Know what I mean? : reflections on hip-hop /

This book comprises transcriptions of recent interviews with Dyson (Georgetown Univ.), conducted by scholars Meta DuEwa Jones (Univ. of Texas, Austin), James Peterson (Penn State), and hip-hop documentary filmmakers Thomas Gibson and Byron Hurt. Topics include outsiders' criticisms of hip-hop culture, commercialization and globalization; and authenticity, social consciousness, machismo, homophobia, and gender within the context of hip-hop. A talented public intellectual, Dyson produces quotable, inspirational language throughout; e.g., "Rap's pavement poetry vibrates with commitment to speaking for the voiceless." Unlike the layered analyses of Imani Perry's outstanding Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (CH, Sep'05, 43-0223) or the researched historiography of S. Craig Watkins's Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (CH, Jan'06, 43-2725), Dyson's volume features short riffs focused on the effects of rap music and videos. Concerns with generational divides among African Americans recur: "Maybe hip hoppers wouldn't talk so much about material things if we helped give them a sense of meaning and means to connect to sustaining spiritual and moral and intellectual traditions." The book is marred only by gimmicky devices; for example, each chapter is a "track," as if the book were a musical album. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-/upper-division undergraduates, faculty, general readers. T. F. DeFrantz Massachusetts Institute of Technology