Jeff Chang: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Written over five years and exploring more than three decades of social and cultural change, this is an impressive, informative, and important book (St. Martin’s Press; 560 pgs; $27.95) with only a few minor but frustrating flaws. An experienced and highly engaged hip-hop journalist, Chang does three things particularly well here: he acutely defines hip hop’s relationship to the economic environment that produced it (“If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work”); he chronicles how technological advancements changed the game (“The sound systems democratized pleasure and leisure by making dance entertainment available to the downtown sufferers and strivers”); and he illustrates how other cultural products—reggae and Spike Lee joints, Enter the Dragon and Beat Street, b-boy dancing and train art—shaped hip hop’s growth.
While Chang is well armed with juicy quotes from the major players (Chuck D: “Our interviews were better than most people’s shows”; Ice T: “Rap is really funny, man. But if you don’t see that it’s funny, it will scare the shit out of you”), he seems less interested in giving fair voice to those ‘the man’ men who hip-hoppers felt like they were up against. The book would’ve gained from more first-person commentary by authorities—be they police involved with newsworthy riots and raids or public officials trying to deal with the problems created by graffiti—who are often made to look like one-dimensional squares who don’t get it.
This aside, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop is fascinating reading. The story of hip hop’s international rise has many of the same elements of other stories of artistic creation: scrappy, outsider artists trying to handle their entry into the system; the public’s screw-that reaction to new styles (it happened to Stravinsky and Grandmaster Flash); and the artists themselves trying to play the game but stay true to themselves.
For the young and forming Chuck D, this last element was a source of great inner conflict. When Def Jam president Rick Rubin came calling, Chuck D responded this way: “Mom! Tell him I’m not home. Tell him I don’t wanna make no stupid goddamn records!” With such urgency and skills, why would Chuck say no? “Yo I need to make some radical moves. And that’s not radical enough.”
Soon enough, of course, Chuck D would respond in the way pioneering artists did before him: by remaking the game itself.
