Can't Stop Won't Stop

"This is not the biography of a single activist. It is a kind of sociopolitical history of hip-hop. It goes back a long way. Chang spends a lot of time describing the rise of gangs from the late 1960s. He tells you a lot about 1970s New York. Hip-hop really started as an artform long before most people outside the Bronx were aware of it. And I loved this social background because it shows that if people had a curiosity about the music you could show them all this other stuff. The sections that I kept going back to again and again were the ones about Public Enemy and N.W.A and Ice Cube, and Chang goes through the various controversies they faced step by step. Political hip-hop was very controversial and widely discussed. And again you see the impact that taking a political stand can have on the individuals when they realise that they don’t agree with some of the members of their own bands, or their ideas are changing so quickly they become at odds with some of their fans. The author is a fan but not an undemanding one. He really digs deep into the complexity of it. There are lots of good books about hip-hop, but this is definitely the best one on the politics and social context of hip-hop. Well, I think it is most necessary outside the West. In North Africa and the Arab world it has still got this potency. That is where hip-hop is a really fierce unmediated voice of protest. Whereas in the West we have had moments of such social upheaval and such musical innovation that you can’t match that. Times like 1968. And there are so many factors at work – the way that people look at politics and the effect of the Internet. There is less faith in musicians. In the West, protest music began to decline as a really important force in the early 1990s. Now there are still lots of protest songs around, but it is not as thrilling to live through or write about as punk or civil rights. Those were moments where it felt like society was changing and music was at the forefront."

"This is a fun book too. One of the reviews of this book by Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop , calls him the Howard Zinn of hip-hop. There’s some truth to that. The book covers a broader chronological period: it starts with the origins of rap music and hip-hop culture in the 1970s and goes through to the 1990s. But there’s a lot of fascinating material on the 1980s: the evolution of what we now call East Coast Rap, with Public Enemy and other groups, in the early 1980s and then the development of West Coast Gangsta rap in the late 1980s. It’s another trip through the underside of Reagan’s America. I think it’s somewhat overwritten, but it’s still highly absorbing and informative. Actually, the history of rap music is one of the few areas of recent history that has become the object of some scholarly work. Chang’s book is not a work of academic scholarship, but I think it’s a better reading experience. It isn’t a thesis-driven book, except to argue that hip-hop culture — rap music specifically and hip-hop culture more generally — was the authentic cultural expression of young people of color in America at a time when they saw fairly bleak prospects for themselves. Of course one of the ironies of hip-hop culture is that it became, for a small number of artists and entrepreneurs, an avenue toward great wealth and social success. The further irony is that rap music became, probably, the most lasting and influential cultural product of the 1980s. I don’t think anyone could have predicted that at the time."