Hip Hop Users Guide: Pop Culture

In It's Bigger Than Hip Hop, M. K. Asante, Jr. looks at the rise of a generation that sees beyond the smoke and mirrors of corporate-manufactured hip hop and is building a movement that will change not only the face of pop culture, but the world. Asante, a young firebrand poet, professor, filmmaker, and activist who represents this movement, uses hip hop as a springboard for a larger discussion about the urgent social and political issues affecting the post-hip-hop generation, a new wave of youth searching for an understanding of itself outside the self-destructive, corporate hip-hop monopoly. Through insightful anecdotes, scholarship, personal encounters, and conversations with youth across the globe as well as icons such as Chuck D and Maya Angelou, Asante illuminates a shift that can be felt in the crowded spoken-word joints in post-Katrina New Orleans, seen in the rise of youth-led organizations committed to social justice, and heard around the world chanting "It's bigger than hip hop."

The 'Hood Comes First looks at the increasingly specific emphasis on real neighborhoods and streets in rap music and hip hop culture as an urgent response to the cultural and geographical ghettoization of black urban communities. Examining rap music, along with ancillary hip hop media including radio, music videos, rap press and the cinematic 'hood genre, Murray Forman analyzes hip hop culture's varying articulations of the terms "ghetto," "inner-city," and "the 'hood," and how these spaces, both real and imaginary, are used to define individual and collective identity.

Since it sprang off the walls and streets of New York in the early eighties, the baggy-panted, break-dancing, in-your-face world of hip-hop has dominated popular music, fashion, advertising, and even politics for two decades. Constantly reinventing itself, today it's big business. But what--and whose--is it really?Nelson George's acclaimed book, The Death of Rhythm and Blues, established him as one of the most reliable observers of African American (and therefore, all American) popular music. This book is the long-awaited sequel to that classic. It offers a tour through the waves of a multimedia explosion of which rap music is only the most audible manifestation--from Kool Herc and the Sugar Hill Gang through Public Enemy to Puff Daddy. George looks at the roles of entrepreneurship, technology, and language; considers the themes (and controversies) of violence and misogyny, crossover, and blaxploitation; and argues, powerfully, why hip-hop has held its steady grip on American popular culture despite all odds for over twenty years.

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.