Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop

Hip-hop is one of the most important global arts movements of the past two decades, moving beyond rap music to transform theater, dance, performance, poetry, literature, fashion, design, photography, painting, and film. Through essays, interviews, roundtable discussions, and more, Total Chaos provides a deep, incisive look at the hip-hop arts movement in the voices of its pioneers, innovators, and mavericks.

Buzz
“Total Chaos is Jeff Chang at his best: fierce and unwavering in his commitment to document the hip-hop explosion. In beginning to define a hip-hop aesthetic, this gathering of artists, pioneers, and thinkers illuminates the special truth that hip-hop speaks to youth around the globe.”
—Bakari Kitwana, author of The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture and Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, And the New Reality of Race in America

“Jeff Chang, whose Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is nothing less than the finest rap history extant, envisions a future in which the four hip-hop ‘elements’-MC’ing, DJ’ing, B-Boying, graffiti-generate a polycultural, transnational, sampled-and-bricolaged vanguard in theater, dance, poetry, fiction, painting, and design. Uncommonly inspired anthology…readable and provocative.”
-Robert Christgau, Rolling Stone

Read more here…

Book excerpt:

Hip-hop is one of the big ideas of this generation, a grand expression of our collective creative powers. But, when recognized at all, the hip-hop arts have often been divided into subcategorical themes—”spoken word poetry”, “street literature”, “post-multicultural theatre”, “post-black art”, “urban outsider art”—by critics trained to classify trees while lost in the forest. Perhaps this is simply because the hip-hop arts movement did not undertake to formally announce itself in such circles, as in Antonin Artaud’s 1938 manifesto The Theater And Its Double or the 1971 Black Arts Movement anthology, The Black Aesthetic. Perhaps this is simply because, despite all the interest in the talking, the hip-hop arts movement has been chiefly concerned with doing, which is just what it has done, organically, for over three decades now.

Ida: A Sword Among Lions

Read this interesting review of Paula J. Giddings’ book about the great Ida B. Wells. Reviewed by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. Here’s an excerpt:

Ida B. Wells was in England in 1894 when she heard that white Southerners had put a black woman in San Antonio, Tex., into a barrel with “nails driven through the sides and then rolled [it] down a hill until she was dead.” The 31-year-old Wells, a black Southerner, was seasoned to the widespread phenomenon of mob torture and murder that went by the shorthand “lynching”; in fact, she was abroad on a speaking tour denouncing it. Nonetheless, she shed tears over the latest “outrage upon my people.”

Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union

Paul and Stephen Kendrick recount the relationship between Fredrick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The authors present President Lincoln as a reluctant abolitionist whose three meetings with Douglass from 1863 to 1865 and further reading of Douglass’ writings encouraged Lincoln to believe that the Civil War could not be won without emancipation. Paul and Stephen Kendrick discuss their book at the Multicultural Student Services Center at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

Watch a discussion with the authors here.