The Hip Hop Wars : What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why it Matters
Tricia Rose is a professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African-American culture and politics, social thought, popular culture, and gender issues. The author of the seminal Black Noise, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
"The Hip Hop Wars is a conversation changing book. It gives music
fans, political progressives, parents, pop culture aficionados and
scholars what we need to put a stop to stupid arguments-and address
what really matters when we talk about hip hop."--Lisa Duggan,
author of Twilight of Equality
"The Hip Hop Wars is Crisis of the Negro Intellectual for the new
millennium. Tricia Rose's take on hip hop is smart, provocative,
analytical, and gutsy."--Jill Nelson, author of Volunteer Slavery:
My Authentic Negro Experience
"[Tricia Rose is] a poetic voice of equanimity and strategic
anger...Rose has the capacity to parse out the different threads of
argument, examine them, and then tear them apart...The fact that
she's traveling the middle path here, neither defending nor
attacking hip hop, makes for a really nuanced, thought-provoking
reading...It's harder to write when you're not making grand
pronouncements and one-sided judgments. Rose does a beautiful
job."
--Feministing.com
"A loving, smart, and searing critique from the pioneer of Hip Hop
studies, The Hip Hop Wars breaks the impasse between those who
always regarded the music as the source of our contemporary moral
panic, and those hardcore defenders willing to justify anything in
the name of 'keeping it real.' Tricia Rose not only brings sanity
and intelligence to the debate, but at the back of every criticism,
complaint, and concern is a social justice agenda. If you care
about our future, read this book."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"A powerful blueprint for artists and community organizers who dare
reclaim the magnificence of hip-hop culture from the matrix of
mainstream distortions, The Hip-Hop Wars persuasively argues the
ways that hip-hop in the last decade has become synonymous with
Blackness. Hip-hop's most fierce cultural critic has given us an
essential tool for deciphering both hip-hop and race in a
post-racial global world."--Bakari Kitwana, author of Why White
Kids Love Hip-Hop
"In The Hip Hop Wars, Tricia Rose has thrown down the gauntlet and
taken up the brutal issues that confront hip hop culture.
Dispatching hip hop's haters and sycophants with equal skill, she
has given us a bracing and brilliant salvo from the front line of
hip hop's war for definition and survival."--Michael Eric Dyson
"In this impassioned and brilliant book, Tricia Rose shows how hip
hop has been harmed by both its friends and its foes, how the myths
spread by both its attackers and defenders hurt the people who
created hip hop in the first place. In an age where both government
policy and private profiteering have promoted the organized
abandonment of Black communities, debates about hip hop hide larger
agendas about race, sex, and money. The Hip Hop Wars exposes the
music industry and its myths, but even more important, explains
what we can and must do about them."--George Lipsitz, author of
Footsteps in the Dark
"Renowned cultural critic Rose ventures again into the world of
hip-hop and produces another work that should challenge common
feelings about the subject...It's Rose's convincing arguments and
challenges of assumptions that make this an important title."
--Library Journal
"The book's clear strength is Rose's strong voice and tight
research. Her exploration of the infamous Imus-gate, the effect of
governmental policies such as incarceration over rehabilitation,
and the question of what to expect from "role models" are all sound
and compelling...Rose is definitely a fair critic."
--Buffalo News
"Tricia Rose is the distinguished dean of hip hop studies in
America. Her recent book not only affirms this grand status but
also transforms our understanding of the present and future of hip
hop-and race-in America. Rose's courageous voice and progressive
vision are so badly needed at this time!"--Cornel West
"While the depth of Tricia Rose's analytical skills is
breathtaking, even more impressive is that at its heart, The Hip
Hop Wars is a hopeful, inspiring book that speaks to the necessity
of a community-centered vision for justice for all."--Henry Louis
Gates, Jr
"Works such as Rose's The Hip Hop Wars...based on a deep love for
the music and a concern for the people who make it, listen to it,
and care about it-we need a lot more of those."
--Current Musicology
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