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9780312301439

Can't Stop Won't Stop : A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

by ;
  • ISBN13:

    9780312301439

  • ISBN10:

    031230143X

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Copyright: 2005-02-01
  • Publisher: St. Martin's Press
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Summary

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 hip-hop generation created.

Author Biography

Jeff Chang has been a hip-hop journalist for over a decade and has written for The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Village Voice, Vibe, The Nation, URB, Rap Pages, Spin and Mother Jones. He was a founding editor of Colorlines Magazine, Senior Editor at Russell Simmons' 360hiphop.com and co-founder of the influential hip-hop label, SoleSides, now Quannum Projects. He lives in California.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi
DJ Kool Herc
Prelude 1(6)
Babylon Is Burning: 1968--1977
Necropolis: The Bronx and the Politics of Abandonment
7(14)
Sipple Out Deh: Jamaica's Roots Generation and the Cultural Turn
21(20)
Blood and Fire, with Occasional Music: The Gangs of the Bronx
41(26)
Making a Name: How DJ Kool Herc Lost His Accent and Started Hip-Hop
67(22)
Planet Rock: 1975--1986
Soul Salvation: The Mystery and Faith of Afrika Bambaataa
89(20)
Furious Styles: The Evolution of Style in the Seven-Mile World
109(18)
The World Is Ours: The Survival and Transformation of Bronx Style
127(14)
Zulus on a Time Bomb: Hip-Hop Meets the Rockers Downtown
141(26)
1982: Rapture in Reagan's America
167(22)
End of Innocence: The Fall of the Old School
189(26)
The Message: 1984--1992
Things Fall Apart: The Rise of the Post-Civil Rights Era
215(16)
What We Got to Say: Black Suburbia, Segregation and Utopia in the Late 1980s
231(32)
Follow for Now: The Question of Post--Civil Rights Black Leadership
263(36)
The Culture Assassins: Geography, Generation and Gangsta Rap
299(32)
The Real Enemy: The Cultural Riot of Ice Cube's Death Certificate
331(26)
Stakes Is High: 1992--2001
Gonna Work It Out: Peace and Rebellion in Los Angeles
357(24)
All in the Same Gang: The War on Youth and the Quest for Unity
381(26)
Becoming the Hip-Hop Generation: The Source, the Industry and the Big Crossover
407(30)
New World Order: Globalization, Containment and Counterculture at the End of the Century
437(32)
Appendix: Words, Images and Sounds: A Selected Resource Guide 469(28)
Notes 497(28)
Acknowledgments 525(2)
Index 527

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

Prelude

Generations are fictions.

The act of determining a group of people by imposing a beginning and ending date around them is a way to impose a narrative. They are interesting and necessary fictions because they allow claims to be staked around ideas. But generations are fictions nonetheless, often created simply to suit the needs of demographers, journalists, futurists, and marketers.

In 1990, Neil Howe and William Strauss both baby boomers and self-described social forecasters set forth 'a neatly parsed theory of American generations in their book, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. They named their own generation "Prophets," idealists who came of age during a period of "Awakening," and their children's generation "Heroes," who, nurtured by their spiritually attuned parents, would restore America to a "High" era. In between were "Nomads" inhabiting a present they described as an "Unraveling." What Howe and Strauss's self flattering theory lacked in explanatory power, it made up for with the luck of good timing. The release of Generations intersected with the media's discovery of "Generation X," a name taken from the title of a book by Douglas Coupland that seemed to sum up for boomers the mystery of the emerging cohort.

Howe and Strauss's book was pitched as a peek into the future. Cycles of history, they argued, proceed from generational cycles, giving them the power to prophesize the future. Certainly history loops. But generations are fictions used in larger struggles over power.

There is nothing more ancient than telling stories about generational difference. A generation is usually named and framed first by the one immediately preceding it. The story is written in the words of shock and outrage that accompany two revelations: "Whoa, I'm getting old," and, "Damn, who are these kids?"

Boomers seem to have had great difficulty imagining what could come after themselves. It was a boomer who invented that unfortunate formulation: "the end of history." By comparison, everything that came after would appear as a decline, a simplification, a corruption.

Up until recently, our generation has mainly been defined by the prefix "post ." We have been post civil rights, postmodern, poststructural, postfeminist, postBlack, post soul. We're the poster children of "post," the leftovers in the dirty kitchen of yesterday's feast. We have been the Baby Boom Echo. (Is Baby Boom Narcissus in the house?) We have been Generation X. Now they even talk about Generation Y. And why? Probably because Y comes after X.

And so, by the mid 1990s, many young writers sick of what Howe and Strauss and their peers had wrought took to calling themselves "the Hip Hop Generation." In 2002, in an important book, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and The Crisis in African American Culture, Bakari Kitwana forged a narrow definition African Americans born between 1965 and 1984 a period bracketed by the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the assassination of Malcolm X on one end and hip hop's global takeover during the peak of the Reagan/Bush era at the other.

Kitwana grappled with the implications of the gap between Blacks who came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and those who came of age with hip hop. His point was simple: a community cannot have a useful discussion about racial progress without first taking account of the facts of change.

Folks got bogged down once again in the details. How could one accept a definition of a Hip Hop Generation which excluded the culture's pioneers, like Kool Herc and Afrika Bombaataa, for being born too early? Or one that excluded those who had come to claim and transform hip hop culture, but were not Black or born in America? Exactly when a Hip Hop Generation began and whom it includes remains, quite appropriately, a contested question.

My own feeling is that the idea of the Hip Hop Generation brings together time and race, place and polyculturalism, hot beats and hybridity. It describes the turn from politics to culture, the process of entropy and reconstruction. It captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as "post this" or "post that."

So, you ask, when does the Hip Hop Generation begin? After DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa. Whom does it include? Anyone who is down. When does it end? When the next generation tells us it's over.

This is a nonfiction history of a fiction a history, some mystery and certainly no prophecy. It's but one version, this dub history a gift from those who have illuminated and inspired, all defects of which are my own.

There are many more versions to be heard. May they all be.

Jeff Chang
Brooklyn and Berkeley
January 1998 to March 2004


Copyright 2005 by Jeff Chang

Excerpted from Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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