The Hip Hop Years: A History of Rap Book

Published to accompany the Channel 4 series The Hip Hop Years, this is a useful and thoroughly readable account of the most important form of popular music, alongside the dance music revolution of the late 80s, to have emerged in the last 25 years. Although an analogous movement such as punk was a relatively short-lived phenomenon, its brash electrifying energy has some parallel in the development of hip hop--for if, like contemporary dance music, hip hop was birthed by the DJ skills of 70s' black America, one of its enduring legacies has been its transformation into a lingua franca of protest music (becoming all that punk had briefly promised it could be), a form so malleable and adaptable that, unlike the Anglo-centric thrust of rock music, it has been taken up and mutated successfully worldwide. While this book doesn't cover hip-hop's global manifestations, it does provide a fairly detailed account of the development of the music in its native USA, and usefully brings the story right up to 1999, the year of Lauryn Hill's extraordinary success at the annual Grammy Awards. Much of the narrative is provided by means of a complex interweaving of first-hand recollections--and though this gives it an aura of accuracy and authenticity, it sometimes leads to the feeling that the book is tied too closely to the televisual format to take advantage of the extra scope that the print medium can offer. A sketchy glossary and index confirm this, the absence of even a cursory discography is an additional irritation and the free CD (containing three seminal tracks by Afrika Bambaataa, De La Soul and Wu-Tang Clan & Onyx) seems a little skimpy: it would have been useful to have pieces by Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, and, say, N.W.A, at the very least-- though there is a separate double CD produced to accompany the book. Nevertheless, minor quibbles aside, this is a welcome attempt to provide a popular account of a hugely popular music, too often ignored or overshadowed by censorious hysteria. If the accounts of the deaths of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. are sobering antidotes to the excesses of gangsta rap, the lucidity and intelligence of many of the participants underlines how much more serious and articulate hip hop can be than much contemporary music--not to mention great fun. --Burhan TufailRead More