-In his award-winning book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, the journalist and academic Jeff Chang locates the foundations of hip hop in the social policies of ‘urban renewal’ pioneered by Robert Moses and the ‘benign neglect’ of Nixon’s administration. The building of New York’s Cross Bronx Expressway razed through many of the city’s ethnic neighbourhoods, destroying homes and jobs and displacing poor black and Hispanic communities in veritable wastelands like east Brooklyn and the South Bronx, while the government turned a blind eye to those affected. “Hip hop did not start as a political movement,” Chang tells BBC Culture. “There was no manifesto. The kids who started it were simply trying to find ways to pass the time, they were trying to have fun. But they grew up under the politics of abandonment and because of this, their pastimes contained the seeds for a kind of mass cultural renewal.”- bbc/culture/story/20130809-the-party-where-hip-hop-was-born
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 13:55:33 +0000