Never Drank the Kool-Aid by TourΓ© gives you an interesting look on nineties and early 2000’s hip-hop.TourΓ©, 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.Β Through his journalism career, he has interviewed and/or profiled an impressive list of hip-hop legends, politicians, and athletesβTupac, Beyonce, Colin Powell, Wu-Tang Clan, Jennifer Capriati, and Michael Jordan, to name a few.
In many of his profile stories, TourΓ© shadows his subject throughout a pretty average day, and by doing so, he presents his interviewee in very candidly. For instance, an excerpt from βDo You Like My Jesus Piece,β published in 2004, told of a younger Kanye West who went to his jewelerβs 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 βNever Drank the Kool-Aidβ 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, youβll 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 TourΓ© wrote when Tupac and Biggie were alive.
The title of the book suggests that while TourΓ© 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, TourΓ© 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, TourΓ© has also propelled hip-hop into a bigger platform of conversation in American journalism.
Photo from Amazon.
