Reviews

Everything But The Burden by Greg Tate

outcolder's review against another edition

3.0

I'd just finished reading the starry-eyed 'Why White Kids Love Hip Hop' [book:Why White Kids Love Hip Hop] by Bakari Kitwana and I wanted a counter argument. Instead, Greg Tate put some essays from a bunch of his friends, and only the first one about Eminem (yawn) had anything to do with white people vamping on hip hop while keeping their privilege. But it's still great, my favorite was an autobiographical essay from a black woman who is trying to grow dreadlocks and she's been buying this hair care product that is basically little starter dreads. Then she goes to Africa and can't find this product anymore. She freaks out for a while before she realizes she can just cut hair from her daughter and use it on her own head like the product she used to buy. It's deep, see. Cuz, like black hair, all the issues around black hair, and then it's actually comodified in the USA, they sell bits of black hair to people who are trying to grow dreads, and in Africa, at least where she was, I think Ghana? they were all trying to have straight hair, so the stuff she was looking for was just getting thrown out.

lizmart88's review against another edition

1.0

I was really excited to read this but it was not what I expected. It's much more academic than I anticipated. It's also from the early 2000s and felt a little bit too old. It's hard to read a book about pop culture from two decades ago!

Some of the essays were interesting - meditation on Eminem as a white rapper in the first part was pretty interesting. Others were less interesting to me.

Didn't quite finish it.