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More copies of this ISBNThis title in other editionsCan't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generationby Jeff Chang
Staff Pick
"Here's a little story that must be told..." Jeff Chang, hip-hop journalist (URB, Village Voice, Spin, the Nation, San Francisco Chronicle), has penned an award-winning (2005 American Book Award) account of the origins of hip-hop. From Jamaica and the South Bronx in the late 1970's to the streets of Philadelphia during the 2000 Republican National Convention, Chang traces hip-hop's rise from the fledgling culture of a few dozen New York City teenagers to a truly massive global movement. One time disc jockey (DJ Zen) and co-founder of the successful Solesides/Quannum Projects label, Chang possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the hip-hop world and uses the social and political upheavals of the past 25 years to illustrate the medium's ascent to a multi-billion dollar industry. Chang's effort is a comprehensive book detailing the individuals and the events that have made hip-hop what it is today. From Wild Style to Beat Street, the L.A. riots to Howard Beach, Grand Wizzard Theodore to Mos Def, b-boys to graf writers, Spike Lee to Jean-Michel Basquiat, the connections of a culture now found worldwide are explored in exquisite detail and depth. What will perhaps one day be seen as the seminal text of hip-hop history, Can't Stop Won't Stop is a brilliant and engaging expose of an often misunderstood art. Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop has been a generation-defining global movement. In a post–civil rights era rapidly transformed by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop gave voiceless youths a chance to address these seismic changes, and became a job-making engine and the Esperanto of youth rebellion. Hip-hop crystallized a multiracial generation's worldview, and forever transformed politics and culture. But the epic story of how that happened has never been fully told . . . until now. Jeff Chang has been a hip-hop journalist for more than a decade and has written for The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Village Voice, Vibe, The Nation, URB, Rap Pages, Spin, and Mother Jones. He was a founding editor of Colorlines Magazine, senior editor at Russell Simmons's www.360hiphop.com, and co-founder of the influential hip-hop label SoleSides, now Quannum Projects. He lives in California. Winner of the American Book Award Winner of the Asian American Literary Award Winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award New York Magazine's Best Music Book of the Year Winner of the ARSC Award for Excellence Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's worldview and transformed American politics and culture. But that epic story has never been told with the kind of breadth, insight, and style that informs this study. Based on original interviews with DJs, b-boys, rappers, graffiti writers, activists, and gang members, and with unforgettable portraits of many of hip-hop's forebears, founders, and mavericks—including DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D, and Ice Cube—Can't Stop Won't Stop chronicles the events, ideas, music, and art that marked hip-hop's rise from the ashes of the 1960s into the new millennium. Here is a powerful work of cultural and social history that documents the end of the American century while taking a provocative look at the new world the hip-hop generation has created. "The birth of hip-hop out of the ruin of the South Bronx is a story that has been told many times, but never with the cinematic scope and the analytic force that Chang brings to it. Robert Moses unleashes the destructive juggernaut of the Cross-Bronx Expressway; landlords set fire to worthless tenements; police stand by and do nothing; and, against a backdrop of gang warfare, peacemaking d.j.s lay down the heavy beats and spidery loops around which a rapping, dancing, graffiti-painting culture grows. This is one of the most urgent and passionate histories of popular music ever written. Chang is blind to no one's greed or viciousness, but he retains an idealistic view of a music that speaks the truth about the alternately stultifying and horrifying urban landscapes that the parents who hate hip-hop have made."—The New Yorker "Can't Stop Won't Stop gives us the bustling, rumbling, all-or-nothing personality of the hip-hop generation while launching us into a desire for its ideals. 'Concede them a demand and they would demand more,' [Chang] writes. 'Give them an apocalypse, and they would dance.' Dancing in the streets is the eternal image in Chang's powerful new history of America in the last three decades. Scattered legend is now transcribed: America built the 'hood, which created a global culture of ghetto chic and hip-hop couture. As celebrity threatens hip-hop's integrity, it propels the movement to look for its roots. Who does hip-hop belong to, if anyone? Where were you when it all began? The culmination of ten years of research by Chang, [this book] creates a geography for the nostalgia, a cure for the identity angst . . . [Chang] plunges us into a world of Uzis and knives, Rastafarianism and Islam, vinyl and hot beats. His steely, economical style reveals the story inside rap, straight up without any rhythmic painkillers."—Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien, The Village Voice "The birth of hip-hop out of the ruin of the South Bronx is a story that has been told many times, but never with the cinematic scope and the analytic force that Chang brings to it. Robert Moses unleashes the destructive juggernaut of the Cross-Bronx Expressway; landlords set fire to worthless tenements; police stand by and do nothing; and, against a backdrop of gang warfare, peacemaking DJs lay down the heavy beats and spidery loops around which a rapping, dancing, graffiti-painting culture grows. This is one of the most urgent and passionate histories of popular music ever written. Chang is blind to no one's greed or viciousness, but he retains an idealistic view of a music that speaks the truth about the alternately stultifying and horrifying urban landscapes that the parents who hate hip-hop have made."—The New Yorker "Jeff Chang's history of what he calls 'the hip-hop generation' . . . is 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."—The New York Times Book Review "'During the mid-1970's,' Chang writes, 'most of the youthful energy that became known as hip-hop could be contained in a tiny seven-mile circle.' That circle was the Bronx, an economically ravaged borough of New York City that was home to such nascent cultural heroes as DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, who were busily rewiring turntables and re-engineering the powder-keg racial politics of their home turf and in the process creating the future of American popular culture. Obsessively researched, beautifully written, Chang's book is the funky, bootleg, B-side remix of late-20th century American history."—Time "For me, and I think for many of us of the hip-hop generation, [Can't Stop Won't Stop is] probably the most important text ever written on hip-hop culture—it's about all the social, political, artistic and economic forces that crystallized in the late '70s and gave birth to what we call hip-hop."—Marc Bamuthi Joseph, San Francisco Chronicle "This is a book that should be on the shelves of every high school and college library, an engaging and entertaining full-blown excursion into American inner-city culture's rapid proliferation into every nook and cranny of culture at large."—LA Weekly "His scope is operatic, sprawling, and concerns itself with the people, places, and politics that drove hip-hop from its infancy . . . It is essentially a people's history . . . perhaps Jeff Chang is hip-hop America's Howard Zin."—Salon.com "Not just another publicist-approved hip-hop encyclopedia, music writer Chang's sprawling collection of well-researched chronological essays smartly preserves and politicizes three decades of cultural history . . . Can't Stop Won't Stop remains vibrant, relevant, and vital.
Review:"The most important new genre of the last quarter-century finally has a sweeping historical overview as powerful as the music with Can't Stop Won't Stop...the best-argued, most thoroughly researched case for hip-hop as a complete and truly American culture." Chicago Sun-Times
Review:"The birth of hip-hop out of the ruin of the South Bronx is a story that has been told many times, but never with the cinematic scope and the analytic force that Chang brings to it....This is one of the most urgent and passionate histories of popular music ever written." The New Yorker
Review:"Jeff Chang's new and necessary book...delivers a vivid account of the last third of the American twentieth century....The book is as much a cultural history as a music history." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Review:"This is a book that should be on the shelves of every high school and college library, an engaging and entertaining full-blown excursion into American inner-city culture's rapid proliferation into every nook and cranny of culture at large." Los Angeles Weekly
Review:"The conclusion the book draws is its real strength-hip-hop is the culture of youth, and teens today have never known a world without it." School Library Journal
Synopsis:Based on original interviews with DJs, rappers, graffiti writers, activists, and gang members, this work chronicles the events, the ideas, the music, and the art that marked the hip-hop generation's rise from the ashes of the 1960s into the new millennium.
Synopsis:Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop has been a generation-defining global movement. In a post-civil rights era rapidly transformed by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop gave voiceless youths a chance to address these seismic changes, and became a job-making engine and the Esperanto of youth rebellion. Hip-hop crystallized a multiracial generation's worldview, and forever transformed politics and culture. But the epic story of how that happened has never been fully told . . . until now. About the AuthorJeff Chang has been a hip-hop journalist for over a decade and has written for The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Village Voice, Vibe, The Nation, URB, Rap Pages, Spin and Mother Jones. He was a founding editor of Colorlines Magazine, Senior Editor at Russell Simmons' 360hiphop.com and co-founder of the influential hip-hop label, SoleSides, now Quannum Projects. He lives in California.
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