Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
by Jeff Chang
St. Martin’s Press, 546 pp., $27.95
Jeff Chang’s labor of love chronicles the sociological background of a music that often doubles as functional culture. Beginning in the Sixties with rampant white flight away from the urban sprawl of the Bronx, hip-hop emerged from the ashes of a borough systematically burned to the ground for insurance settlements. As the “politics of abandonment” continued to wreak havoc on Bronx infrastructure, youth gangs inspired by the Black Panthers began employing practical activism within their communities. Moving beyond the assimilative demands of the civil rights era, warring Bronx families such as the Ghetto Brothers, Black Spades, Savage Skulls, and Seven Immortals settled a peace agreement in 1971 that essentially kicked the hip-hop movement into gear. Embracing James Brown at a time when he was being shunned by black radio, DJ visionaries such as Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa combined Jamaican sound system innovations with aspirations of a “post-white” unity that quickly spread across “Planet Rock.” Comparing rap’s widespread yet guarded acceptance within mainstream media to Reggie Jackson’s performance in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series, with which the black slugger forced a proudly pale organization to come to terms with his dominance, Chang effectively illustrates the uphill battle for perceived legitimacy faced by a growing majority of Americans. With its eyes ever on the prize, hip-hop rebelled against eventual corporate exploitation by binding itself to the social rage of Public Enemy and the anti-apartheid movement. Chided by blatant police brutality and a rift in “Black Korea,” the festering anger came to a head with the Los Angeles uprising of 1992, openly prophesied by astute MCs such as Ice Cube. While the genre’s focus has splintered in recent years, Chang provides compelling evidence that hip-hop as a catalytic movement persists to this day.
This article appears in February 25 • 2005.