Rapper's delight

Jeff Chang's remarkable history tells the story of hip-hop, the most important music (and youth) movement of our time.

By Peter L'Official

Mar 31, 2005 | Charlie Ahearn, famed writer-director of the 1982 old-school hip-hop film classic "Wild Style," broke my heart about a quarter of the way through Jeff Chang's "Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation." Asked about the double-edged impact of the Sugar Hill Gang's 1979 chart-topping, crossover hit "Rapper's Delight" on break dancing and DJ culture in the clubs, he observes, "Nobody was dancing. Period! Rap became the focal point. MCs were onstage and people were looking at them." The song, apart from enlivening the then-waning Bronx club scene, helped cast the DJ down from his heretofore prominent position as ruler, sole controller and cold-rocker of the party. The days of kids decked out in denim cut-sleeves sporting well-manicured 'fros at clubs "gettin' they dance on" were done. Dancers became spectators, DJs cut records for profit, and silver-tongued Bronx kids rhymed over those records, enacting the culture's transition from DJ-dominated live performance to the more formulaic, highly marketable, studio-ensconced iteration dominated by the rapper. This leads to Ahearn's heart-stopper: "This is 1980. In other words, hip-hop is dead by 1980. It's true."

Now, hip-hop's death has been decried so many times that it's become nearly a theme of the music itself (and not just every time Puffy re-reinvents the remix). But I was born in 1980. As a matter of fact, I was born in New York City, and have lived the greater part of my life in the Bronx, the internationally known and locally respected birthplace of hip-hop. It's a lil' badge of honor that I enjoy carrying around, and a fact that almost assuredly annoys friends and others alike due to my constant and often public claim to that heritage. My favorite music came from where I came from. It's a neat and simple bit of history that I keep close to my heart -- nothing more, considering I came rather late to hip-hop block-party consciousness, being blissfully pre-pubescent for its glory days -- and it's kept so close that I can't help but feel concern for the culture that's grown up, out, around and away from the two turntables and a microphone that helped start it. And no matter how many times hip-hop has "died," it's still troubling to hear from one of its elder statesmen that the music you grew up listening to was dead before you knew it existed.

But baby -- and I'm addressing hip-hop directly here -- I love you, as 50 Cent so playfully rapped once, "like a fat kid loves cake." And after completing Chang's epic endeavor (546 pages including appendices, indexes, notes and the obligatory shout-outs), I can tell that he does too.

Yet it's not just the music that he loves, because hip-hop isn't just about dope beats and rhymes, or at least it shouldn't be. In some strange and I suppose logically impossible way, Hip-Hop in the grand, elevated, generational sense is "bigger than hip-hop," in the words of the duo dead prez (a group so -- undeservedly -- under the mainstream radar that they don't even get capital letters). I know what you're saying, how can a thing be bigger than itself? I'll attempt to answer that with simple stoner logic: What if the thing is not the thing you thought it was in the first place? (Can I get a Keanu? "Whoa!" Thanks!)

Hip-hop in its purest sense offers both a means to decide whether you should cop that bangin' new mix tape from the cat on the corner, and a forum to decide whether you think Colin Powell's a punk for copping to the neocon playbook and selling us on those WMD. Hip-hop was born in the Bronx, yes, but it has been reborn countless times -- to borrow Secretary of Defense and hype-man extraordinaire D. Rummy's words -- north, south, east and west of there, too.

Like it or not, hip-hop's been co-opted by our media monopolies as both dominant mode and signifier of youth/outsider/disenfranchised culture. Having transcended its branding as a niche market of music, it has come to stand for -- and brand -- urban culture itself. (Referring to the seminal West Coast rap group N.W.A.'s meteoric rise to the top of Billboard's charts in the 1990s, Chang slyly writes, "Apparently lots of suburbanites and whites were down with a 'Niggaz 4 Life' program," keenly identifying the music's potential to both identify and define a lifestyle.) Hip-hop has become both universal aesthetic and adjective, from the Dirty South to South Africa, with its spirit manifesting itself in the unlikeliest of places, often in more unfamiliar guises.

Holler if you hear me. Allen Iverson is hip-hop, sure. But if you've ever watched the elegant, world-class French striker Thierry Henry celebrate after scoring a wonder goal, you'd know he's hip-hop, too -- and not merely because he's friends with San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker and once sat next to Spike Lee and Jay-Z at a Knicks game. Same goes for the kids chilling out in Tokyo's Harajuku district, sporting Nike sneaker styles that hip-hop heads in America would absolutely bug out over. Though he would no doubt protest, Stanley Crouch is a little bit hip-hop, too. Just ask critic Dale Peck.

Chang, a freelance hip-hop journalist with a background in ethnic studies and a decade-long investment in the art form (which includes co-founding an influential indie hip-hop label that helped launch acts like DJ Shadow and Blackalicious), approaches the palimpsest of hip-hop pedagogically. Which is to say, his scope is operatic, sprawling, and concerns itself with the people, places and politics that drove hip-hop from its infancy -- at a party thrown by DJ Kool Herc's sister on 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx -- to its now-ubiquitous and rather decadent cacophonic pimping of your TV, radio, cellphone and, of course, your ride. He writes, "My own feeling is that the idea of the Hip-Hop Generation brings together time and race, place and polyculturalism, hot beats and hybridity. It describes the turn from politics to culture, the process of entropy and reconstruction. It captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as 'post-this' or 'post-that.'"

What hip-hop provides -- from Chang's perspective, and that of the downtrodden denizens of Rio's favelas and Paris' banlieues, marginalized and impoverished much like the South Bronx population of the 1970s -- is a way to look at the world. And that's exactly what "Can't Stop Won't Stop" does: It looks at the world through the words, eyes and deeds of the culture's true, oft-forgotten architects and revolutionaries over the past three and a half decades. Chang isn't interested in rap's big, boldfaced names and endlessly echoing voices as touchstones for his narrative. While he pays homage to founding fathers Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc (who writes the book's introduction) among many others, Chang grounds his copious research with those whose stories have been overlooked, co-opted or abandoned: the street gangs of 1960s-70s Bronx, the b-boys (break dancers) whose loose-limbed poppin' and lockin' became novelty once the MC grabbed the mike, and the graffiti artists whose brief brush with art world fame came, then went, with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. These are but some of the heretofore ignored to whom Chang gives voice. There's nary a Diddy in sight.

It is what Chang calls "the politics of abandonment" that seemingly drove him to write the book, and which accounts for the seething menace -- masked by cool understatement -- he shows when dealing with real-life villains such as megalomaniacal urban builder Robert Moses, or pretty much anyone involved with the LAPD. A boombox Boethius, Chang employs a central metaphor not of a wheel, but instead, a loop -- of history, of a sample, of cassette tape -- around which he structures and organizes the book.

Next Page: Why modern hip-hop has seemingly lost its way

• View blog reactions