Book Review: Hip Hop America
Nelson George
Viking, Penguin Putnam Inc.

For more than a third of my son's life, he has periodically tried to give me a sense of the art of hip hop music. I tuned him out. He continued to emphasize the poetry and staying power of the genre (almost 21 years, like Russell), which permeates pop culture in America and beyond. Hip hop isn't the first African-American music form that mainstream America first marginalized and then absorbed. Recall the time it took for blues, jazz, rhythm & blues, and soul to reach acceptance by mass audiences. Then along comes hip hop, a music straight out of young urban black culture, and even the descendants of rock-and-roll signed up to demonize this music. I still didn't get it, so here are the "Cliff Notes" to learn what it was I missed. In HipHop America Nelson George surveys this folk art-a "showcase of the art of verbal dexterity and storytelling"-that has survived disco, punk and grunge. George was early on the East Coast hip hop scene and, as a professional music critic, offers a first-person survey of the cultural evolution of this music. As disco gave way, the funk of the mobile disc jockeys went underground, only to emerge a decade later as what is still the most vital shot in the arm pop music has received in the last twenty years. He tells the fascinating story of Gangsta Rap as a "direct by-product of the crack explosion" and how it was "judged thoughtlessly without any understanding of the genuine stylistic differences between them."

It wasn't just white America that struggled with hip hop. Early on, the new artists lacked support from the black music establishment. Even more pointedly, this was "one of those crucial turning points where the adult black population began to profoundly disconnect from its kids." Other major touchstones of hip hop's history include the East Coast/West Coast schism; the turning points of sampling and the music video, and how it is that "hip hop has managed to remain vital, abrasive and edgy for two decades." Folk music? I'll argue that it is. The narratives of hip hop may not be your "street reality," yet the cultural crosstalk that freed the "dark imaginations of young black artists to say what no generation of African-Americans had felt comfortable expressing in public" is available for anyone willing to listen. - Richard Dorsett