Soul

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Somehow it’s fitting that in the era of Donald Trump, the blaxploitation genre, which emerged from the black nationalist movement during the original call for ‘law and order’ during the Nixon administration, has been making a comeback. In 2018, Sony released a remake of Superfly starring Trevor Jackson as pusherman Youngblood Priest and directed by Director X. But perhaps no film has done more to signal the revival of the blaxploitation genre than the latest Shaft film. The franchise could scarcely appear hardier. It was Gordon Parks who first adapted the film from the works of the pulp novelist Ernest Tidyman.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. As any Yule fool knows, there’s no Christmas album like an old Christmas album. But there’s not many of them. We’ve had plenty of classic Christmas singles but hardly any classic Christmas albums. In fact, since little Phil Spector went and ‘canceled’ himself and the life of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003, there is only one. Nowadays, a double-sided helping of Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You from 1963 would have the most ardent Wall Of Sound fan hearing sirens, not sleigh bells.