Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

by Jeff Chang Narrated by Mirron Willis

Overview

Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's worldview, and transformed American politics and culture. But that epic story has never been told with this kind of breadth, insight, and style.



Based on original interviews with DJs, b-boys, rappers, graffiti writers, activists, and gang members, with unforgettable portraits of many of hip-hop's forebears, founders, and mavericks, including DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D, and Ice Cube, Can't Stop Won't Stop chronicles the events, the ideas, the music, and the art that marked the hip-hop generation's rise from the ashes of the '60s into the new millennium. Here is a powerful cultural and social history of the end of the American century, and a provocative look into the new world that the hip-hop generation created.

Editorial Reviews

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-This isn't a musical history, but rather an urban social history. While learning about those who originated hip-hop, readers are informed of the social conditions that led to its creation in the Bronx and its expanding popularity. In the '70s, the borough was in the throes of an urban-development scheme that left it cut off from the rest of New York City by major highway construction, as illustrated by two small maps. With crushing poverty and little to do, teens turned to gangs, but also to house parties, break dancing, and graffiti. Soon, Lower East Side art dealers and club owners discovered the scene and brought it to the mainstream. But hip-hop wasn't destined to be a fad, and suburban Long Island's Public Enemy appeared, followed a few years later by the Los Angeles scene, led by NWA and Ice Cube. The contrast between the Bronx gangs of the '70s and the Crips and Bloods of the '90s shows how rap lyrics-and the daily lives of rappers-got more violent. This is an extremely well-researched, heavily footnoted, thoroughly indexed book that, although lengthy, isn't the dry scholarly read it might appear to be. Chang wears his left-leaning sensibilities on his sleeve, and artists who tried to advance the art form are given more attention, to the detriment of those who were shallower but just as popular. The conclusion the book draws is its real strength-hip-hop is the culture of youth, and teens today have never known a world without it.-Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

From the Publisher

One of Slate's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years

“The birth of hip-hop out of the ruin of the South Bronx is a story that has been told many times, but never with the cinematic scope and the analytic force that Jeff Chang brings to it. . . . This is one of the most urgent and passionate histories of popular music ever written.” —The New Yorker

“This is a book that should be on the shelves of every high school and college library, an engaging and entertaining full-blown excursion into American inner-city culture's rapid proliferation into every nook and cranny of culture at large.” —Los Angeles Weekly

“Chang tells these stories beautifully . . . provocative.” —The New York Times Book Review

“When Hip-Hop 101 becomes a requirement, Jeff Chang's history of the turmoil that begat this beloved culture will be the go-to textbook.” —Vibe magazine

“The most important new genre of the last quarter century finally has a sweeping historical overview as powerful as the music with Can't Stop Won't Stop . . . the best-argued, most thoroughly researched case for hip-hop as a complete and truly American culture.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Jeff Chang's new and necessary book . . . delivers a vivid account of the last third of the American twentieth century. . . . The book is as much a cultural history as a music history.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“His scope is operatic, sprawling, and concerns itself with the people, places, and politics that drove hip-hop from its infancy. . . . It is essentially a people's history . . . perhaps Jeff Chang is hip-hop America's Howard Zinn.” —Salon.com
“Flow without the ego, intellectualism without Ivory Tower disdain, and, finally, history with heart and passion and fire: Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop manages to go from wide-lens overview to pinpoint accuracy in covering the biggest cultural-political movement of our time. A true accomplishment.” —Farai Chideya, author of Trust and The Color of Our Future

“Jeff Chang is a master alchemist, spinning narrative gold from a weave of sociology, history, political theory, and old fashioned boom-bap. . .Can't Stop Won't Stop is one of the best books yet written on the shifting, tumultuous history of hip-hop culture and the generation of adherents it spat onto the American and global landscape. It is a tour-de-force.” —Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, author of Gunshots In My Cook-Up: Bits of Hip-Hop Caribbean Life

“An exuberant and revelatory history of the inner-city cultural revolution that still rocks the world. Jeff Chang is hip-hop's John Reed.” —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums

“One of our most insightful commentators on urban music takes a panoramic survey of hip-hop's entirety. . .Authoritative, incisive, and entertaining, Can't Stop Won't Stop is a massive achievement.” —Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 and Generation Ecstasy

“Don't be misled; this is not just another rap book. . .inflammatory, illuminating, and anything but myopic, the scope of Chang's work is awe-inspiring.” —DJ Shadow, hip-hop artist, Endtroducing and The Private Press

“This book belongs on your shelf next to Criminal Minded, Illmatic and All Eyez On Me.” —William Jelani Cobb, PhD, author of To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic

“Orale pues-Can't Stop Won't Stop draws from the fire, verve, rage, injustices, pains, victories, and creativity of a whole generation of marginalized, forgotten, pissed-on and pissed-off youth.” —Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in LA and Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times

