'If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor,' Chang writes, 'hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.' Three out of four kids didn't finish high school, the vast majority were unemployed and street gangs like the Savage Nomads and the Black Spades had divvied the borough's neighborhoods up on a block-by-block basis. The South Bronx had lost, over the previous few decades, 600,000 manufacturing jobs, 750,000 residents and 43,000 housing units. That a new culture should have formed here was all but unthinkable. This is a fiendishly difficult project, but at first, at least, the movement was so small, and so site-specific, that Chang finds it easy enough to circumscribe: 'It may be hard to imagine now,' he writes, 'but during the mid-1970's, most of the youthful energy that became known as hip-hop could be contained in a tiny seven-mile circle' in the Bronx. Jeff Chang's history of what he calls 'the hip-hop generation' takes that template as its starting point - it's less a history of music than a record of the cultural movement the music inspired, as well as an attempt to define the 'hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures' of a generation whose only unifying characteristic may be its opposition to any definitions an outsider might impose. Both forms represented end runs around stalled political processes (the Reconstruction, and the failures of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, respectively) each involved great rechannelings of creative energies, and each came to serve as a template for social change, both here and abroad. Hip-hop forced its way through the rubble of the 70's-era South Bronx on its way to become the international phenomenon it is today.

Most of these have been well-intentioned efforts - and, almost without exception, they've gotten the story half-wrong: with hindsight, hip-hop's grab-bag, collage-driven aesthetic looks more like a radical break with the blues-based idioms that dominated popular music in the previous century.īut in a deeper sense the comparisons ring true: the blues emerged during Jim Crow, transcended their local origin and translated to every corner of the globe. Hip-hop has had 30 years to seep into the national bloodstream, and our cultural guardians have spent much of that time trying to fit the form into musical narratives that stretch from jazz and the blues to rhythm and blues, soul music, funk and rock 'n' roll. CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.

Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang