Damn...this is the shit I've been waiting for. Don't think I've ever been exposed to an academic conversation about hip-hop. To be honest, I've been on my ignant boom-bap for the past semester. Yet I've been waiting on this drop for months. Born to Use Mics, an engagement and commentary on THE greatest album of all time, and I encourage argument to that.
I'm biased, I admit. Illmatic is that album I grew up on, a casette that my brother played continuously on his stereo until his shit ate the tape. It Ain't Hard to Tell proved to be the mood music for gloomy days where the clouds greyed like the concrete that niggas dropped their blunt ashes on. Life's a Bitch seemed to be the existential crisis that every glock-toting brotha seemed to struggle with. I grew up with this soundtrack I did not understand until I bought it for myself.
Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai pay homage to the first album I bought, my favvvv-orite shit. They break down the desolation it exposes of the trife of a young black man checking his dreams in the post-Civil Rights Movement. The crack epidemic. The Bush, Reagan, and Clinton years. I'm only few chaps in, but it is a must read if you love hip-hop and want to see it live and breathe on.
"It was hip-hop, not Roosevelt's New Deal or Johnson's War on Poverty, that was 'the last great social program of the 20th century.'" C'mon son.
To Buy: http://www.amazon.com/Born-Use-Mics-Reading-Illmatic/dp/0465002110#noop
Update: Professor Daulatzai gave a lecture at my school...and I missed it. FML
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