Never Drank the Kool-Aid by Touré gives you an interesting look on nineties and early 2000’s hip-hop.Touré, an American writer and music journalist, compiled a collection of his past essays from publications such as Rolling Stone, Vibe, Playboy, and the Times to create Never Drank the Kool-Aid. Through his journalism career, he has interviewed and/or profiled an impressive list of hip-hop legends, politicians, and athletes—Tupac, Beyonce, Colin Powell, Wu-Tang Clan, Jennifer Capriati, and Michael Jordan, to name a few.
In many of his profile stories, Touré shadows his subject throughout a pretty average day, and by doing so, he presents his interviewee in very candidly. For instance, an excerpt from “Do You Like My Jesus Piece,” published in 2004, told of a younger Kanye West who went to his jeweler’s shop to have the blue eyes on his Jesus piece replaced with something darker because he thought having a white Jesus around his neck would not reflect his socially conscious lyrics.
The essays in “Never Drank the Kool-Aid” were published from 1995 to 2004. As a hip-hop fan, I was absorbed in this book because it was like stepping through a time machine traveling the timeline of hip-hop and music. Reading this, you’ll meet twenty-year-old Alicia Keys in the early stages of her explosive career, a much younger Jay-Z gambling in a hotel with his boys, and Caushun, the first openly gay rapper. There are even essays Touré wrote when Tupac and Biggie were alive.
The title of the book suggests that while Touré has met many influential people, he has never bought into the different philosophies or ideologies of those he has met or written about. In his journalism career, Touré has simply wanted to go past their glamorous lifestyles and show the sides of these big names that no one ever bothered to dig into. By doing so, Touré has also propelled hip-hop into a bigger platform of conversation in American journalism.
Photo from Amazon.
