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Can't Stop Won't Stop
A History Of The Hip Hop Generation
by Jeff Chang


9.0

based on 12 reviews
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based on 1 vote
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The music journalist chronicles the history of hip-hop music over the past three decades, from its Jamaican roots to its origins in New York in the 1970s and rap's steady gain in popularity since.

St. Martin's Press, 560 pages
02/01/2005
$27.95

ISBN: 031230143X

Nonfiction
Entertainment & Media

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

LA Weekly Scott T. Sterling

Extensively researched and meticulously written.

Village Voice Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien

Powerful... [Chang's] steely, economical style reveals the story inside rap, straight up without any rhythmic painkillers.

Publishers Weekly

[Chang] documents stories that have been left unrecorded until now, with the oral histories of the gangs and artists.

The New Yorker

[Can't Stop Won't Stop] is one of the most urgent and passionate histories of popular music ever written.

Booklist Mike Tribby

A fascinating, far-reaching must. [1 Feb 2005, p. 935]

Entertainment Weekly Raymond Fiore

Jeff Chang's sprawling collection of well-researched chronological essays smartly preserves and politicizes three decades of cultural history.

Salon Peter L'Oficial

Can't Stop Won't Stop reads like a history textbook -- albeit one of the cooler history textbooks you could find -- and that's a good thing.

Washington Post Adam Bradley

[Can't Stop Won't Stop] is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in hip-hop's context as well as its culture, and for anyone who would better understand the confounding mixture of activism and apathy that characterizes America's younger generations.

Daily Telegraph Danny Kelly

There is a fearless sweep to [Can't Stop Won't Stop]. As the narrative veers dizzyingly from content to context, from broad-brush assertion to the laser-focused insights of previously unheard voices, it's clear that there's no part of American life or recent history that Chang considers off-limits.

The Independent Ben Thompson

Weighty and ambitious.

The Onion A.V. Club Andy Battaglia

A rich sociological history of hip-hop.

The New York Times Book Review Alex Abramovich

[Chang's] provocative, intermittently brilliant history... [loses] its form and focus.

The average user rating for this book is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 1 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Nash gave it a9:
Not very many authors are able to balance the social backdrop to a generation where a genre was born. Jeff Chang did, if you're a hip-hop fan. This book needs to be read.

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Can't Stop Won't Stop A History Of The Hip Hop Generation by Jeff Chang

Can't Stop Won't Stop
A History Of The Hip Hop Generation
by Jeff Chang