Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I don’t know much about hip-hop, but I think this history of the music, dance, and graffiti which combined to form it, the people that started it, and the communities that sustained it is pretty good. Not great, but good. There is an extensive list of further reading and listening and when the author gets out of the way and just tells us the story it’s really very good. And he does tell us a lot, including the more unsavory parts of the history from many perspectives. It’s when he tells us what it all means, in the stilted language of critical theory meets hip-hop jargon, that I got a bit glassy-eyed. I still don’t quite know what pre-millennial tension is.