Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop is a sprawling, time-lapse portrait of a generation's torch-bearing musical movement - hiphop.
It begins in the Bronx of the '70s — a borough balkanized by gangs and crumbling under arson-set flames and benign neglect, where striving residents cobbled together speakers, spray paint, and breakdance into a youth culture that conquered the globe in 30 years. This genre-defining tome breathes new life into old stories by trading detached criticism for passionate and engaged reporting. In compelling prose, Chang casts hip-hop as a folk art — inextricable from the larger African-American struggle for social justice — that eventually became bound up with an entire generation's attempt to define itself.
Don't be fooled: this is no polite music encyclopedia. In every chapter, Can't Stop wraps hip-hop in its social context. In a crucial observation, Chang places Kool Herc's legendary parties against the background of the pioneering Bronx gang truce that made them thinkable. In his version of the Kingston connection, the clashing soundsystems that formed the roots of later stateside block parties served as popular entertainment and community mouthpieces. He also explores the music's unlikely apostles, such as the downtown scenesters who spread the gospel before it was even fully formed. In the middle chapters, he weighs Chuck D's high-wire ideology of revolution and media-baiting, and unpacks a crackling conversation between Ice Cube and Angela Davis. The activist verve that animates these pages falters a bit as the story reaches the materialistic late '90s, but to his credit Chang flips the script by exposing the paradox of media consolidation: while hip-hop culture is now irrevocably global, the source of its political potential remains defiantly local. By reasserting the stakes of the music and parsing out the cacophony of voices in the chorus of an entire generation, Chang has written a work that is as passionate and engaging as it is monumental. (TW) from BoldType Read what Vibe Magazine has to say Listen to NPR (US National Public Radio) discussion about the book. As well as hear a DJ D-Sharp 'Mix Tape' Hosted by Joyo Charting the History of Hip-Hop, Focusing on DJ Kool Herc.
