Randall Roberts

You don't need a half-wit music critic to tell you it's been a remarkable year for America, one historians will be discussing and researching for centuries to come. War, financial collapse, politics, technology: All have been dinner-table topics for many Americans. Racial barriers in 2008 were demolished by a Midwestern...

White people long to be funky. They want elasticity: the rubber knees, the fluid flow, the boiling blood, the innate understanding of the rhythms they pine to create. They want the funk; they are willing to give up everything for the funk. But the funk remains buried by centuries of...