Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes)

The eighties were a colorful and contentious decade in the United States. Today's Gen-Xers have made the trade in eighties nostalgia and icons - from Rubik's Cubes to Members Only jackets - big business, but not everyone remembers the Me Decade as their carefree wonder years. Nelson George, the man Newsweek has called "the best black writer writing about black music in America," is in that category. His new book gets beyond the fads to the facts. Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America," trickle-down economics, and the steady undoing of the civil rights advances from the sixties and seventies made the 1980s a crucial and often perilous decade for an African American community that struggled to maintain a foothold amid a landscape of crack, crime, and urban destruction in an increasingly hostile American society. At the same time, black stars went supernova on television (Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey), in the movies (Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee), in the sports arena (Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan), in music (Michael Jackson and Prince), in literature (Alice Walker and Toni Morrison), and on the streets (Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan).
Organized chronologically, Post-Soul Nation is a recount of the whole of the African American experience in the 1980s. With a particular focus on culture and politics, George takes us from the release of the very first rap single in 1979 to Colin Powell's public emergence during the invasion of Panama in December 1989. Along the way, we witness the rise of political figures such as Clarence Thomas, Willie Brown, Harold Washington, W. Wilson Goode, and Marion Barry; the arrest and conviction of child murderer Wayne Williams; the identification and spread of AIDS; the designation of Martin Luther King's birthday as a national holiday; the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics; the trial of Bernard Goetz; the death of Len Bias; the Tawana Brawley affair and the rise of Al Sharpton; George Bush's Willie Horton campaign commercial; and the murder of Yusef Hawkins, among countless other events and individuals whose impact on the African American experience in the 1980s - and in turn, the American culture as a whole - has yet to be fully recognized or recorded. Nelson George has, over the last fifteen years, steadily rewritten the whole history of the African American experience within American culture as a whole. Post-Soul Nation focuses on the series of tipping points in that dynamic. After the eighties, there was no turning back.

Nelson George, author of seven previous nonfiction books and five novels, has received two ASCAP-Deems Taylor awards, a Grammy, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Elevating the Game and Hip Hop America. He was also a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A writer for national magazines, George has also written and produced several television programs and two feature films and is the executive producer of the upcoming HBO film Brooklyn.