Where To Buy The Hip-Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip-Hop--and Why It Matters

Having recently discussed _The Hip Hop Wars_ with numerous students and people, it has become increasingly clear to me how necessary Rose's arguments are to the hyperbolic and contentious context currently shaping the national conversation on hip hop. The book's most significant contribution is to demonstrate that hip hop is so heavily coded with implied and symbolic meanings; and that we can no longer afford to think of hip hop simply as "innocent music and artistry." Nor is it enough that there are numerous underground artists doing something different than what mainstream hip hop promotes.

If the history of this country wasn't so fraught with old and new forms of racism, perhaps that approach to hip hop would be possible. Instead, we have a context in which hip hop is constantly made to stand in as a representation of all black people and to stand in for various forms of "deviance." Rose demonstrates how representations circulated by mainstream hip hop allow people to excuse themselves from dealing with their own complicity in racism, sexism, homophobia and systemic inequality. By taking both hip hop's critics and defenders to task, Rose insists that there are very real consequences to leaving these matters unaddressed.

Stepping into a club and seeing the ways so many men and women, boys and girls of all races mimic what they see in mainstream hip hop representations tells us that the 'hip hop trinity' is schooling youth to interact in ways that often reinforce sexism/racism/homophobia while leaving the larger forces that drive systemic inequality invisible.

One of the things I have witnessed consistently in discussing _The Hip Hop Wars_ is how people will often fall back into the rhetoric of either the critics or the defenders of hip hop as they talk about the book. Though Rose takes the time to outline the mutual denials that both critics and defenders have left intact, people's refusal to detach themselves from their investments in the current state of mainstream hip hop often takes us back into the same spiraling cycle. Because after all, isn't mainstream hip hop tremendously useful for allowing numerous investments to remain intact? One can hold onto his or her investment in racist projections of 'pathology', because this allows them to evade the ways they are complicit in perpetuating systemic inequality. One can hold onto their investment in racist projections of 'sexual deviance,' because this helps one disavow the practices and policies that perpetuate women of color's vulnerability to violence and inequality. One can hold onto sexist projections of 'hoes,' because this allows investments in destructive forms of masculine power to remain intact. One can hold onto their investments in the capital and wealth derived from mainstream hip hop by saying that performers are just 'artists', because this helps people distance themselves from the ways life chances are systematically being stripped away from youth in devastated communities.

And my favorite, one can claim to be THE exception to this context, miraculously outside of the world of mainstream hip hop even as it pervades the culture, people's interactions and assumptions everywhere (see Drew's review above).

Rose is most powerful in her call to move beyond this spiraling cycle toward transformative action--both in the industry, the music, in ourselves, and in mass social action toward systemic equality. But only a few are fearless enough to take on that call.Get more detail about The Hip-Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip-Hop--and Why It Matters.