Reviewed by: Motown: The Sound of Young America by Adam White and Barney Ales Suzanne E. Smith Adam White with Barney Ales. Motown: The Sound of Young America. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2019. Pp. 400. Illustrations. Softcover: $39.95. When I published Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit a little over twenty years ago, I was motivated to challenge the dominant narrative about why the record company and its music were historic. Both popular music scholars and journalists regularly argued that the "Motown Sound" was historic because of its crossover appeal to White audiences. Most importantly, arguments emphasizing Motown's [End Page 162] success across the color line contended that the company's music was an important agent of cultural integration during the contentious, and often violent, civil rights era. The argument, in other words, worked to tie Motown's larger significance primarily to the reception of White audiences and then insert the record label into a triumphant story of the victorious civil rights movement. These assertions frustrated me on two levels. First, they largely, if not completely, ignored what the record label and its music meant to the Black community that produced it. Secondly, they perpetuated the illusion that when White audiences embrace "Black" music, they supposedly are more willing to support the civil rights and equality of African American people. My goal, put simply, was to tell the grassroots history of Detroit's Black community and its long-standing fight for equality and to understand that Motown—its executives, performers, and music—always navigated, but never transcended, these racial struggles no matter how successful the company became. Given this background, I bring a particular perspective, and perhaps bias, to any new books on Motown that seek to offer fresh insight on the company's history. In the case of Motown: The Sound of Young America, author Adam White presents an intriguing, but ultimately odd and largely unsatisfying, book that combines a coffee-table-style tome offering "over 1,000 illustrations" with a lengthy and often granularly detailed biography of Barney Ales, the record label's national sales and promotion director. Berry Gordy Jr. hired Ales, Motown's first White executive, in 1960 in a strategic move to facilitate crossover sales. Ales embraced the task, which involved shrewd negotiating with White-owned record distributors and radio station owners who were unwilling to do business directly with African Americans. As the legend goes, Ales's identity as a White executive was the linchpin in the story of Motown's phenomenal crossover success. To be clear, I respect Ales's pivotal role in bringing Motown's music to wider and whiter audiences. He is a worthy subject for a biography and much of White's efforts to explain Ales's contributions to the record label offer meaningful behind-the-scenes history not only of the man, but of the ins and outs of record promotion in the 1960s. In addition, White devotes considerable time depicting Ales's professional relationship and friendship with Berry Gordy Jr., which was the only interracial partnership in the music business in this era in which the African American involved was the boss. Ales's active participation in the writing of the book (he is given partial authorship credit) leaves questions, however, about how much of this story is skewed by his effort to gloss over more problematic aspects of his career, including his long-speculated connections to organized crime. [End Page 163] In the end, the juxtaposition of White's exhaustive account of Ales's career with the hefty coffee-table photo album of literally hundreds of images of Motown artists creates a reading experience that is both disorienting and troubling. Put simply, the volume constructs a history of the record label in which Ales's voice is valorized and African American bodies are fetishized. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 sparked a new reckoning in American society about race, popular culture, and consumption. One prominent example was the recent decision by Quaker Oats to—finally—retire the Aunt Jemima brand after over 130 years. In the case of Motown, I am wary of books like...