cover image Beats Rhymes & Life: What We Love and Hate about Hip-Hop

Beats Rhymes & Life: What We Love and Hate about Hip-Hop

. Harlem Moon, $14 (307pp) ISBN 978-0-7679-1977-7

Novelist Jasper (Seeking Salamanca Mitchell) and filmmaker Womack have both written about various aspects of hip-hop culture, and here they collect a fascinating group of essays by music writers on key ideas and images in the genre. The book is organized by what the editors consider the strongest images in what all the writers view as the ""cultural juggernaut"" of hip-hop: the fan, the buzz (drugs), the love, the cane (pimps), the cross (religion), the coffin, the whip (cars), the ice (diamonds), the stilettos, the tag (graffiti), the turntable, the shell casing, the block, the floor (dancing) and the suit (business). Each writer clearly loves hip-hop music, and all are united by a sense, stated best by Lisa Pegram (in a powerful look at ""Romance vs. Promiscuity in Mainstream Hip-Hop"") that the music is ""our blues, our jazz, our rock and roll, our generation's birthmark on the American experience."" In the end, many of these writers challenge current artists, producers and record industry executives to recognize that the musical possibilities that arose out of the multicultural hip-hop scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s are being reduced to what Faraji Whalen describes as ""the idea that black youth should conform to and emulate the worst possible racial stereotypes."" This is a fine collection for anyone invested in hip-hop and the pop culture landscape it transformed.