Fear of a Hip-Hop Planet: America's New Dilemma

Obama's ascent to the presidency is vivid proof that the color line is largely a thing of the past. But the color line has been replaced with the line between the suburbs and the inner city. Race has become "spatialized." Once we step across that line, we move into a danger zone where baggy pants and gold teeth equate with "super-predator" and thug.

Fear of a Hip-Hop Planet: America's New Dilemma calls attention to the moral panic about Gangsta Rap, and other aspects of urban culture. The book is organized around three themes. The first is that the same fear that attached to race has now migrated to the precincts of cultural difference. The second is that while race has become increasingly invisible, structural inequality in the inner city has deepened: work has disappeared, failure has been normalized in schools, and the drug war has become a war against the urban underclass. The third theme is that Gangsta Rap plays a critical and complex role both in interpretation and in resistance. Throughout this carefully considered and researched work, the author shows how the transformation of urban music mirrors the transformation of the inner city itself.

Is Gangsta Rap just black noise? Or does it play the same role for urban youth that CNN plays in mainstream America? This provocative set of essays tells us how Gangsta Rap is a creative "report" about an urban crisis, our new American dilemma, and why we need to listen.

• Depicts another side of the "culture wars" debate that shifts away from the "art" or "poison" angle back towards a conversation about the conditions that produced the music

• Shows the deep interconnection between how urban youth are represented in the media and urban policies like the war on drugs

• Examines how the geographic split within the black community masks a second split between two disparate cultures both claiming to be black

• A chronological account of development of rap music going back to the era of slavery

• Drawings and editorial cartoons

• A multicultural bibliography containing sociological, historical, and legal materials

• A glossary of many key terms such as "structural racism" and "governmentalism"

Increasingly, police, politicians, and late-night talk show hosts portray today's inner cities as violent, crime-ridden war zones. The same moral panic that once focused on blacks in general has now been refocused on urban spaces and the black men who live there, especially those wearing saggy pants and hoodies. The media always spotlights the crime and violence, but rarely gives airtime to the conditions that produced these problems.

The dominant narrative holds that the cause of the violence is the pathology of ghetto culture. Hip-hop music is at the center of this conversation. When 16-year-old Chicago youth Derrion Albert was brutally killed by gang members, many blamed rap music. Thus hip-hop music has been demonized not merely as black noise but as a root cause of crime and violence.

Fear of a Hip-Hop Planet: America's New Dilemma explores—and demystifies—the politics in which the gulf between the inner city and suburbia have come to signify not only a socio-economic dividing line, but a new socio-cultural divide as well.