HipHop Studies Bibliography With Google Book overviews Alim H. Samy, Awad Ibrahim, Alastair Pennycook. Eds.

Global linguistic flows: hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the Politics of Language. 2008. 260 pages Book overview Located at the intersection of sociolinguistics and Hip Hop Studies, this cuttingedge book moves around the world - spanning Africa, Asia, Australia, the Americas and the European Union - to explore Hip Hop Cultures, youth identities, the politics of language, and the simultaneous processes of globalization and localization. Focusing closely on language, these scholars of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, (Hip Hop) cultural studies, and critical pedagogies offer linguistic insights to the growing scholarship on Hip Hop Culture, while reorienting their respective fields by paying closer attention to processes of globalization and localization.The book engages complex processes such as transnationalism, (im)migration, cultural flow, and diaspora in an effort to expand current theoretical approaches to language choice and agency, speech style and stylization, codeswitching and language mixing, crossing and sociolinguistic variation, and language use and globalization. Moving throughout the Global Hip Hop Nation, through scenes as diverse as Hong Kong's urban center, Germany's Mannheim inner-city district of Weststadt, the Brazilian favelas, the streets of Lagos and Dar es Salaam, and the hoods of the San Francisco Bay Area, this global intellectual cipha breaks new ground in the ethnographic study of language and popular culture. Limited preview - 2008 Armstrong, Edward G. Eminems Construction of Authenticity Popular Music and Society. Bowling Green: Oct 2004. Vol. 27, Iss. 3; pg. 335, 21 pgs Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner, Rap, Black Rage, and Racial Difference Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 1999 http://enculturation.gmu.edu/2_2/bestkellner.html Boyd, Todd. The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop. 2004
Book overview View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.The New H.N.I.C. brilliantly observes pivotal moments in hip hop and black culture as a whole... provocative[ly] raises the level of the hip hop discussion.--Black Issues Book ReviewIt was naive for Todd Boyd to subtitle his book The Death of Civil Rights and the Birth of Hip Hop, and not to expect people to wig out.--Punk PlanetStand back! Todd Boyd brings the ruckus in this provocative look at how hip hop changed everything from the jailhouse to the White House--and why it truly became the voice of a new generation. --Alan Light, Editor-in-Chief, Spin Magazine Elegantly script[s] the fall of the previous generation alongside the rise of a new hip-hop ethos. [The New H.N.I.C] is built on the provocative premise that this generation''s hip-hop culture has come to supersede the previous one''s paradigm of civil rights. Highlighting various moments in recent rap historythe controversy over OutKast''s naming a single after Rosa Parks; the white negro-isms of EminemBoyd offers hip-hop as the

most suitable access point for understanding the social, political, and cultural experiences of African Americans born after the civil rights period. --Village VoiceThose who are hip have always known that Black music is about more than simply nodding your head, snapping your fingers, and patting your feet. Like the proverbial Dude, back on the block, Dr. Todd Boyd, in his groundbreaking book The New H.N.I.C., tells us that like the best of this oral tradition, hip hop is a philosophy and worldview rooted in history and at the same time firmly of the moment. Dr. Boyd''s improvisational flow is on point like be bop Stacy Adams and The New H.N.I.C.,in both style and substance, breaks down how this monumental cultural shift has come to redefine the globe. With mad props and much love, Dr. Boyd''s The New H.N.I.C. is the voice of a generation and stands poised at the vanguard of our future.--Quincy JonesA convincing and entertaining case that hiphop matters, Boyd''s reading [of hip hop] is nothing less than inspired.--Mother JonesIf you want to understand the direction of music today, read thisbook. Boyd expertly chronicles the birth of Hip Hop, its impact on allmusic and how the language and music defines a generation.-- Tom Freston, CEO, MTV NetworksBoyd''s main observation is simple and mostly true: Hip-hop has rejected and now replaced the pious, sanctimonious nature of civil rights as the defining moment of Blackness.--Los Angeles TimesWhen Lauryn Hill stepped forward to accept her fifth Grammy Award in 1999, she paused as she collected the last trophy, and seeming somewhat startled said, This is crazy, ''cause this is hip hop music.'' Hill''s astonishment at receiving mainstream acclaim for music once deemed insignificant testifies to the explosion of this truly revolutionary art form. Hip hop music and the culture that surrounds it--film, fashion, sports, and a whole way of being--has become the defining ethos for a generation. Its influence has spread from the state''s capital to the nation''s capital, from the Pineapple to the Big Apple, from ''Frisco to Maine, and then on to Spain.But moving far beyond the music, hip hop has emerged as a social and cultural movement, displacing the ideas of the Civil Rights era. Todd Boyd maintains that a new generation, having grown up in the aftermath of both Civil Rights and Black Power, rejects these old school models and is instead asserting its own values and ideas. Hip hop is distinguished in this regard because it never attempted to go mainstream, but instead the mainstream came to hip hop.The New H.N.I.C., like hip hop itself, attempts to keep it real, and challenges conventional wisdom on a range of issues, from debates over use of the N-word, the comedy of Chris Rock, and the get money ethos of hip hop moguls like Sean P. Diddy Combs and Russell Simmons, to hip hop''s impact on a diverse array of figures from Bill Clinton and Eminem to Jennifer Lopez.M 2004 - 192 pages

