Hip-Hop Chaos In Context

Sorry for the delay in the blog, people. Families are amazing things. Spending time with them is chaos in control, or is that the other way around? But that's how things roll, so you roll with it. Same with hip-hop and journalism, which is what my latest pro piece tackles, this time for the cool kids at WireTap:

Hip-Hop Chaos In Context
"If you don't know, you better ask someone. And if you don't know hip-hop, you might want to ask Jeff Chang, to be exact. And that's not just because, as one of the foremost hip-hop scholars in existence today, he will actually take the time to think deeply about your questions and nicely deliver some well-researched answers. Rather, it's because ever since he came up in Hawaii in love with hip-hop and graffiti, and followed that formative start by managing the California-based indie-hop label Solesides (home to DJ Shadow and Blackalicious), he has lived the culture every minute and every hour of his still-young life. And that's how he likes it: Hip-hop as passive mainstream entertainment achieved via remote control is as corrosive to him as highbrow mainstreamers still dismissing the street-smart art. Both camps refuse to see how our hypercapitalism has made hip-hop the preferred mode of artistic expression in the new millennium, and how such commodity fetishism has sucked away some of its racial, economic and sociopolitical contexts.

These mind-bending issues of authenticity, identity and expression are tackled with ease in Chang's latest effort Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (Basic Civitas, 2007), an edited compilation featuring input from artists like DJ Spooky, Adam Mansbach, Danny Hoch and more, as well as bigshot journos like Greg Tate, Harry Allen, Oliver Wang, Mark Anthony Neal and onward. Put simply, Chang's book and mission is to make sense of both the fissures in hip-hop culture as well as the fusion, and do it humbly. He's that rare thing in scholarship circles: An approachable teacher. And for that, you can thank hip-hop..." MORE

Jeff is on tour forever, so make sure to stop in and work with him. He's committed to the form and he's committed to the history, so he's a walking library of information. And one of the coolest cats you'll ever meet. Win-win sitch.