And perhaps that’s why I love them.ĭavid Toop, The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hopīrian Cross, It’s Not About A Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles Their relation to hip hop is much like my own-simultaneously “in” (I started and, for 15 years, ran the hip hop label Big Dada Recordings) and “out” (I’m a white, middle class guy from England). This, then, is a list of books sitting at the edge of any putative “Best Of,” books that never quite belong, and whose lack of belonging is exactly what makes them work.
You’d start with the likes of Nelson George and Greg Tate, shimmy through Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and Dan Charnas’s The Big Payback, stop off with Tricia Rose and Bakari Kitwana, take in some of the best ghosted memoirs of the stars (probably Rza’s Tao of Wu and Jay-Z’s Decoded), before finishing up with more recent works like Hanif Abduraqqib’s brilliant Go Ahead In The Rain, or devoting yourself to inventory with the Ego Trip Book of Rap Lists.īut hip hop is a machine for undermining orthodoxy, so any canon is also automatically suspect, or ripe to be torn apart and reconfigured-and that’s what makes it such a vital force.
About 20 years later than you would’ve expected, hip hop literature (and literature about hip hop) is finally developing something like a canon.
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