Campbell, Kermit Ernest. Gettin' our groove on: rhetoric, language, and literacy for the hip hop generation. 2005 Book overview http://books.google.ca/books?id=gjsjb0QGCJIC&vq=%22When+chickenheads+come+home+to+roost %22&dq=chicken+heads+come+home+to+roost&source=gbs_navlinks_s Because of the increasing influence of Hip hop music and culture on a generation raised during its dominance, it is important to address Hip hop and African American vernacular not merely as elements of folk and popular cultures but as rhetoric worthy of serious scrutiny. In Gettin' Our Groove On, author Kermit E. Campbell not only insists on this worthiness but also investigates the role that African American vernacular plays in giving a voice to the lived experiences of America's ghetto marginalized. Campbell's work shows the persistence and force of the vernacular tradition in the face of increasing criticism from the American mainstream. A broad area of research is covered with surprising depth as Campbell addresses issues of language and rhetoric within the historical context of African oral tradition and African American folklore, poetry, popular music, fiction, and film. The text presents gangsta/reality rap as a rhetorical tactic consistent with ghetto hustling culture, rather than just entertainment, and also explores the negation of black vernacular in the classroom that has resulted in misguided approaches to teaching literacy to black students. Itself infused with the Hip hop idiom and an engaging style free of academic jargon, Gettin' Our

Groove On presents a thorough and provocative contribution to cultural and rhetorical studies. Limited preview - 2005 - 195 pages Chang, Jeff. Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (Basic Civitas Books, 2007) Chang, Jeff. Can't stop won't stop: a history of the hip-hop generation. 2005. 546 Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's worldview, and transformed American politics and culture. But that epic story has never been told with this kind of breadth, insight, and style. Based on original interviews with DJs, b-boys, rappers, graffiti writers, activists, and gang members, with unforgettable portraits of many of hip-hop's forebears, founders, and mavericks, including DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D, and Ice Cube, Can't Stop Won't Stop chronicles the events, the ideas, the music, and the art that marked the hip-hop generation's rise from the ashes of the 60's into the new millennium. Here is a powerful cultural and social history of the end of the American century, and a provocative look into the new world that the hiphop generation created. Chang, Jeff. Its a Hip Hop World Foreign Policy (December 2007) Chuck D, Fight the Power: Rap, Race, and Reality (Delta, 1998) Clay, Andreana. Keepin' it Real Black youth Hip Hop and black identity identity Source: American Behavioral Scientist, 2003, 46, 10, 1346-1358, Sage Publications Collins, Patricia Hill, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (Temple University Press, 2006) Condry, Ian, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Duke University Press (October 2006) Cutler, Cecilia "Keepin' It Real: White Hip-Hoppers' Discourses of Language, Race, and Authenticity Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (December 2003) Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 211-233 Cutler, Cecelia The Co-Construction of Whiteness in an MC Battle Pragmatics (Belgium, 2007, March 17) Vol. 17, Iss. 1, Pgs 9-22

