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Peace Tamara,

I've been really enjoying Country Fried Soul. There's lots to love about your book. One thing I really dig is how you designed it to be explicitly hip-hop. I really love your mixtape concept. It's like the funk is in the format, too!

That's what is also interesting to me about hip-hop writing. First off, there's a huge variety of styles—as many as there are MCs or graf writers or DJ or b-girl/b-boy styles--and mad quality to be had. Don't believe me? Check Raquel Cepeda's incredible anthology And It Don't Stop or Oliver Wang's Classic Material. (And anyone who doesn't believe "real" journalism, the kind that takes risks and changes lives, is happening in hip-hop should check Cheo Hodari Coker's biography of Biggie or anything by Elizabeth Mendez-Berry.)

I'm not even getting to Bakari Kitwana or Mark Anthony Neal or Tricia Rose's cultural criticism or Danyel or Adam Mansbach or Jee Kim's lit or Joe Schloss, Cheryl Keyes, or Raquel Z. Rivera's scholarship. I could go on mentioning peers like this who inspire me for days...

To be honest, I would never say that the majority of what's being published in magazines or in books now is classic material. But it's always been like that. Even the so-called Golden Age of Hip-Hop produced its share of wack shit. (To all you 80s revivalist audiobloggers who don't believe me, I have crates and crates in my garage to prove it.) I don't have any good reason to read about 98% of the writing I did in the 90s ever again.

But the point is most folks get better with time, indeed some folks get really good, and as a result, it feels like there's a lot of style, knowledge, and just straight-up kick-ass writing out there right now. I'm proud of us for that.

I think it's just going to keep on getting better. The other day, I counted more than a dozen books out from my peers and friends in the past 12 months. The publishing industry is waking up to the quality of our stuff. And even if you don't like my writing or the next person's, there's another voice you need to hear right around the corner. That's hip-hop...

One thing you got me thinking about was what makes our writing hip-hop. Because even if I was writing about the revaluation of the yuan, I'd still say my shit was hip-hop. And I'm interested in trying to figure out why, and asking others how they see it as well…it's what I'm trying to do with this current project on the aesthetics of hip-hop. What makes hip-hop journalism or hip-hop theater or hip-hop pedicures hip-hop?

For me, I've been messing around with storytelling, sentence structure, internal rhyme, flow, voices, layering. It's not just rap music that influences me—it's everything: what it would read like to successfully capture, say, the warmth and humanity of a Brett Cook-Dizney piece, the ignition and surprise of a Rokafella floor routine, the shrewdness and ambition of a Jay-Z power move?

Not that anyone can read this in my writing—usually I suck, and I'm really not that confident at this yet. But it is something I am conscious of when I write and rewrite and edit. Do you obsess about any of this stuff too?

Questions, questions, always got questions.

Peace,

Jeff

Posted by Jeff Chang at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

Hey Jeff,

I'm sorry it took a while to reply to you, though it looks like people have used my absence to get a discussion going. In some ways that has actually helped me to come up with what I want to say here, for it's that same opinionated spirit that these people are expressing that makes writing about hip-hop interesting. More so than other musical genres, writing about hip-hop opens you up into such a vulnerable space simply because there are always people who will tell you if they think you are full of shit for what you are saying.

I've told you this before, but it was somewhat of a terrifying challenge to write the Dirty South book for so many reasons. Not only is it my first book but it's the first to tackle this subject (and I pray not the last). I had an overriding fear that my work would not appear credible to those who have chronicled the culture for many years. That shit kept me up at night at times!

But I turned that fear and dread into a positive as I let it drive me to work as hard as I could to come up with an approach that was appropriate to my place as a fan and an outsider. In the end, more people have said good things about my effort than bad-and even most of the criticism has come from supportive and kind-hearted places.

Hip-hop's tough love is helping me become a better writer and reporter, and I love it for that. I'm starting to see that I can have a valid role in the development of the literary end of hip-hop by helping artists and others in the community tell their stories and to help them tell their own stories as well. More than a few people I talked to during the course of writing my book mentioned interest in putting their own books together. I was particularly impressed when 8Ball of 8Ball and MJG fame mentioned an arsenal of poetry! I'd love to help catalyze these kinds of book projects for people.

Answering your question of how hip-hop has changed my life is difficult at best. I was born the year that Kool Herc perfected the loss of his accent and started to seriously throw down in New York, as I learned from your book. My life seems like a hip-hop pastiche of sorts, even though I grew up in the suburbs and only started to become versed in city life as a young adult. That's testament to the reach of hip-hop.

Pivotal moments in my early hip-hop history: At age 10 I soaked up Breakin' and Beat Street and challenged a fifth grade classmate to a break-off (I don't think I won). I jammed off of those same synth grooves that Afrika Bambaataa did, and I saw Grandmaster Flash mixing records on TV and longed to integrate the technique into the pause-button mixtapes I was making. And then when I was about 12, I saw these kids from right here in the Bay Area on a local TV show called Home Turf. They were probably 15-16, something like that, and they were DJing their little hearts out. Their names were QBert and Mixmaster Mike. I can't flex records like they do, but what amazing role models to have behind the decks at an early age, right?

Still, as a kid I never really felt like a part of hip-hop, rather an observer of it. It's not like I was in New York dodging third rails or anything like that, so that's why I felt that way. As an adult so many years later I'm just beginning to find my voice within the culture.

The element of DJing as introduced to me by hip-hop has been the most influential on me in my work, whether I'm actually writing about hip-hop or not. Country Fried Soul is what I like to call a mixtape in book form: You can read it in any order, and it's got an A-Side (interviews and reflections on the culture) and a B-Side (reference material and recommendations). It has that same sort of cut-and-paste aesthetic. Writing this book made me realize how much that defines all of the writing I do.

Hip-hop has influenced my whole life in a profound way. It's how I sensibly patch together my strange palette of musical and cultural interests and influences. Even if some people think I'm full of shit -- which, in this incredibly incisive blog-i-verse, is not unlikely. But that's okay, for we're hopefully all in it for a good discussion.

Anyway, congratulations on winning an American Book Award! I'm glad people are recognizing your significant work, and I hope it continues to do well for you. I look forward to the next leg of our chat and promise my reply won't be so long and timid in the making!

Thanks,
Tamara

Posted by Tamara Palmer at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (46)