CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP (YOUNG ADULT EDITION)

A 2005 classic charting hip-hop’s rise to global prominence—while navigating the entanglements of race, class, politics, and poetics that lie at its heart—gets a long-overdue redux.

Two veteran cultural critics bring the history of hip-hop to younger readers in 2021 as the infinite futures of the genre continue to expand. Readers can feel the seeds of Chang’s cultural organizing within the storytelling of this tour de force while Cook brings his decades of experience as a pioneering hip-hop journalist to give new color to this edition. They write of hip-hop’s birth in the figurative and all-too-literal fires of Kingston, Jamaica, and the South Bronx before becoming the world’s most significant youth cultural influence. Hip-hop founding father DJ Kool Herc reminds readers of the dualities of fun and responsibility at its core in the introduction. Chapters comb through the movement’s antecedents in the 1960s, traveling from coast to coast, through the South and all around the world. The authors show the oft-underrepresented ways that Black women have shaped hip-hop, and new chapters chart its championing in the 21st century as a lifestyle built around being anti-establishment grappled with commercial success, political influence, and social change during the 2020 summer of Covid and mass protest. In addition to satisfying committed fans, this stellar work could function as a supplementary text within any social studies narration of the post–civil rights–era U.S.

Required history for young hip-hop heads—and everyone else.