The Vinyl Ain't Final examines hip-hop, as music, dance, business, politics and lifestyle, in the context of the global reach of black popular culture in the contemporary world. Divided into two sections – the first focussing on US hip-hop, the second on global variations – the collection includes essays by academics, journalists, political activists and hip-hop practitioners, and provides a breadth of opinion and diversity of subject matter that constitutes a valuable addition to the current body of work on hip-hop and black popular culture.
The essays focussing on hip-hop in the United States include poems by Umar Bin Hassan, an elder statesman of civil-rights era “proto-rap,” and reprinted essays by political activist and death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. While these works attest to the political potential of hip-hop, and locate US hip-hop within a history of black political resistance, the remaining essays on the contemporary US hip-hop scene emphasize the diversity of styles and ethnic and cultural influences at work in US hip-hop, as well as the complexity of relations of production and distribution in mainstream and underground music, and the diversions and connections between hip-hop as commodified product in the mass market and as lived experience. These essays include local genealogies of Bay Area hip-hop and Hawaiian groups, and analyses of the politics of gender in US hip-hop, hip-hop iconography and the criminalization of a black underclass, and the role of Islam in hip-hop's political expression. Together, these essays challenge any representation of US hip hop as monolithically “American” or even “African American.”
Addressing the global reach of hip-hop as a musical and cultural style, the rest of the collection brings together an impressive range of cultural and national case studies, including work on Britain, France, Germany, Cuba, Samoa, Japan, Tanzania and South Africa. Moving beyond restrictive readings of the “Americanization” of global culture and the politics of black cultural authenticity, these essays analyse the indigenization of hip-hop in a variety of local and national settings, including the complex national and cultural locations of second-generation immigrants in Europe, and the multiple and strategic articulations of “black” identity in a globalized world.
