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Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2007.
With Hip-Hop Revolution, Jeffrey Ogbar's second book, the author enters into the hotly contested debate over the cultural politics and effects of the American popular culture phenomenon of hip-hop. Ogbar approaches this "unprecedented global cultural juggernaut" (10) with an historical perspective, often contextualizing elements of hip-hop aesthetic in earlier twentieth-century aspects of African American cultural production and civil-rights issues, while also employing close readings of a vast repertoire of hip-hop lyrics, videos, and personas. Central to every argument in this five-chapter book is the insistence that hip-hop is not monolithic in its artistic manifestations, meanings, intentions, or means of consumption. The book's controlling question explores the ever-shifting nature of discourses of authenticity, which Ogbar reveals to be at the center of hip-hop aesthetic. Ogbar grounds his work in the large body of writing on hip-hop history, particularly singling out JeffChang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, and clarifies his focus on the political and social landscape of musical verse in hip-hop, rather than on a comprehensive study of all components of hip-hop arts (including graffiti, break-dance, Disc Jockeying and MCing). Another qualifying factor submitted by the author is that the book "is not . . . a heavily theoretical cultural studies work" (6). Indeed, the work engages with theoretical political concepts such as hegemony and institutionalized racism without being incomprehensible to a reader unversed in highly academic theoretical jargon.
After a concise introduction, chapter one, "Hip-Hop and the Evolution of the Black Image" explores the debate over representations of blackness in the hip-hop industry. Ogbar contextualizes the debate by providing a history of the minstrel figure in American popular culture, relying particularly on the work of W. T. Lhamon and Patricia Hill Collins. He then demonstrates how the earliest manifestations of hip-hop music in the 1970s grew out of the Black Power movement and often included direct rejections of minstrel tropes (such as in KRS-One's "My Philosophy"). Before embarking on a chronological study of the internal debates among rappers over their relationships with the minstrel trope, Ogbar identifies...