Scan barcode
ebonyutley's review
1.0
getting through this book was grueling. i should have just quit, but i like to finish reading what i start. the tone is so over the top and hood pretentious. there's very little information in the book that can be substantiated since there are no notes and all the interviews are several years older than the publication date.
jone_d's review
4.0
There were times that this book felt dated - it was from another era, published in '07. But for me, a white guy who loves hip hop, but can't claim to know too much about the history or the contemporary reality of the music or culture, the book was plenty relevant. I really loved how true almost all the essays were to the subtitle "What we love and hate about hip-hop;" I appreciated reading personal accounts of why hip-hop mattered to each of authors. It reminded me of how we talk about our families, we get our family members, we care about them deeply, and and we understand why they let us down. In the last essay in the book Cobb writes: "You can't help but realize that we are asking hip-hop, of all things to be exempt from the forces that have corrupted medicine, bought off the media, produced for-profit prisons, and stolen presidential elections." I did wish that the interviews had been more like oral histories and less like big headline little content profiles/Q&A's in magazines - but maybe that is some white bias that mistakenly values Studs Terkel over ... see there you go, I don't even know who to compare Terkel to without sticking my foot in my mouth.
More...