Party Music

August 12, 2013
It’s not common knowledge that the fiery Black Panthers organization had a rocking house band, the Lumpen, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but Vincent (Funk) sets the record straight in this book about a tight-knit group of activist musicians who sang their revolutionary ideology to the community. Although the band performed for less than a year, Vincent, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, stresses the important role of music in black culture at that time, with the Lumpen piggybacking on the triumphs of James Brown, Sam Cooke, and Aretha Franklin, giving high-energy performances “of blackness, hyper-masculinity and hyperbole, of smack talk that put the Man in his place and exalted everything gloriously black.” If this well-detailed book accurately chronicles the funky black power groove of the Panther band, it truly succeeds in recapturing the mood of that turbulent time when Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panther Party stole national attention with their bravado and purpose. Comprehensive, complex, and revealing, Vincent’s nostalgic journey provides an insider’s look at a remarkable band and a piercing snapshot of black history.