Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop

Perry offers detailed readings of the lyrics of many hip hop artists, including Ice Cube, Public Enemy, De La Soul, krs-One, OutKast, Sean “Puffy” Combs, Tupac Shakur, Lil’ Kim, Biggie Smalls, Nas, Method Man, and Lauryn Hill. She focuses on the cultural foundations of the music and on the form and narrative features of the songs—the call and response, the reliance on the break, the use of metaphor, and the recurring figures of the trickster and the outlaw. Perry also provides complex considerations of hip hop’s association with crime, violence, and misogyny. She shows that while its message may be disconcerting, rap often expresses brilliant insights about existence in a society mired in difficult racial and gender politics. Hip hop, she suggests, airs a much wider, more troubling range of black experience than was projected during the civil rights era. It provides a unique public space where the sacred and the profane impulses within African American culture unite.

• Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
• More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States
• Subway Art
• Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop
• God Save the Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-Hop
• That's the Joint!
• When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down
• The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why It Matters
• Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Music / Culture)
• Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation