About 20% of this book is that, the rest is about why Republicans are evil. I'm an old school hip-hop nerd and was hoping for a bunch of behind the scenes stories about guys like Eric B.

I started reading this in college for a class about 8 years ago and finally decided to finish it via audiobook. Maybe it gets better later, but I didn't have the patience. The political topics that the narrative touches detract from a focus on the music, and often the author seems to be making generalizing claims that depict the minority culture in an idealized light, castigating law and order as always racist and oppressive, and criminals as mistreated revolutionaries. There are parallels and connections to the history of Jamaican music, but to argue that the roots of hip hop are found there is a stretch, IMO.

Some would argue that hip hop is a specific product of African-American innovators in NYC, (although some were Jamaican immigrants). For example, the argument that hip hop begins in Jamaica is a controversial and surprising one that needs a clearer argument. The narrative spends too much time on these topics without justifying the time spent by explaining the relevance, or spelling out the specific claims being argued.

I stopped listening after several chapters, because the narrative does not focus on hip hop, instead covering adjacent historical topics such as Jamaican political history, or specific personalities involved in the NYC gang struggles of the 70s that ostensibly serve as background for the discussion of the music. 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 hip-hop generation created. But that epic story has never been told with this kind of breadth, insight, and style.īased 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 '60s into the new millennium. 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. Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement.

Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang