Kid Creole & the Coconuts: To the Life Boats

“Strange, how potent cheap music is.”
— Noel Coward, Private Lives

AUGUST DARNELL, master of glib sophistry, is back again. Look over last year’s notices: amid the wisecracks, the nonsense and the slander there are glimmers of truth . . . but nothing that even vaguely resembles a straight answer. The Kid Creole world is rich in innuendo and intelligence, but few writers have come close to describing the Real Deal. It is neither tea party nor revolution, so neither the party crowd nor the revolutionaries have properly assessed its triumphs and its failures. Continue reading “Kid Creole & the Coconuts: To the Life Boats”

August Darnell and the Creole Perplex

“The dominant feeling of the black poet is one of malaise, better still of intolerance. Intolerance of reality because it is sordid, of the world because it is a cage, of life because it has been stolen on the high road of the sun.”– Aime Cesare, “Introduction à la poésie negre américain” (Tropics # 2, 1941).

Continue reading “August Darnell and the Creole Perplex”