Hip Hop

Hip Hop For Kids: School House Hip Hop (Dance)
$19.99
It looks like a cheap home made video and probably it is. There are no teaching methods aplied to the making of the video. My son is really into hip-hop but he didn't like it. Now I need to find a better product. Any recomendations?

It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation
$14.99
I was hip hop. A `70s baby, my teenage years stretched across hip
hop's awakening into proud and empowering lyrical expression. It
was a chain link of similarities, connecting the dots of every urban
experience, expressing the voice of every ghetto. Like Common, I
used to love H.E.R. But then, somewhere in my twenties, she abandoned
me. I became nothing more than a groupie, a video accessory and a
derogatory term. And my male counterparts became
unrecognizable, fake shadows of long forgotten pimps and, "keeping
it real," fools.

M.K. Asante remarkably captures the incredulous struggle that those
like me, the post hip hop generation, face when reconciling past hip
hop loyalty with current hip hop disdain.
IT'S BIGGER THAN HIP HOP is a classic work, a creative and
innovative approach to examining what hip hop was and is, and how
its growth and subsequent stagnation affect generations.

An example of his entertaining approach is demonstrated in Chapter
3, What's Really Hood?, when M.K. Asante engages in a colorful and
testy interview with "the ghetto." Yes, the ghetto finally speaks
and he has some truth to spread. As "the ghetto" explains his
history dating back from 1611, correlating past "ghettoization" with
modern Urban Renewal, he reminds the post hip hop generation of the
ignorance in blaming the poor for poverty.

In Chapter 10, Two Sets of Notes, M.K. Asante captures the struggle
of being taught incomplete truths, being fooled by "selective
memory," losing who we are as a people inside of the incessant white
lies. His poem reminded me of my public school frustration, when
black and brown history was a footnote on the school agenda and I
had to join the Youth NAACP and, to my Baptist mother's horror, the
Nation of Islam seminars in an attempt to learn about me.

M.K. Asante won me over early on, when he articulated how the reel
becomes the real. It's an argument you thought you heard before, but
never quite applied in this way. But M.K. Asante's logic makes
perfect sense, especially if you, like me, often wonder why a
suburban black boy tries so hard to be "thug life" or a middle class
black child works overtime to prove his "realness." It's a mind-
boggling epidemic that I never understood, until now.

IT'S BIGGER THAN HIP HOP speaks candidly to the post hip hop
generation, challenging us to take a deeper look and a more
introspective approach into who and what we really are, reminding us
that the struggle is ever present.

Reviewed by a. Kai
for The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
$17.00
This is an amazing book. The research that goes into creating such a detailed history is nothing short of spectacular. Tracing the various threads that came together to create hip-hop, in all its myriad forms, is a staggering accomplishment. While, as Mr. Chang himself notes, one cannot create a definitive history of hip-hop, this does an excellent job of covering the first two decades of this art form.

Sadly, as with many histories that try to encompass such broad topics, it does eventually start to slip. Much of this is likely due to the absolutely explosion of hip-hop during the late 80s and early 90s. There is simply too much to cover. While it is perhaps silly to be bothered by the exclusion or lack of attention to certain important groups (Tupac and Biggie being some of the most notable), the material does become much thinner as the book moves into the 90s.

Personally, I would have been happy if the book had cut off somewhere around 1991 and eventually been left as the first volume of an ongoing series. There is much material left to cover and it is also much more difficult to write about events without sufficient time to generate perspective.

With that said, I would heartily recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about the birth of hip-hop. It is an engaging read that was difficult to put down. I know that I have a much greater appreciation for the history surrounding this art form now than I did before reading Mr. Chang's opus.

Millennium Hip-Hop Party
$18.98
These totally 90s stars appear disguised as a millenium dance party. I really like G Thing and Baby Got Back, maybe Humpty Dance, overall just a shallow not satisfying compilation to retain your sense of humor. Whites are a minority.