 Look At Me!: Jin The Great Yellow HopeFor overeducated hip-hop-gen AZN cult-crits like me, Jin presents a subject worthy of our subjectivities, a stab against invisibility, a voice that validates our own time in the wilderness. Through marketing and sociology and a vast audience's unfulfilled desire, the first Asian American rapper to break from the underground into the big leagues appears as the Great Yellow Hope... To read the complete article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, click here.  Can't Stop Won't Stop: Previews & Outtakes Stakes Is High: The Selling Of "Political Rap" This article began with a simple question: Why in our generation have we wanted rappers and celebrities so much to become political leaders? The convergence of celebrity and politics became one of the unexpected themes of Can't Stop Won't Stop. And so it went a little something like this: "Fifteen years ago, rappers like Public Enemy, KRS-One and Queen Latifah were received as heralds of a new movement. Musicians--who, like all artists, always tend to handle the question "What's going on?" much better than "What is to be done?"--had never been called upon to do so much for their generation; Thelonious Monk, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder were never asked to stand in for Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer or Stokely Carmichael. But the gains of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s were being rolled back. Youths were as fed up with black leadership as they were with white supremacy. Politics had failed. Culture was to become the hip-hop generation's battlefield, and 'political rap' was to be its weapon....But 'political rap' was actually something of an invention." Click here for the rest of the article in The Nation. Why Righteous Leftists and Right-Wing Nuts Still Hate Graffiti The attitudes that authorities, activists, art dealers, and the general public have shown around graffiti have been uncannily prophetic of attitudes about the hip-hop generation as a whole. Tracking these relations over the last three decades and what they mean formed a major strand of the book. These related pieces appeared in the Village Voice and ColorLines. The ColorLines piece explored the progressive movement's uneasy relationship with vandalism. The Voice piece, a book review of a number of seminal books on graffiti released in 2002, gets into the political backlash. Last B-Boys Standing: The Arcs of Urban Style In recent years, there has been a flood of hip-hop scholarship—some great, some not so great. For me, there are two foundational texts—Steven Hager's Hip-Hop (recently reprinted in Adventures In The Counterculture) and David Toop's Rap Attack—two foundational movies—Style Wars and Wild Style— and three crucial books—Tricia Rose's Black Noise, Brian "B+" Cross's It's Not About A Salary: Rap, Race + Resistance in Los Angeles, and Bakari Kitwana's The Hip-Hop Generation. (While we're on the topic, I'm also fond of James Spady's Nation Conscious Rap and Street Conscious Rap, Joe Austin's Taking The Train, Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn's Yes Yes Y'all, Martha Cooper and Akim Walta's Hip-Hop Files, Raquel Cepeda's And It Don't Stop hip-hop journalism anthology, and Raquel Z. Rivera's New York Ricans From The Hip-Hop Zone.) These books all start from a uniquely hip-hop point-of-view: the street-corner looking up, a truth-telling gaze. This article, published in the Irish magazine Deaf, looks at the Rock Steady Crew. It sort of illustrates my own approach to hip-hop scholarship, inspired by Tricia Rose's rigor and B+'s idea that it all begins with local stories. But, most of all, it's an homage, and a thank you, to the style of Bronx and Uptown kids like Crazy Legs and Doze. Click here to read the article in Deaf Magazine. Que Viva Richie Perez! I was honored to sit on a panel one afternoon with the great Richie Perez, one of the heroes and legends of the Bronx. When it was over, he invited me to come to his office to talk about hip-hop and organizing. We talked all day. That's how he was, generous and never in a hurry, but always right on time. When he passed last year, many of us mourned so deeply because it really hurt. But he would have wanted us to go on, and so we do. The book is livicated in part to him. Here's a blog piece I did to try to capture the reasons why Richie's life continues to mean so much. Click here to go the article. ARCHIVE This archive will be updated with links and reprints of stuff I've done over the years. For now, enjoy the links below. Got It Bad archives This column in the San Francisco Bay Guardian ran from 1998-2001. Click here. ColorLines archives Here's an incomplete archive of ColorLines pieces. I was managing editor with the great Bob Wing from 1997-2000, and continue to write under the brilliant Tram Nguyen. Chuck Brown and D.C. Go-Go Nuff said. To read this piece in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, click here. Want more go-go? Track down the first issue of Swindle or the Aaliyah 2001 issue of Vibe. Better yet, just go here. The Hip-Hop Generation Can Call For Peace I began writing this hours after the World Trade Center collapsed, as a cloud of death blew over my old block in Brooklyn. In a way, that moment has never left me. Click here to read the article in Alternet. The Hip-Hop Generation and The Vote 2004 saw unprecedented organizing efforts to target the hip-hop generation's vote. What did they mean and what kind of impact will they have? Click here to go to the article in the San Jose Metro. Setting A Hip-Hop Agenda After helping to organize the National Hip-Hop Political Convention in the summer of 2004, I came back to report on what really went down there. Click here to go to the article on Alternet. Come back here as we add more articles or sign up for the Can't Stop Won't Stop email list to be notified. |
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