![]() 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 ![]() Dance off the Inches: Hip Hop Party $14.98 I think this product is for beginners. I love to do physical exercises and I was looking for hip hop videos with coreography to have fun while doing the exercise...but it has been boring for me. Is like to be warming up during almost all the routine. |
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