Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
by Jeff Chang, D.J. Kool Herc
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Book Summary Information
Author: D.J. Kool Herc, Jeff ChangEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-12-27
ISBN: 0312425791
Number of pages: 560
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
Book Review: flawed opus
Summary: 2 Stars
Mr. Chang has repeatedly denied that his book is definitive, but his subtitle says otherwise. The volume struck me as being comprised of two rather disjointed halves. The first is more about hip-hop and the latter more about violence, gangs, and race relations. It's the second half which falls apart as he fails to tie all those stories of riots and truces back to hip-hop. This section might as well be a separate book.
The author goes into excruciating detail around many historical and racially motivated killings (those of Karen Toshima, Michael Stewart, Amadou Diallo, Michael Griffith, Yusuf Hawkins, George Jackson, Eddie Lee, Latasha Harlins, Oliver X. Beasley, Henry Peco, etc.). Cataloging these injustices apparently seemed topical to him, but they are tangential to his ostensible subject, music. Failures in race relations are treated over and over again in the book, to the detriment of many other roots of hip-hop (funk, 808s & 1200s, marijuana, the dozens).
Mr. Chang is prone to hyperbole: "A millennial impulse was brewing." (329) "Youth itself was being criminalized." (389) "The discourse was migrating from the realm of the political to the cultural, from the intimacy of street corners and race papers to the fishbowl of the global media." (273)
The author's grip on economics is shaky and anecdotal; he makes many difficult uncited assertions. Several egregious editing mistakes crept into the first edition. The 500-page book is inexplicably set in a sans serif font.
The detailed histories of graffiti, Public Enemy, and Source magazine were excellent and worthwhile. The letters and speeches quoted are illuminating and would be difficult to find elsewhere.
While I did finish the book, and enjoy many parts of it, the hip-hop generation Mr. Chang describes is apparently not the one to which I belong.
Summary of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop has been a generation-defining global movement. In a post-civil rights era rapidly transformed by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop gave voiceless youths a chance to address these seismic changes, and became a job-making engine and the Esperanto of youth rebellion. Hip-hop crystallized a multiracial generation's worldview, and forever transformed politics and culture. But the epic story of how that happened has never been fully told . . . until now.
Many good books have been written about the history of hip-hop music and the generation that nurtured it. Can't Stop Won't Stop ranks among the best. Jeff Chang covers the music--from its Jamaican roots in the late 1960s to its birth in the Bronx; its eventual explosion from underground to the American mainstream--with style, including DJs, MCs, b-boys, graffiti art, Black Nationalism, groundbreaking singles and albums, and the street parties that gave rise to a genuine movement. But the book is about more than beats and rhymes. What distinguishes his book from the pack is Chang's examination of how hip-hop has shaped not only pop music, but American history and culture over the past 30 years. He shows how events such as urban flight, race riots, neighborhood reclamation projects, gang warfare in the Bronx and Los Angeles, and grassroots movements that influenced political agendas are as integral a part of the hip-hop story as the music itself. He also charts the concurrent rise of hip-hop activism and the commodification of the music and the ideological clashes that developed as a result.
Based on hundreds of interviews and over a decade of work as a respected music journalist, Chang offers colorful profiles of the lives and influences of "the trinity of hip-hop music"--Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and DJ Kool Herc--along with many other artists, label executives, DJs, writers, filmmakers, and promoters. Impressive in its scope, Can't Stop Won't Stop is a lively and sharply written exploration of the power of hip-hop to unite people across generational, racial, and economic lines. --Shawn Carkonen
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