Rapper's delight

Chang begins his tale temporally in 1968, a time when youth and revolution seemed poised to seize the world by storm. But in the South Bronx, gang culture -- fueled by the influx of heroin and the mass exodus of whites to the suburbs made possible by Moses' destructive monstrosity, the Cross-Bronx Expressway -- took root, and street violence became the reality. After years of Nixon's and city officials' policy of "benign neglect" had taken its toll, the raging fires that razed communities and made the Bronx the nation's symbol for urban failure, the gangs themselves declared a stunning truce in 1971. That's when people like Herc, Flash, and Bambaataa (himself a member of a gang, then leader of the Zulu Nation) stepped in. The creative energy they unleashed in a seven-mile radius from the Bronx's Crotona Park in the late '70s rather fittingly "sampled" the same rebellious, avant-garde spirit of a decade before.

As Chang writes, in making his most trenchant point: "They were about unleashing youth style as an expression of the soul, unmediated by corporate money, unauthorized by the powerful and protected and enclosed by almost monastic rites, codes, and orders. They sprung from kids who had been born into the shadows of the baby boom generation, who never grew up expecting the whole world to be watching. What TV camera would ever capture their struggles and dreams? They were invisible.

"But invisibility was its own kind of reward; it meant you had to answer to no one except the others who shared your condition. It meant you became obsessed with showing and proving, distinguishing yourself and your originality above the crowd."

That these kids "never grew up expecting the world to be watching" perhaps accounts in part for why modern hip-hop has seemingly lost its way in comparison to the vibrant folk art it once was; today, everybody expects the world to be watching.

Regardless of hip-hop's inspirational woes today, it is this cyclical progression of events that forms Chang's loop, repeated in Los Angeles between the late '80s and early '90s, culminating in the post-Rodney King verdict riots, the 1992 Watts peace treaty, and a similar flowering of creativity, leading to hip-hop's eventual entry into the mainstream.

Chang's narrative ends, rather unfortunately, in the year 2000 at a demonstration at the Democratic convention, with fists raised defiantly in the air in front of the Ronald Reagan State Building. It's a conclusion, necessarily so I suppose, that completes the revolutionary loop from 1968, but so much has happened in these past years that I felt cheated to have taken such a remarkably detailed ride through history, then to be forced to get off earlier than I expected. It's a rather evasive and jarring ending to an otherwise comprehensively researched and well-written history.

The history of hip-hop music in many ways still mirrors the history told by rapper Common in "I Used to Love H.E.R.," a single from his 1994 classic "Resurrection." Employing a trope, well, common to the genre, Common raps as if hip-hop is a girl he grew up with. (The very fact that I'm citing Common will perhaps out my current musical allegiances with regards to the gangsta/poet, thug/backpacker debate, which Chang addresses intelligently in his book.)

I met this girl, when I was ten years old
And what I loved most she had so much soul
She was old school, when I was just a shorty
Never knew throughout my life she would be there for me
On the regular ...

And later ...

I might've failed to mention that the shit was creative
But once the man got you well he altered the native
Told her if she got an energetic gimmick
That she could make money, and she did it like a dummy
Now I see her in commercials, she's universal
She used to only swing it with the inner-city circle
Now she be in the burbs lickin rock and dressin hip
And on some dumb shit, when she comes to the city
Talkin about poppin' glocks servin' rocks and hittin' switches
Now she's a gangsta rollin with gangsta bitches
Always smokin blunts and gettin drunk
Tellin me sad stories, now she only fucks with the funk
Stressin how hardcore and real she is
She was really the realest, before she got into showbiz

All that is generally still true, and the cycle has repeated itself since then in some form or another -- and this rap is only 11 years old. (Some might remember that Common and Ice Cube didn't exactly see eye to eye after this song was released, since Cube thought himself obliquely referenced here -- so excuse me for one sec ... Cube, I ain't got nuthin' but love for ya baby!) So Chang's loop theory seems to hold water -- especially when put in context of a comment made by the Source magazine's co-founder and CEO David Mays in 1993: "This isn't a niche market, or just an ethnic market ... Hip-hop is like rock and roll twenty-five years ago. It's a music-driven lifestyle being lived by an entire generation of young people now ... This market is dying to be marketed to."

In the wake of 50 Cent and the Game's exquisitely timed "beef" (and 50's first-week sales massacre of all Billboard chart rivals), Mays' words might seem funny or prophetic, despite the fact that the threat of someone dying has become the marketing ploy. (Chang pays particular attention to Mays and the other co-founder of the Source, Ray "Benzino" Scott, both of whom have stakes in the music business and thus have more conflict-of-interest issues with the magazine than Dick Cheney has with Halliburton.) Who knows if we're truly at the nadir of Chang's loop, but if we are, then there's nowhere to go but up.

"Can't Stop Won't Stop" reads like a history textbook -- albeit one of the cooler history textbooks you could find -- and that's a good thing. It is essentially a people's history, a sociological text that delves deep into the racial and economic climates of the times that produced hip-hop culture. Of course, Chang gets to supplement his sociology with the occasional critical consideration of the lyrical stylings of a Rakim or an Ice Cube, but for the most part the focus is on cold, hard, often political fact, which is what makes it both fascinating and important. Chuck D, the famous Public Enemy frontman, was renowned for saying that hip-hop was black America's CNN. Given that CNN is now devoted to hard-hitting, 24-hour coverage of the Michael Jackson trial, that seems a less flattering comparison. But using that same analogy, perhaps Jeff Chang is hip-hop America's Howard Zinn.

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