It's Bigger Than Hip Hop
The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation
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It's Bigger Than Hip Hop takes a bold look at the rise of a generation that sees beyond the smoke and mirrors of corporate-manufactured hip hop and is building a movement that will change not only the face of pop culture, but the world. M.K. Asante, Jr., a young firebrand poet, professor, filmmaker, and activist who represents this new movement, uses hip hop as a springboard for a larger discussion about the urgent social and political issues affecting the post-hip-hop generation, a new wave of youth searching for an understanding of itself outside the self-destructive, corporate hip-hop monopoly. Through insightful anecdotes, scholarship, personal encounters, and conversations with youth across the globe as well as icons such as Chuck D and Maya Angelou, Asante illuminates a shift that can be felt in the crowded spoken-word joints in post-Katrina New Orleans, seen in the rise of youth-led organizations committed to social justice, and heard around the world chanting "It's bigger than hip hop."
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2.5
More of a polemic than a chronicling of the post-hip hop moment.
I'm definitely reading it outside its intended milieu— a non-black adult reading it a decade after publication. So I am aware that some of the issues that twigged me may not bother other readers.
Some chapters were solid ethnographic and historic discussions, and sections of exhortation were really strong. But the pacing was thrown off by the faux-interviews and the author's personal meanderings.
It was striking to me that even while arguing for a post-colonial Afrocentric eduction, Asante rarely, if at all, mentioned pre-colonial black figures in his history lessons. Marcus Garvey was mentioned more than once, but not Mansa Musa or even Shaka Zulu.
An entire star off for casual antisemitism— why did there need to be a digression about wanting Mos Def's possibly-antisemitic song to be published? it was very visible that he named an antagonistic music producer as Jewish, but Elie Wiesel and Emma Goldman were “Romanian” and “Lithuanian”.
