You won’t find much about rap music in Jeff Chang’s
new book ““ which would be pretty normal if it weren’t a
history of hip-hop.
Chang, who earned his master’s degree in Asian American
studies from UCLA in 1995, will be taking his promotional tour of
“Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop
Generation” to the Kerckhoff Hall State Rooms (131-135) on
Feb. 11.
A hip-hop journalist for over 10 years, Chang has written for
several publications, from The Village Voice to Vibe, served as
senior editor/director of Russell Simmons’ 360hiphop.com, and
co-founded the influential hip-hop label Solesides. Friday’s
event, a book signing and multimedia presentation free and open to
the public, is cosponsored by the UCLA Asian American Studies
Center and UCLA Asian Pacific Coalition.
Chang calls the book a history of hip-hop’s content within
a description of its context.
“Hip-hop is much bigger than rap music,” he
explained. “It covers everything from the way you tie your
shoes to whether or not you want to vote. It’s a way of
looking at the world.”
In his book, Chang details the sociohistorical background
responsible for a culture and world view adopted by an extensive
number of people born during and after the civil rights era.
“There’s a lot of stuff that’s happened in the
last three decades that separates what this generation sees as our
world from their world. Things have changed, and a distinct point
of view has emerged,” he said.
Chang’s experience in ethnic studies is apparent in his
approach of recovering voices marginalized from the mainstream.
More conventional histories of hip-hop might begin with the
recording of “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, or Kool
Herc’s invention of the breakbeat ““ the practice of
stretching a brief instrumental portion of, say, a James Brown song
into several minutes via turntables ““ in the early
’70s, but Chang starts with the nationwide inner city
abandonment that began in the Bronx in 1968.
“The city was pulling services out ““ schools, fire
stations ““ so kids ended up on the streets,” he said.
“It really was amazing that folks in this generation were
able to create (something) out of nothing.”
In his interviews with Kool Herc and his family, Chang went a
step further, uncovering the ironic effect of his immigrant
experience on his musical ambitions.
“For Herc, being able to play James Brown and Nat King
Cole songs was a way for him to become Americanized and lose his
accent. So in a weird way, a lot of the motivation for hip-hop
getting started came from this Americanization process,” he
said.
As for the context of Chang’s book itself, it can be
traced back to his beginnings as a hip-hop journalist in 1991, the
same year Ice Cube’s controversial “Death
Certificate” was released. Chang, who is an Asian/Pacific
Islander of Chinese and Hawaiian descent, remembers being both
shocked and saddened by the track “Black Korea,” in
which an angry Ice Cube launches into a venomous and threatening
diatribe against Korean small-business owners.
“My journey through hip-hop has been shaped by my
relationship with that record,” Chang said.
He wrote one of his first papers on “Death
Certificate,” and his idea of a book about the topic and the
race, culture and politics behind it eventually expanded in scope
into “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.”
Chang only considered writing the book, however, when Solesides,
a music label he co-founded that helped to launch the careers of
friends such as DJ Shadow, Blackalicious and Lateef the Truth
Speaker, disintegrated in 1997. The collective re-formed as Quannum
Projects, but without Chang.
“I was pretty much a failure on the business end of
things,” he admitted laughingly. “I got to see some
friends become pretty big stars, but I’m a better writer than
I ever was a businessman.”
Chang hopes that skill will come to some good, having already
garnered critical acclaim and a mention on MTV.
“I hope for a better dialogue between generations. Some of
the motivation of the book was from frustration, in terms of
looking at the way discussions have gone about between generations
about different points of view. There is a serious break between
the generations that needs to be healed.”