Hip-hop occupies an interesting place in contemporary American culture. Its presence is pervasive. Songs by rap and R&B artists dominate the Billboard charts and MTV airwaves, and hip-hop's street-smart styles wield considerable influence in the artistic and commercial realms of fashion. Yet hip-hop lacks a definitive voice in contemporary cultural and sociological studies, often marginalized as a localized movement with little non-temporal relevance.
The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture is Bakari Kitwana's contribution to this significant but often neglected niche in contemporary American culture. It's equal parts generational manifesto, pop culture study and social tract. Kitwana primarily focuses on what he labels the "hip-hop generation," a classification of African-American men and women born between 1965 and 1984. He devotes whole chapters to a host of problematic issues that affect their lives: activism, employment, gender relations, legal rights and politics. While the book has its weaknesses, its argumentative thoughtfulness and passionate energy leave the strongest impression on the reader.
Kitwana repeatedly toes the line between eloquent prose and readable pop non-fiction. For all the matter-of-fact humor and vitality of hip-hop, his objectives are serious, and he treats them accordingly. He conveys the weight of his subject matter to the reader without taking a proselytizing approach. His language is clear but not overly simplistic; smart but not patronizing. It makes for a decidedly enjoyable and informative reading experience.
His passionate approach to his subject is endearingly sincere, but at the same time, it threatens to become too earnest. The book is partially a call for action on the part of African-American youths, and its tone reflects that objective. Kitwana's sincerity illuminates his writing and adds to its quality. However, his sincerity becomes heavy-handedness in certain parts and disrupts his pacing and fluidity of thought. His intentions are consistently admirable, but the same can't be said of the way he presents them to the reader.
His research is thorough, as demonstrated by the numerous references to cultural figures, historical events and sociological theory, but the sheer volume of information verges on saturation. Kitwana's approach to his subject is partially academic, and he fills his pages with analyses of information drawn from cultural studies, history, politics, psychology and sociology. These facts and figures add considerable weight to his arguments, but also affect their clarity. Dates, names and statistics are omnipresent to a point where they become the focus of the text rather than the ideals that they support.
Finally, potential readers ought to know that the book is less a study of hip-hop music than a study of the generation that birthed it and brought it into the mainstream. Kitwana names a number of hip-hop artists throughout the book, and he even devotes considerable sections of chapters to the murders of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Nevertheless, this material is primarily supplementary and serves to shape his arguments regarding culture and society in a culturally familiar context to his readers.
In The Hip Hop Generation, the cultural movement behind the music has a testimonial that is as serious and as relevant as hip-hop itself.
