In Negro Soy Yo Marc D. Perry explores Cuba’s hip hop movement as a window into the racial complexities of the island’s ongoing transition from revolutionary socialism toward free-market capitalism. Centering on the music and lives of black-identified raperos (rappers), Perry examines the ways these young artists craft notions of black Cuban identity and racial citizenship, along with calls for racial justice, at the fraught confluence of growing Afro-Cuban marginalizatio...

Can't Stop Won't Stop is a powerful cultural and social history of the end of the American century, and a provocative look into the new world that the hip-hop generation created.Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's wor...

A docu-style investigation of our fascination with the gun, from the perspective of the hip-hop generation.The 2003 shooting death of Toronto community-centre worker Kempton Howard put the spotlight on hip hop’s fixation with guns. Media and police soon blamed rap music and its tales of gang life on bullet-ridden US streets for the rising use of firearms in Canadian crime. Were these songs artful accounts of a terrible truth, or a self-fulfilling prophecy?Rodrigo Bascunan a...

*Includes a Suggested Playlist of some of Pac's lesser known songs. *Discusses both the New York shooting and Las Vegas shooting in detail, explaining who was likely responsible for the shooting.*Discusses the beefs during Pac's life and the various conspiracy theories surrounding his death. *Includes a Table of ContentsAt the renowned Coachella music festival in 2012, crowds looked on with awe and stunned silence as the worlds most famous rapper took the stage to deliver a fiery performance ...

The untold story of the world's most controversial album---a surreal tale of secret recordings, the Wu-Tang Clan, baffled customs agents, the world's most hallowed art institutions, and a villain of comic book proportions: Martin Shkreli.In 2007, the innovative young Wu-Tang producer, Cilvaringz, took an incendiary idea to his mentor the RZA. They felt that the impact of digitization threatened the sustainability of the record industry and independent artists, while...

With never before seen photos and interviews and dedicated to the memory of Big Proof, the founder of D12 and Eminem, this book will take you deep into the heart of the Detroit Ghetto with Eminem long before D12 and the Aftermath with D12. With over 100 million albums sold worldwide and Academy Awards, Grammy Awards, American Music Awards, ASCAP Music Awards, Billboard Music Awards, Gold and Platinum Albums, under his belt, Eminem is one of the best-selling rap artists ever. Discovered by ...

"A definitive work on the New York punk scene . . . a compelling, raw nerve rampage through the frazzled brain of one of rock's most tragic heroes." —Ian Fortnam, VoxLobotomy is a lurid and unlikely temperance tract from the underbelly of rock 'n' roll. Taking readers on a wild rollercoaster ride from his crazy childhood in Berlin and Munich to his lonely methadone-soaked stay at a cheap hotel in Earl's Court and newfound peace o...

At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here: criticism engaged with this vibrant musical form on its own terms. A scholar and a fan, Perry considers the art, politics, and culture of hip hop through an analysis of song lyrics, the words of the prophets of the hood. Recognizing prevailing characterizations of hip hop as a transnational musical form, Perry advances a ...

For more than two hundred years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images — Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. Louis A. Pérez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island as they have persisted and changed since the early nineteenth century. Drawing on ...

In this cultural history of Cuba during the United States' brief but influential occupation from 1898 to 1902 — a key transitional period following the Spanish-American War — Marial Iglesias Utset sheds light on the complex set of pressures that guided the formation and production of a burgeoning Cuban nationalism.Drawing on archival and published sources, Iglesias illustrates the process by which Cubans maintained and created their own culturally relevant national symbols in the f...

Kid Gavilan was a fixture in the boxing world of the early 1950s. He fought on television more than thirty times, in bouts for championships and non-title fights. From Camaguey, Cuba, the Kid was named by his first manager, who had a restaurant called El Gavilan or The Little Hawk. Kid Gavilan fought the majority of his fights in the United States after arriving here in the 1940s. Kid fought Sugar Ray Robinson, Carmen Basilio, Billy Graham, Johnny Bratton, and others contenders, some of th...

Fidel Castro was a dynamic and charismatic leader, who led Cuba through success and failures from 1959. Son of a rich landowner, he became a radical revolutionary who attempted to overthrow the government in 1956 with a tiny band of followers. Using propaganda and subversion as much as sudden attacks from his mountain hideout, he gained victory in 1959. He liberated his country from one dictator and the overwhelming influence of the United States, only to turn it into anot...