Book Review Why White Kids Love Hip Hop
I had such high expectations for this book, and I walked away so, and then disappointed. My primary complaint: Kitwana doesn't spend much time talking about why white kids love hip-hop. She establishes that white kids do, indeed, love hip-hop; she discusses the methods by which white society popularized hip-hop; she speculates about the futurity of politics because white kids love hip-hop. But her give-and-take regarding the reasons white kids seek out, listen to, and engage with hip-hop and hip-hop civilisation is superficial at all-time. So why do white kids dearest hip-hop? Co-ordinate to the writer, information technology'due south because Gen X and Milennials are experiencing truthful multiculturalism and are seeking out hip-hop equally a way to pass up old racial politics. She claims that hip-hop's popularity and universality, specially during a time of economic crisis, are allowing white kids to take function in the blackness experience, reject antagonistic racial politics, and engage in cross-cultural understanding. In Kitwana'due south ain words, "That American youth across race have embraced hip-hop civilisation… is a testament to American youth incorporating the founding fathers' 'all men are created equal' rhetoric into their worldview." In some cases, this is certainly true. However, I sincerely dubiousness that white kids are putting Chris Brown and Drake on their iPods as an act of political solidarity. The crux of my critique of this book tin exist summed up by a note I made at the bottom of folio 5 of the introduction. I wrote: "makes white people seem and then accepting and black people seem so fussy." This was in response to an anecdote the writer included near a planning commission meeting for a "major hip-hop political event" in which a "young Black human being" stormed out after hearing that "the issue would be multicultural." I wish I was over-simplifying this office of the text, merely I'1000 not. I literally had the image of a bunch of people at a circular table breaking the news to this guy. "Brad, brace yourself. The result will be… multicultural." Cue storming out. Finish scene. Skip this read. The argument is plagued by over-simplification, assertions without evidence, and sometimes offensive characterizations of both black and white youth.
This author has a simplistic writing style that is refreshing. Before I begin any volume, I've made it a practice to research an author to get a context from which the writers perspective/storyline is coming. This is advice I took from a lecture by KRS-ONE. Coincidentally, KRS-ONE is ane of Hip-Hops original defining artists, and an authority in the study and history of the genre. He lived it. He isn't experiencing or speaking from the outside, he is Hip-Hop. He's mentioned in this book. I'd listen to KRS-ONE lecture virtually Hip-Hop before I would a learned scholar or intellectual because many of them interpret Hip-Hop from the outside looking in, but he was a role of the movement. I feel that way almost this AUTHOR too. He is an authority in Hip-Hop culture because he was working in the Hip-Hop customs and interacting with many of the artists as a young Afrikan-American Male around the fourth dimension when Hip-Hop was existence created and transformed. Remember, Hip-Hop is non that quondam of a genre. This author was a journalist, activist, and historian, working in the New York Hip-Hop scene, documenting the history of this music, and traveling the world experiencing the evolution of Hip-Hop immediate. This book is splendid if yous want to proceeds perspective on the origins of Hip-Hop and how it appeals to people other than the Afrikan-Americans who created it. It informs about Hip-Hops political influences and continues the story of "Afrikan music" and how it comes into class. Hip-Hop is most definitely something to study and follow. I am Hip-Hop, a unifying force, fifty-fifty having been built-in subsequently its conception, I follow it, I enquiry information technology considering it addresses important parts of American and globe history. 5 stars because the book encourages the pursuit of knowledge.
This book was in a weird place. Information technology came out in 2005 but this decade has seen a ridiculous amount of new cultural appropriators (heck, that wasn't even a widespread term back when this was published), and then the volume would always feel dated and quaint. The author's focus doesn't actually help. The book is pretty much four different parts, but information technology's not even divided like that. There are instance studies with individuals ("why this white person should be immune to listen to hip hop!), a lot of focus on Eminem'due south beef (which I estimate made sense simply I would've like to juxtapose his success with blackness rappers' industry troubles to make it clearer), movie analyses, and and then the importance of coalition edifice in politics and how hip hop tin can exist used for that. There were as well many different ideas and it wasn't really connected with each other. I would like to see the political part fleshed out in a new book. And if you're wondering, he cites economic disillusionment as for why white kids similar hip hop following a loss of opportunity in the lxxx's and 90'southward. I guess he was onto something.
This book has some interesting points but more often than not it is a black guy talking about how the white man is trying to steal his civilization. If you try to filter out all the balderdash near that then you tin can find he has some decent points. I went into this volume open minded simply came out feeling like I wasted my time. He tries to make excuses for all the bug in the black social club. You might want to read this if you would like a black person's perspective of hip-hop when concerning white people, but it is probably what you wait.
I wasn't feeling Henry James tonight, then I picked this volume up and read the first lx pages. Here is the typically vapid sentence that made me bandage it to the pit with a groan: "This trend to go against convention and go beyond the expected has long been a part of hip-hop's history, and well-nigh certainly is a feature of many white kids who dear hip-hop."
A lot has changed since this book was published and then a flake of information technology feels outdated. I liked the parts explaining how the Nielsen Soundscan organisation is inaccurate, and the Eminem role was new to me, but I idea that the movie part wasn't needed. On ane hand, the movies all involved cultural appropriation (and not just gag characters like Seth Green in Tin can't Hardly Wait), but on the other hand, I don't remember these movies are big/impactful enough (Or at to the lowest degree information technology's the first time I heard of any of these). I feel like the terminal chapter needed a ameliorate transition from the previous parts.
an interesting collection of essays that cover the political, in particular racial, aspects of hip-hop culture. bakari both critiques and celebrates the appropriation of hip-hop past white people, especially white youth, with a clear understanding of the class struggles both races share. no vapidity hither: tellingly, many of the other reviewers didn't read more than 1 or two essays!
