A review by bibliophiliac
Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop by Danyel Smith

informative reflective slow-paced

3.75

Danyel Smith has been a journalist chronicler of hip-pop and pop music for several decades, and we learn quite a bit of her personal story woven through her exposition of a number of Black-women pop artists from the Dixie Cups and Diana Ross to Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson. This is the music I grew up with; despite being white, I wanted to be in the Dixie Cups or The Supremes – those sixties girl groups were the bomb, and I never really thought about color until a racist pointed out my different color skin. The interweaving of her partial memoir and the stories of these women was not always successful; sometimes it felt like I was whipsawing between unrelated anecdotes and stories about Dionne Warwick, Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight, and Leontyne Price, among others. There were also some sentences that stopped me cold because no matter how many times I re-read them I was not sure what she was saying. Nevertheless, informative and well written.