Drissel, David. "Hip-Hop Hybridism: Diasporic Youth Constructing Black-Inflected Identities" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, (New York, New York City, Aug 10, 2007) http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p182680_index.html Flores, Juan, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (Columbia University Press, 2000) Forman, Murray, The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) 387 pages Forman, Murray. Mark Anthony Neal. That's the joint!: the hip-hop studies reader. 2004. 628 pages Spans 25 years of serious writing on hip-hop by major scholars and mainstream journalists. The first comprehensive anthology of key articles and essays on hiphop. Ice-T, The Ice Opinion (St Martins Press, 1994) Iton, Richard, In search of the Black fantastic : politics and popular culture in the postcivil rights era (Oxford University Press, 2008) Kitwana, Bakari, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture (Basic Civitas, 2003) The Hip Hop Generation is an eloquent testament for black youth culture at the turn of the century. The only in-depth study of the first generation to grow up in post-segregation America, it combines culture and politics into a pivotal work in American studies. Bakari Kitwana, one of black America's sharpest young critics, offers a sobering look at this generation's disproportionate social and political troubles, and celebrates the activism and politics that may herald the beginning of a new phase of African-American empowerment. 230 pages Kitwana, Bakari. Why White Kids Love Hip-hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America (Basic Civitas Books, 2005) 222 pages Krs-One Ruminations (Sensei Publications, 2007) Mitchell, Tony. Ed. Global noise: rap and hip-hop outside the USA. 2002. 336 pages
Book overview http://books.google.ca/books? id=itcAedBA5CIC&dq=global+noise&source=gbs_navlinks_s The thirteen essays that comprise Global Noise explore the hip hop scenes of Europe, Anglophone and Francophone Canada, Japan and Australia within their social, cultural and ethnic contexts. Countering the prevailing colonialist view that global hip hop is an exotic and derivative outgrowth of an AfricanAmerican-owned idiom subject to assessment in terms of American norms

and standards, Global Noise shows how international hip hop scenes, like those in France and Australia, developed by first adopting then adapting US models and establishing an increasing hybridity of local linguistic and musical features. The essays reveal diasporic manifestations of international hip hop that are rarely acknowledged in the growing commentary on the genre in the US. In the voices of rappers from around the globe with divergent backgrounds of race, nationality, class and gender, the authors find a consistent rhetoric of opposition and resistance to institutional forms of repression and the construction of a cohesive, historically-based subculture capable of accommodating regional and national diversities. CONTRIBUTORS: Roger Chamberland, Ian Condry, David Hesmondhalgh, Claire Levy, Ian Maxwell, Caspar Melville, Sarah Morelli, Mark Pennay, Andre J.M. Prvos, Ted Swedenburg, Jacqueline Urla and Mir Wermuth.

Murray, Derek Conrad. Hip-Hop vs. High Art Notes on Race as Spectacle Art Journal. New York: Summer 2004. Vol. 63, Iss. 2; pg. 4, 16 pgs Morgan, Joan. When chicken-heads come home to roost: a hip-hop feminist breaks it down. 2000 (1999). 240 pg Book overview http://books.google.ca/books? id=1NxYNMHzmS4C&dq=chicken+heads+come+home+to+roost&source=gbs_ navlinks_s A new voice of the hip-hop generation speaks out about the reality of being a black woman in America today. In this fresh, funky, and ferociously honest book, award-winning journalist Joan Morgan bravely probes the complex issues facing African-American women in today's world: a world where feminists often have not-so-clandestine affairs with the most sexist of men; where women who treasure their independence often prefer men who pick up the tab; and where the deluge of babymothers and babyfathers reminds black women who long for marriage that traditional nuclear families are a reality for less than 40 percent of the African-American population Nair, Ajay and Murali Balaji. Desi rap: hip-hop and South Asian America. 2008. 188 pages Book overview Desi Rap explores the connection between South Asian Americans and hip-hop as both a sociopolitical/cultural movement and performative identity. This groundbreaking collection of essays is the first book of its kind to interrogate ideas about ownership of culture while asserting the distinctness of South Asian American identity that has come through the use of and influence by hip-hop as a cultural art form.

Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G., Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press Of Kansas (November 19, 2007) 248 pages
Book overview In the world of hip-hop, "keeping it real" has always been a primary goal-and realness takes on special meaning as rappers mold their images for street cred and increasingly measure authenticity by ghetto-centric notions of "Who's badder?" In this groundbreaking book, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar celebrates hip-hop and confronts the cult of authenticity that defines its essential character-that dictates how performers walk, talk, and express themselves artistically and also influences the consumer market. Hip-Hop Revolution is a balanced cultural history that looks past negative stereotypes of hip-hop as a monolith of hedonistic, unthinking noise to reveal its evolving positive role within American society. A writer who's personally encountered many of hip-hop's icons, Ogbar traces hip-hop's rise as a cultural juggernaut, focusing on how it negotiates its own sense of identity. He especially explores the lyrical world of rap as artists struggle to define what realness means in an art where class, race, and gender are central to expressions of authenticity-and how this realness is articulated in a society dominated by gendered and racialized stereotypes. Ogbar also explores problematic black images, including minstrelsy, hip-hop's social milieu, and the artists' own historical and political awareness. Ranging across the rap spectrum from the conscious hip-hop of Mos Def to the gangsta rap of 50 Cent to the "underground" sounds of Jurassic 5 and the Roots, he tracks the ongoing quest for a unique and credible voice to show how complex, contested, and malleable these codes of authenticity are. Most important, Ogbar persuasively challenges widely held notions that hip-hop is socially dangerous-toblack youths in particular-by addressing the ways in which rappers critically view the popularity of crime-focused lyrics, the antisocial messages of their peers, and the volatile politics of the word "nigga." Hip-Hop Revolution deftly balances an insider's love of the culture with a scholar's detached critique, exploring popular myths about black educational attainment, civic engagement, crime, and sexuality. By cutting to the bone of a lifestyle that many outsiders find threatening, Ogbar makes hip-hop realer than it's ever been before.

