Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop has been a generation-defining global movement. In a post–civil rights era rapidly transformed by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop gave voiceless youths a chance to address these seismic changes, and became a job-making engine and the Esperanto of youth rebellion. Hip-hop crystallized a multiracial generation's worldview, and forever transformed politics and culture. But the epic story of how that happened has never been fully told . . . until now.

Praise

"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

 

"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

 

"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

 

"Chang tells these stories beautifully . . . provocative."--The New York Times Book Review

 

"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

"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

About the Author(s)

By Jeff Chang and D.J. Kool Herc

Jeff Chang has been a hip-hop journalist for more than a decade and has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, Vibe, The Nation, URB, Rap Pages, Spin, and Mother Jones. He was a founding editor of Colorlines Magazine, senior editor at Russell Simmons’s 360hiphop.com, and cofounder of the influential hip-hip label SoleSides, now Quannum Projects. He lives in California.

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