It's Bigger Than Hip Hop

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”.