How hip hop shapes our conversations about race -- and how race
influences our consideration of hip hop
Hip hop is a distinctive form of black art in America-from Tupac to the
Pulitzer Prize-winning Kendrick Lamar, hip hop has long given voice to
the African American experience. As scholar and cultural critic Tricia
Rose argues, hip hop, in fact, has become one of the primary ways we
talk about race in the United States.
But hip hop is in crisis. For years, the most commercially successful
hip hop has become increasingly saturated with caricatures of black
gangstas, thugs, pimps, and hos. This both represents and feeds a
problem in black American culture. Or does it? In The Hip-Hop Wars,
Rose explores the most crucial issues underlying the polarized claims on
each side of the debate: Does hip hop cause violence, or merely reflect
a violent ghetto culture? Is hip hop sexist, or are its detractors
simply anti-sex? Does the portrayal of black culture in hip hop
undermine black advancement?
A potent exploration of a divisive and important subject, The Hip Hop
Wars concludes with a call for the regalvanization of the progressive
and creative heart of hip hop. What Rose calls for is not a sanitized
vision of the form, but one that more accurately reflects a much richer
space of culture, politics, anger, and yes, sex, than the current
ubiquitous images in sound and video currently provide.