Oliver. Hip-hop culture: An alternative site for gender socialization in the AfricanAmerican community. Human behavior in the social environment from an AfricanAmerican perspective (2nd ed.). (2007) pg:365 Perkins,William Eric. Droppin' science: critical essays on rap music and hip hop culture. 1996 Eleven essays analyze various aspects of hip-hop that are usually neglected, including coverage of female and Latino contributions to both rap and hip-hop culture. Limited preview - 1996 - 276 pages Perry, Imani, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004) Book overview At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here-criticism engaged with this vibrant musical form on its own terms. A scholar and a fan, Perry considers the art, politics, and culture of hip hop through an analysis of song lyrics, the words of the prophets of the hood.

Recognizing prevailing characterizations of hip hop, or rap, as a trans-national musical form, Perry advances a powerful argument that hip hop is first and foremost black American music. At the same time, she contends that many studies have short changed the aesthetic value of rap by attributing its form and content primarily to socioeconomic factors. Her innovative analysis revels in the artistry of hip hop, revealing it as an art of innovation, not deprivation. Perry offers detailed readings of the lyrics of many hip hop artists, including Ice Cube, Public Enemy, De La Soul, KRS-One, Outkast, Sean "Puffy" Coombes, Tupak Shakur, Lil' Kim, Biggie Smalls, Nas, Method Man, Lauryn Hill, and Foxy Brown. She focuses on the cultural foundations of the music and on the form and narrative features of the songs-the call and response, the reliance on the break, the use of metaphor, and the recurring figures of the trickster and the outlaw. Perry also provides nuanced considerations of hip hop's association with crime, violence, and misogyny. She contends that while its message may be disconcerting, rap often expresses brilliant insights about existence in a society mired in difficult racial and gender politics. Hip hop, she suggests, airs a much wider, more troubling range of black experience than was projected during the civil rights era. It provides a unique public space where the sacred and the profane impulses within African American culture unite. 236 pages Poter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (SUNY Press, 1995) 197 pages http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/postmodern_culture/v007/7.1r_wood.html Volume 7, Number 1, September 1996 E-ISSN: 1053-1920 DOI: 10.1353/pmc.1996.0046 Wood, Brent. Resistance in rhyme Postmodern Culture - Volume 7, Number 1, September 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press Brent Wood - Review Essay: Resistance in Rhyme (Review of: Russell Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism) Postmodern Culture 7:1 Resistance in Rhyme Brent Wood 1996 PMC 7.1 Russell Potter. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: SUNY, 1995. Spectacular Vernaculars is the most recent book on hip-hop to appear on university library shelves, and the first to deal squarely with hip-hop as a specifically postmodern phenomenon. Did I say "phenomenon"? Russell Potter would have my head. The central claim Potter makes in the intriguing introduction to Spectacular Vernaculars is that hip-hop culture constitutes a "highly sophisticated postmodernism" (Potter, 1995: 13). By characterizing hip-hop as a "postmodernism," rather than a "postmodern phenomenon," Potter begins to build his case for understanding hip-hop as a selfconscious political practice, not merely as a collection of commodities and customs. Furthermore, he means to insist, against Paul Gilroy to whose work

