompass almost all of African-American popular music, or at least everything that has arisen since World War II. The names of styles, which embody novelty, date more quickly than the substance they describe. 'Soul' now sounds antique; 'R&B' can be applied to the works of Wynonie Harris in the late 1940s, or to those of Mary J. Blige fifty years later, but not much in between. But because 'boogaloo' is a term transmitted more often orally than in writing, it has enjoyed an immunity to the flux of fashion. [The New York Review of Books]
1:26:07 PM Google It! 
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