Books Reveal True Hip Hop, Chapter & Verse

Hatip Bookerising

The New York Daily News moderate-conservative columnist writes: "I have seen three new books that should be looked at by anyone interested in the degree of precise, imprecise and naive thought brought to the matter or that avoids the facts of the matter. Tayannah Lee McQuillar's 'When Rap Music Had a Conscience' is a perfect example of precision, confusion and extraordinary intellectual laziness. 'Pimps Up, Ho's Down' by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is much more intellectually rigorous but gets caught in academic language and feminist cliches. 'Beats, Rhymes, & Life: What We Love And Hate About Hip Hop' is an anthology edited by Kenji Jasper and Ytasha Womack that spans the gamut from extremely clear criticism and analysis to some of the looniest excuses I have ever read given for anything.

The problem with McQuillar's work is that while she is critical of the thug extremes and the prison values that mislead too many young black people, she provides a chapter, 'The Sacred Scrolls,' that is overladen with Afrocentric claptrap and shoddy propaganda presented as if it is real scholarship. Sharpley-Whiting's book does not suffer from the sort of cowardice one too often hears from black academics who genuflect to hip hop in order to stay current with the tastes of the students who provide them with whatever power they have on college campuses. Sharpley-Whiting calls them as she sees them and wisely quotes the offensive material when necessary. Her book is high level in its research and its thought, and those looking for adult ideas about the subject should look it up.

"He continues: "All in all, however, we are seeing something rising up from the ground and moving through the bling and the smoke machines to ask only that we Americans recognize what is happening to our young people and understand that part of the reason it exists is that popular culture at large has far too frequently substituted sensation, pornography and shock for the mysteries and the grandeur of human feeling. In that sense, for all of its violent minstrelsy, the worst of hip hop is just following the pack."