Prometheus 6

'All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America' by John McWhorter
Hip-hop is too politically impotent to make a difference, the author writes.
By Adam Mansbach
Special to The Times
June 19, 2008

Simultaneously smug and beleaguered, "All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America" raises the question: Who, exactly, is claiming it can? No one -- academic, artist or critic -- has made any such argument since roughly 1988. This puts Manhattan Institute senior fellow John McWhorter in the awkward position of playing provocateur to an empty house, and gives his prose the tone of a petulant undergrad being shouted down in a dorm lounge. It also raises serious doubts about his engagement with either hip-hop or the large body of scholarship about it....

[P6: Bunch of stuff in the middle you should go read]