Thanks in no small part to Rose herself, hip hop has also found a home in the academy. Remaining closely identified with urban, black youth (in ways that Rose describes as sometimes quite unhealthy), hip hop has become an aspect of self-definition for a widespread and diverse group of people, many of whom identify as part of the 'Hip-Hop Generation' united less by a period of birth than by a set of shared cultural practices (Kitwana 2002). Outside of the US, local hip-hop movements emerged around the world, whether in the form of a few MCs in a bedroom reciting Tupac lyrics in English, or a full-fledged scene in a local language and style. Within the US media landscape, hip hop music, fashion, and visual aesthetics became ubiquitous. The dress, music, dance, and visual style that grew up in the South Bronx not only took hold throughout American culture, but throughout cultures of the world.

As Tricia Rose tells it, these arguments have remained essentially static, even as hip hop experienced two remarkable-though opposing-developments.įirst, hip hop expanded. Defenders respond with rebuttals codified in the early 1990s, lauding the aesthetic value and social relevance of their favorite corners of the hip-hop world, eliding any problems inherent in the rest, and questioning the true motives of hip hop's critics. Critics of hip hop repeat the same attacks they leveled at NWA, decrying violence, misogyny, and homophobia in hiphop lyrics, and in the most extreme cases branding its creators as Typhoid Marys for a particularly virulent social pathology. New York: Basic/Civitas Books.Īs hip hop slowly settles into middle age, the pitched battles of its younger years have frozen in a stalemate. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop-And Why It Matters.

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