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Book Talk: Kimberly Mack – Living Colour’s Time’s Up (33 1/3 series)
Saturday, May 6 @ 7:00 p.m.Kimberly Mack in conversation with Jason Hanley, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Vice President of Education and Visitor Engagement.
The iconic Black rock band Living Colour’s Time’s Up, released in 1990, was recorded in the aftermath of the spectacular critical and commercial success of their debut record Vivid. Time’s Up is a musical and lyrical triumph, incorporating distinct forms and styles of music and featuring inspired collaborations with artists as varied as Little Richard, Queen Latifah, Maceo Parker, and Mick Jagger. The clash of sounds and styles don’t immediately fit. The confrontational hardcore-thrash metal – complete with Glover’s apocalyptic wail – in the title track is not a natural companion with Doug E. Fresh’s human beat box on “Tag Team Partners,” but it’s precisely this bold and brilliant collision that creates the barely-controlled chaos. And isn’t rock & roll about chaos?
Living Colour’s sophomore effort holds great relevance in light of its forward-thinking politics and lyrical engagement with racism, classism, police brutality, and other social and political issues of great importance. Through interviews with members of Living Colour, and others involved in the making of Time’s Up, Kimberly Mack explores the creation and reception of this artistically challenging album, while examining the legacy of this culturally important and groundbreaking American rock band.
Kimberly Mack is an Associate Professor at the University of Toledo where she specializes in African American literature and culture, twentieth- and twenty-first-century ethnic American literature, autobiographical narratives, and American popular music. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), won the 2021 College English Association of Ohio’s Nancy Dasher Award. Kimberly’s second book, The Untold History of American Rock Criticism, about the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and White women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s, is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. Her 33 1/3 book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, will be published by Bloomsbury in May 2023. Kimberly is also a memoirist and music writer. She holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.
