Nonfiction
Author: Patrick Neate
Published: August 2004
Pages: 274
Publisher: Riverhead
What does a 30-something, British white guy have to say about the current state of affairs in hip-hop? More than you might think. Patrick Neate has been a self-described hip-hop head since his fascination with the music began in the ’80s, and his curiosity and love for the genre and culture led him on a journey around the world to see what was up.
Neate begins his cultural pilgrimage with a visit to New York, birthplace of hip-hop, where he finds an industry that keeps the genre under such tight control that smaller labels there are targeting primarily overseas markets. His journey to Tokyo leaves him questioning the legitimacy of hip-hop fandom there, as he witnesses the outrageously hip Japanese youth hungrily consuming African American culture as they strive for redefinition in a post-industrialized world. As he travels, the author subtly reworks his own understanding (and the reader’s) of what it means to be “real.” Perhaps that’s why he isn’t surprised anymore when a “Tokyo teenager greets him with ‘Word up, dog’” or when he meets a “white Afrikaaner rapping in a suit and tie.” Neate globe-trots and muses over the cultural communication that hip-hop is fostering, all the while taking copious notes on how that communication is being utilized. From its left-wing political role in France and Italy to its use in South Africa and Brazil as a postcolonial tool for reshaping notions of race and identity, hip-hop is changing the world.
By the end, Neate’s work coalesces into something far more important than a snapshot documentary of hip-hop today. Linking globalization, political struggle, race, identity, and alienation, the author constructs an entire worldview through the distinct lens of hip-hop. He offers us hip-hop as an international, cultural medium of the people; something a rapidly globalizing planet is in sore need of.
