It was 1981 and young Kim Mack of Brooklyn, N.Y., was attending a Van Halen concert. She loved rock ‘n’ roll, everything from Blondie to Cheap Trick to Eddie Van Halen and the boys. But as a Black young woman, she noticed something.

“I’d look around and I didn’t see any Black folks except for the people working the concession stand and the ushers, and I felt very self-conscious,” recalled Mack, today an associate professor in the English department at the University of Toledo and author of the new installment in the 33 1/3 book series, Living Colour: Time’s Up.

Each installment in the Bloomsbury series focuses on an individual album. In this case, Mack zeroes in on the iconic Black rock band Living Colour’s second studio release in 1990. 

Mack described her Brooklyn childhood as “chaotic,” but said that her mother used music as a way of dealing with the strife. Music was always playing in the house, especially rock music. Mack’s first album was Parallel Lives by Blondie, followed by a Cheap Trick record, and so on.

But the music loving girl noticed that all of her rock heroes were white. 

“At some point rock music became conflated with whiteness,” Mack said. “The origins of rock are Black, but in the ‘70s and perhaps even now a lot of folks saw rock as white, and I grew up thinking that way and I felt really self-conscious about this music that I loved. Even though I loved it a lot I felt like an interloper into it.”

In 1988, a quartet of young Black men from New York City called Living Colour suddenly erupted onto the world and quickly set the rock scene ablaze. In a late ’80s rock landscape that was almost exclusively dominated by androgynous white men out of the L.A. Sunset Strip, Living Colour stood out from their contemporaries, with their aggressive instrument playing and hybrid rock style, which had a distinctive funk and hip-hop element. 

Mack, by then a teenager, loved it. Living Colour’s first album Vivid went on to sell 2 million copies, partially on the strength of the band’s big hit “Cult of Personality.” Mack said at the time of its release, the song was everywhere.

“I remember hearing ‘Cult of Personality.’ It was just around, you could hear it on the radio and I liked it,” Mack said. “I was super excited to learn that they were Black. I remember watching them on Showtime at the Apollo around the time of Vivid and was like, ‘Wow! Look at what’s happening.’ I think rock served that purpose for me the whole time, but hearing Will Calhoun’s angry drums and that angry snap and that super high energy opening, it was just fantastic. I was sold. The first chance I could get I went and saw them live.”

Mack never forgot the exhilaration she felt as a young Living Colour fan. Years later, she would leave New York for Los Angeles, earning her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and she got a job teaching at UT in 2015. Mack wrote her first book in 2020, about blues music and called Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White.

A fan of the music academia series 33 1/3, Mack submitted a pitch to the publishing house. On her second attempt, her pitch was accepted, and the result is the just-published Volume 152. 

Mack felt a special connection with Living Colour’s sophomore album Time’s Up.

“I owned Vivid, I loved Vivid, but it was really Time’s Up that affected me in a deeper way. It just shook me up in a really positive way. The first time I put on Time’s Up, it just changed everything. The anger, the aggression really stuck with me. I realized later that it spoke to me because it allowed me to feel emotion and express emotion that I hadn’t been able to express when I was a kid and it was a way to channel those emotions.”

Writing the book took Mack just under two years. Her research led her to interviewing all the current and former members of Living Colour, as well as one of their album producers, their studio engineer, guitarist Vernon Reid’s guitar tech, and even Living Colour vocalist Corey Glover’s vocal coach, as well as the late writer Greg Tate.

“One of the reasons why I wrote this book was because Living Colour was really important to me in my musical development because they were the band that taught me that rock music was part of my own cultural inheritance,” Mack said.

Mack’s book was published on May 4, and she is keeping busy promoting the books at readings all over the country. She’s set to appear at Way Public Library, 101 E. Indiana Ave. Perrysburg, at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

Natalie Dielman, programming coordinator of Way Public Library, said the library was excited to host Mack’s reading.

“We're happy to welcome Dr. Mack, who has presented on her work a few times at the library, back to Way,” Dielman said. “Living Colour is a groundbreaking rock band and we're excited to have the opportunity to hear Dr. Mack's analysis of one of their albums.”

First Published May 17, 2023, 12:00 p.m.