Review of Tricia Rose. 2008. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop-And Why It Matters . New York: Basic/Civitas Books

Abstract

As hip hop slowly settles into middle age, the pitched battles of its younger years have frozen in a stalemate. Critics of hip hop repeat the same attacks they leveled at NWA, decrying violence, misogyny, and homophobia in hip­ hop lyrics, and in the most extreme cases branding its creators as Typhoid Marys for a particularly virulent social pathology. 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. As Tricia Rose tells it, these arguments have remained essentially static, even as hip hop experienced two remarkable-though opposing-developments. First, hip hop expanded. 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. Within the US media landscape, hip hop music, fashion, and visual aesthetics became ubiquitous. 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. 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). Thanks in no small part to Rose herself, hip hop has also found a home in the academy. The "Hip-Hop University" that began with scholars like Rose (1994), Todd Boyd (1997), and Michael Eric Dyson (2001) has been populated with an ever growing list of names that includes Mark Anthony Neal (2004), Robin Kelley (1997), Bakari Kitwana (2002), Murray Forman (2004), Jeff Chang (2005), Imani Perry (2004), and dozens of others working across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. The number of courses on hip hop offered in the American universities reaches into the hundreds, and institutional forums for hip-hop scholarship like the Hiphop Archive at Harvard's W.E.B DuBois Institute and a variety of formal study groups for graduate students and more senior scholars have sprung up across the country.l