Party Music

Party Music explores the culture and politics of the Black Power era of the late 1960s, when the rise of a black militant movement also gave rise to a “Black Awakening” in the arts--and especially in music. Here Rickey Vincent, the award-winning author of Funk, explores the relationship of soul music to the Black Power movement from the vantage point of the musicians and black revolutionaries themselves. Party Music introduces readers to the Black Panther's own band, the Lumpen, a group comprised of rank-and-file members of the Oakland, California-based Party. During their year-long tenure, the Lumpen produced hard-driving rhythm-and-blues that asserted the revolutionary ideology of the Black Panthers. Through his rediscovery of the Lumpen, and based on new interviews with Party and band members, Vincent provides an insider's account of black power politics and soul music aesthetics in an original narrative that reveals more detail about the Black Revolution than ever before. Rickey Vincent is the author of Funk: The Music, The People, and the Rhythm of the One, and has written for the Washington Post, American Legacy, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.