The Hippest Trip in America manages, semi-miraculously, to compress more than 30 years of rapier-keen social history and street-savvy cultural criticism within 230-odd pages, Gene Seymour writes for USA Today. The trip chronicled in those pages by journalist-filmmaker Nelson George is the 1,117-episode run of Soul Train, the syndicated TV dance-and-music series. Its nationwide premiere in 1971 was perhaps the most auspicious signpost of a decade in which African-American culture, freed during the previous decade from the social and legal constraints of racial segregation, leapt to the forefront of mainstream pop as never before and, some might argue, never since. Soul Train, which ascended from humble beginnings as a local after-school program in Chicago to a phenomenon of national, if not global proportions, was in retrospect the cornerstone of this transformative era, setting the decades agenda for music, dance and fashion.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:55:48 +0000
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