Potter often refers, that hip-hop is fundamentally a postmodernity rather than an instance of oppositional modernity (4). Hip-hop, in Potter's view, is a successful postmodern guerilla resistance against both the New Right and the corporate juggernauts that rule economic life in North America. Moreover, argues Potter, hip-hop is a resistance which has had "more crucial consequences than all the books on postmodernism... Radford-Hill, Keepin' It Real: A Generational Commentary on Kimberly Springer's Third Wave Black Feminism? Journal of Women in Culture & Society (Summer 2002) Vol. 27 Issue 4, p1083, 12p Raley, Todd. "Never Been a Front/ Never Been a Fraud: Hip-Hop and Whiteness (Top Paper)" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre (Dresden, Germany, Jun 16, 2006) http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p90745_index.html Ramsey, Guthrie P. Jr. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 294 Pages Riddles, Allison. A musical colour line: The problem of race in white rap rhetoric Paper presented at the annual meeting of the conference on college composition and communication (Chicago, IL, March 20-23, 2002) Rodriquez, Jason. Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop (University of Massachusetts, December 2006) Amherst Journal of Contemporary Ethnography Volume 35 Number 6 Rose, Tricia. Black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary America. 1994. 237 From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have made it a provocative fixture on the American cultural landscape. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it. Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics

of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men. But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself." 237 pages Ross, Andrew and Tricia Rose. Microphone fiends: youth music & youth culture. 1994 Youth music is the most creative and contested location on the cultural landscape. It is a vehicle for generational moods and aspirations, a public refuge for fantasies outlawed in daily life, a testing ground for technical ingenuity, an enormously profitable commercial channel for mainstream narratives of thought and behavior, and one of the corporate state's main theatres for national moral panic. Today's sounds, and the debates about their various forms, are inseparable from the social conditions of the last two decades: class polarization, racial marginalization, and economic violence enacted to a degree that has left youth, as a whole, with drastically reduced opportunities in life. Youth culture is still responding to these uneven developments with a passion that has been romanticized by some critics as a significant form of resistance, and denigrated by others as an avoidance of direct and political protest. Microphone Fiends, a collection of original essays andinterviews, brings together some of the best known scholars, critics, journalists and performers to focus on the contemporary scene. It includes theoretical discussions of musical history along with social commentaries about genres like disco, metal and rap music, and case histories of specific movements like the Riot Grrls, funk clubbing in Rio de Janeiro, and the British rave scene. The contents of the volume engage with the broad tradition of cultural studies and sociology of youth music and culture, but they are also designed to address audiences reached by mainstream music journalism and fans of any musical taste. 276 pages Schloss, Joseph Glenn. Making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop. 2004 Book overview http://books.google.ca/books? id=kFb8rSDLQmkC&dq=sample+based+hip+hop+schloss&source=gbs_navlinks _s Despite having created one of the most important musical cultures of the last fifty years, hip-hop composers who use digital sampling are rarely taken seriously as artists. But hip-hop deejays and producers have collectively developed an artistic system that features a complex aesthetic, a detailed array of social protocols, a rigorous set of ethical expectations and a rich historical consciousness.

Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats is the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods and values of this surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects--from hip-hop artists' pedagogical methods to the Afro-diasporic roots of the sampling process to the social significance of "digging" for rare records--Joseph G. Schloss examines the way hip-hop artists have managed to create a form of expression that reflects their creative aspirations, moral beliefs, political values and cultural realities. 2004 - 226 pages Spady, James G.; H. Samy Alim; Samir Meghelli, Tha Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness (Black History Museum Press, 2006) Sullican, Rachel e. Rap and Race: Its Got a Nice Beat, But What About the Message? JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES,Vol. 33 No. 5, May 2003 605-622 Watkins, S. Craig, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Beacon, 2005/6) Avoiding the easy definitions and caricatures that tend to celebrate or condemn the "hip hop generation," Hip Hop Matters focuses on fierce and far-reaching battles being waged in politics, pop culture, and academe to assert control over the movement. At stake, Watkins argues, is the impact hip hop has on the lives of the young people who live and breathe the culture. He presents incisive analysis of the corporate takeover of hip hop and the rampant misogyny that undermines the movement's progressive claims. Ultimately, we see how hip hop struggles reverberate in the larger world: global media consolidation; racial and demographic flux; generational cleavages; the reinvention of the pop music industry; and the ongoing struggle to enrich the lives of ordinary youth. "Watkins wisely chooses to focus on what has not been said . . . [and] tells his version of hip-hop's history in lyrical prose, often mirroring the rhythms and wordplay of the music he's discussing. This is undoubtedly a book for fans, but it is also an intriguing look at how hip-hop has become part of a universal cultural conversation." Publishers Weekly "Offering a fast-moving and well-researched book, Watkins successfully unearths some of the disturbing and encouraging implications of hip-hop culture." Library Journal S. Craig Watkins is associate professor of radio-TV-film, sociology, and African American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Limited preview - 2006 - 295 pages