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Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet

Riverhead, 274pp., $14 (paper)

Several years ago, British novelist Patrick Neate stumbled upon a Tokyo hip-hop club called Harlem, where it seemed up was down and down was up. African men pretending to be black Americans danced with Japanese girls wearing dreadlocks. Hip-hop tends to lead this kind of cultural cross-dressing, Neate argues in his lively travelogue across hip-hop planet, Where You're At, and he should know. A white Londoner who studied at Cambridge and learned to DJ in Africa, Neate is a walking example of why authenticity is a slippery term in the hip-hop world. He finds all kinds of definitions for it along his travels in Rio, New York, and Cape Town, talking to MCs named Herb and bopping his head to South African bubblegum (early Nineties disco pop). Along the way he drops references to everyone from Foucault to the Fugees.

Like any expert in a marginalized genre that's gone mainstream, Neate can be tedious. He's forever clocking how five minutes ago a scene is, or measuring its purity with a gemologist's precision. But he also has a knack for sussing out the cutting edge of the hip-hop scene. He visits a record label in Manhattan called Bronx Science that sells most of their discs overseas and tests the pulse of old time hustlers in South Africa who signify by wearing Chuck Taylor All Stars. By the end of this vivid and amusing book, Neate has learned how to embrace this multiplicity, even when it means that the people grooving to his favorite tunes look, well, a little wack.