Hyphenate This! Where's the Hip in Hip Hop Again?

"I HAVE HAD A DREAM"

Excerpt from January 18, 2007 Can't Stop Won't Stop email Newsletter by Jeff Chang:

THE HIP-HOP BLOG YOU DON'T HAVE TO HATE

Over the last four years, the Can't Stop Won't Stop blog has become one of the best loved rest-spots on the hip-hop information superhighway. No BS, no faux outrage, no bland recountings of uneventful weekends.

Emphasis here on the phrase "the hip hop blog you don't have to hate." When a foremost hip hop blogger and theorist has to sell himself that way, has hip hop lost its hipness?

Meanwhile Cora Daniels just published Ghetto Nation: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and the Heart of the Shameless. Excerpt from her website:

With Ghettonation, acclaimed journalist and author, Cora Daniels, takes on one of the most explosive issues in our country today in this thoughtful critique of America's embrace of a ghetto persona that is demeaning to women, devalues education, celebrates the worst African American stereotypes, and contributes to the destruction of civil peace.

And:

Her investigation exposes the central role of corporate America in exploiting the idea of ghettoness as a hip cultural idiom, despite its disturbing ramifications, as a means of making money. She showcases Black rappers raised in privileged families who have taken on the ghetto persona and sold millions of albums.

Are we finally fed up?

Top: "I Had a Dream" (my title) by Mr. Case
Bottom: Cora Daniels, courtesy www.coradaniels.com

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