Any volume that tried to give physical answers to a premise equally subjective as "Why White Kids Dearest Hip-Hop" would be open to ridicule. But the author, a former editor of "hip-hop Bible" The Source, takes a more intelligent approach than that. He even casts incertitude on the widely accepted notion that hip-hop'due south primary audience is white. He concludes that if white kids - who are increasingly disenfranchised - really are engaging in huge numbers with an art grade perpetrated by oppressed blacks, and then hip-hop could be the "final hope" for a global political system that enriches a tiny elite while seeking to split up and conquer. Here are some quotes I liked: Coming out of the gate in 1991, Soundscan was tracking approximately 7,300 retail outlets, mostly chain stores in the suburbs. Earlier Soundscan, the majority of stores that reported sales were freestanding stores in urban areas. This discrepancy was one of the primeval criticisms of Soundscan - its information pool was lopsided to begin with, hence the seeming overnight shift of hip-hop'south audience from the hood to the suburbs. In 1963 Malcolm X discussed the "Black revolution and the "Negro revolution" with a poignant analogy to coffee: "What do yous practice when you take coffee that's too Black? You weaken it with cream." The idea of a white primary audience became hip-hop's cream, ready, willing and able to dilute what was considered by many Americans far too Black and far likewise influential. [Quoting hip-hop scholar and writer Murray Foreman]: "The real test of white kids and hip-hop is what happens with police brutality when the white officers policing Black and Latino communities are the same immature whites who grew up on hip-hop?" [Quoting Bomb the Suburbs author Billy Wimsatt]: "I'm horrified by the aspect of the white hip-hop affair where you can be a white hard-cadre cloak-and-dagger hip-hop kid in, say, Minnesota, and non know a single Black person. Their whole social circle is white. Their favourite rappers are white, and they're trying to put out their ain CDs, and so on. This is shockingly and violently decontextualised from what hip-hop came from and what information technology's well-nigh." [Quoting white writer Jon Caramanica]: "As a white male child in hip-hop, yous gotta have someone on the calibration below you. First, information technology's all the corny white kids, then the ones new to hip-hop. The ones trying really hard. Clearly you're cooler than that. Merely then you lot outset measuring yourself up to the blackness kids, thinking surely you're cooler, more than hip-hop than the ones who don't seem to habiliment hip-hop on their sleeve, the ones who you lot perceive as corny. So you start thinking you're more hip-hop than they are." [Quoting Hakim of hip-hop group Channel Live]: "Rap music is what you hear on the radio and see in music videos. Hip-hop, on the other hand, is how we survived the anti-youth public policy of the '80s and '90s." White hip-hop activists fall into two main categories: (ane) those who were activists kickoff... and (2) those who moved in the contrary direction... For some white hip-hop activists, it was the lyrics and oppositional politics of hip-hop artists that were directly responsible for waking them up to American democracy'due south many barbarous contradictions. "[White] Billy's activism is based on what he *sees* every bit unjust. [Black] Donna'due south is based on what she'southward *lived* as unjust." [Quoting Harlem Renaissance writer Alain Locke in the "New Negro" more than than 50 years ago]: "[F]undamentally for the present the Negro is radical on race matters, conservative on others, in other words, a 'forced radical'..." Where is the national contend on issues that thing to the hip-hop voting bloc? The need to create full employment with living-wage jobs and repeal mandatory minimum sentencing (which criminalizes hundreds of thousands of young people) is never debated on Capitol Hill... [Westward]hites voting for Obama aren't necessarily moving away from the onetime racial politics but in fact reinforcing it. Hip-hop is the last hope for this generation and arguably the last promise for America. The political elite has done an exceptional job of polarizing the country - liberal versus conservatives, Blacks versus whites, underclass versus elite, heterosexual versus homosexual. On every issue, mainstream electoral politics follows a strategy of divide and conquer. This is what allows our electoral system to office unchallenged as a private piggy bank for the rich.
Bakari Kitwana was, at ane point, a writer for The Source. As others have pointed out before me, this book is not solely about white kids and hip-hop. Rather this book is a drove of Kitwana'southward essays effectually hip hop in popular civilisation today and the implications of its influence. To answer the question of the title, white kids beloved hip-hop, in Kitwana'south opinion, because they have moved beyond the racial definitions of their parents. Their globe is more multi-cultural than those that have come before. It is Dr. King'due south vision realized. He also feels that the white youth of America have far more in common with the blackness youth, unemployment, sub-standard teaching and poverty, than they do with their parents. Possibly the most interesting essay in the book is the one that looks at the ongoing state of war against Eminem atomic number 82 by Benzino and Mays, the founders and publishers of The Source and Kitwana's former employers. While he does not condone the racist lyrics that Eminem was being attacked fore, Kitwana certainly sees selfish and jealous motives as the source of his former employers fury. Given his job history, Kitwana has an interesting point of view on the effect. And an interesting bias, that he does not really practice much address. This is a practiced collection of essays, although the last one on the political influence of hip-hop is a little dated given that it was written earlier Obama's election.
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