“Jeff Chang backspins the un-interrogated truisms that plague so much hip hop scholarship. . .Can't Stop Won't Stop is a fluid, incisive analysis built from the ground up, with plenty of funky breakdowns.” —Adam Mansbach, author of Angry White Boy and Shackling Water

“Has any scholar ever loved hip hop so well—and taken it as seriously—as Jeff Chang does in Can't Stop Won't Stop?” —Bill Adler, author of Tougher Than Leather

“From the intellectual roots of Black cultural and political movements to the emergence of hip-hop activism,Can't Stop Won't Stop is the most comprehensive book out on hip-hop.” —Henry Chalfant, co-producer Style Wars, co-author of Subway Art and Spraycan Art

“Can't Stop Won't Stop brings us so much closer to fully understanding the complexities that inspired the Hip-Hop Generation.” —Mark Anthony Neal, author of Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation

“Jeff Chang has created a new rhythm in hip-hop writing. A must-read and an instant classic.” —B+ (Brian Cross), photographer, producer/director of Keepintime, and author of It's Not About A Salary

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"Narrator Mirron Willis's reading is expertly smooth and cool." —Library Journal Audio Review

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170924257
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	08/02/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Prelude

Generations are fictions.

The act of determining a group of people by imposing a beginning and ending date around them is a way to impose a narrative. They are interesting and necessary fictions because they allow claims to be staked around ideas. But generations are fictions nonetheless, often created simply to suit the needs of demographers, journalists, futurists, and marketers.

In 1990, Neil Howe and William Strauss both baby boomers and self-described social forecasters set forth 'a neatly parsed theory of American generations in their book, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. They named their own generation "Prophets," idealists who came of age during a period of "Awakening," and their children's generation "Heroes," who, nurtured by their spiritually attuned parents, would restore America to a "High" era. In between were "Nomads" inhabiting a present they described as an "Unraveling." What Howe and Strauss's self flattering theory lacked in explanatory power, it made up for with the luck of good timing. The release of Generations intersected with the media's discovery of "Generation X," a name taken from the title of a book by Douglas Coupland that seemed to sum up for boomers the mystery of the emerging cohort.

Howe and Strauss's book was pitched as a peek into the future. Cycles of history, they argued, proceed from generational cycles, giving them the power to prophesize the future. Certainly history loops. But generations are fictions used in larger struggles over power.

There is nothing more ancient than telling stories about generational difference. A generation is usually named and framed first bythe one immediately preceding it. The story is written in the words of shock and outrage that accompany two revelations: "Whoa, I'm getting old," and, "Damn, who are these kids?"

Boomers seem to have had great difficulty imagining what could come after themselves. It was a boomer who invented that unfortunate formulation: "the end of history." By comparison, everything that came after would appear as a decline, a simplification, a corruption.

Up until recently, our generation has mainly been defined by the prefix "post ." We have been post civil rights, postmodern, poststructural, postfeminist, postBlack, post soul. We're the poster children of "post," the leftovers in the dirty kitchen of yesterday's feast. We have been the Baby Boom Echo. (Is Baby Boom Narcissus in the house?) We have been Generation X. Now they even talk about Generation Y. And why? Probably because Y comes after X.

And so, by the mid 1990s, many young writers sick of what Howe and Strauss and their peers had wrought took to calling themselves "the Hip Hop Generation." In 2002, in an important book, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and The Crisis in African American Culture, Bakari Kitwana forged a narrow definition African Americans born between 1965 and 1984 a period bracketed by the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the assassination of Malcolm X on one end and hip hop's global takeover during the peak of the Reagan/Bush era at the other.

Kitwana grappled with the implications of the gap between Blacks who came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and those who came of age with hip hop. His point was simple: a community cannot have a useful discussion about racial progress without first taking account of the facts of change.

Folks got bogged down once again in the details. How could one accept a definition of a Hip Hop Generation which excluded the culture's pioneers, like Kool Herc and Afrika Bombaataa, for being born too early? Or one that excluded those who had come to claim and transform hip hop culture, but were not Black or born in America? Exactly when a Hip Hop Generation began and whom it includes remains, quite appropriately, a contested question.

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."

So, you ask, when does the Hip Hop Generation begin? After DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa. Whom does it include? Anyone who is down. When does it end? When the next generation tells us it's over.

This is a nonfiction history of a fiction a history, some mystery and certainly no prophecy. It's but one version, this dub history a gift from those who have illuminated and inspired, all defects of which are my own.

There are many more versions to be heard. May they all be.

Jeff Chang
Brooklyn and Berkeley
January 1998 to March 2004


Copyright 2005 by Jeff Chang

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