The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop—And Why It Matters
by Tricia Rose
Publication Date: Dec 02, 2008
List Price: $20.99
Format: Paperback, 320 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780465008971
Imprint: Civitas Book Publisher
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Parent Company: Lagardère Group
Description of The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop—And Why It Matters by Tricia Rose
How hip hop shapes our conversations about race — and how race influences our consideration of hip hop
Hip hop is a distinctive form of black art in America-from Tupac to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Kendrick Lamar, hip hop has long given voice to the African American experience. As scholar and cultural critic Tricia Rose argues, hip hop, in fact, has become one of the primary ways we talk about race in the United States.
But hip hop is in crisis. For years, the most commercially successful hip hop has become increasingly saturated with caricatures of black gangstas, thugs, pimps, and hos. This both represents and feeds a problem in black American culture. Or does it? In The Hip-Hop Wars, Rose explores the most crucial issues underlying the polarized claims on each side of the debate: Does hip hop cause violence, or merely reflect a violent ghetto culture? Is hip hop sexist, or are its detractors simply anti-sex? Does the portrayal of black culture in hip hop undermine black advancement?
A potent exploration of a divisive and important subject, The Hip Hop Wars concludes with a call for the regalvanization of the progressive and creative heart of hip hop. What Rose calls for is not a sanitized vision of the form, but one that more accurately reflects a much richer space of culture, politics, anger, and yes, sex, than the current ubiquitous images in sound and video currently provide.
Books similiar to The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop—And Why It Matters may be found in the categories below:
- Music / Genres & Styles / Rap & Hip Hop
- Music / History & Criticism
- Social Science / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / American / African American & Black Studies