Keith Joseph is a confidence man, a young 24-year old Black schemer with confidence. He's always had a method to his madness, a point to his sharp intellect. Now, he's about to add rhyme to his reason. Keith Joseph plans to steal the entire genre of Hip Hop. And to do this, he's going to assemble a crew of fellow confidence men, pranksters, a retired beat maker, and a poet to break into the toughest, most well concealed, heavily guarded place on the planet ... ... The Music Industry. From the author of 12 Stories High and The Ronin Poetz comes Code-47: Memoirs of a Hip Hop Heist.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Is it really fiction?,
By
This review is from: Code-47: Memoirs of a Hip Hop Heist (Paperback)
Code-47: Memoirs of a Hip Hop Heist is the bold story of a young, intelligent black man named Keith Joseph. Keith won't stand for the continuing racism aimed at black people, and formulates a risky plan to take back (or heist) Hip Hop, as he watches most of the people in his community cry out about the music genre's degenerated state, but do little in the way of taking action against the corporate music structure whose basis for existence is to allow nothing but the most violent, sexually explicit and degrading lyrics to influence young black generations to devolve into imitating the over-exaggerated behaviors of so-called "Gangsta Rappers." (I know that's a mouthful for one sentence, but it's true.) So, Keith Joseph puts together a small team to pull sort of a prank on the music industry, and at the same time release encoded songs that help find, take back, keep and restore the minds of the people in his community.
The book is dedicated to Negro Spirituals, and the plot plays out in the same fashion, with Keith Joseph acting as a modern-day Harriet Tubman journeying to a plantation-like music industry to help free black slaves. The centerpiece of the book is an album put together by Keith's team called "The Disguise." The team tricks the music industry into releasing the album. The songs Keith Joseph helps produce are disguised to look like ordinary gangsta rap songs, but are truly encoded with aspects of black history or black spirituality. There is a scene that showcases each concept and code. Justin Thomas, author of Code-47, takes time out to list, in concluding pages, various books to read where much of the "codes" have come from. Keith Joseph's (and his team's) break into the music industry is, of course, the setup. Dealing with the consequences of their actions when they are exposed winds the book down, and steers it into a dark, violent place that exposes a lot of the politics in the music industry that keeps black people at odds with each other--especially Hip Hop artists, and black people from different coasts and regions of America. The characters are plentiful and can be a little rough around the edges in their personality. The subplots strung throughout the book, and Thomas' ability to keep track of them to tie them into the main plot, are just as engaging (and as important) to the larger story. The characters, though intelligent, are flawed--realistically. What I enjoyed personally was how the characters were grounded in reality and within the reality of the story. There was no super-thug character; there was no Black-fantasy-overly-successful corporate character either. The characters compliment one another, even when they struggle to get along. There are "characters," such as the white record producer, but even he has a ground in reality. Code-47 opens with several pages dedicated to the history of Hip Hop, and author Justin Thomas doesn't take the reader back to the mid-70s, but to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, rhyming musical companies in African-Moorish-controlled Spain, and the West African Griots that were often used to quell battles between nations by way of their rhyming skills. The book, however, is not preachy in its presentation (except, maybe, a very harsh commentary on the city of Atlanta). The plot coasts along in a slick manner, paying homage to confidence heist plots, cool and smooth. The reader may at times forget the "greater good" the characters are setting out to prove, and easily get lost in the various storylines and personalities (their interactions) that are presented in a wonderful, funny, thought-provoking and extremely entertaining read. Code-47 is a rare gem, a street book with a heart, solution, and a great deal of intelligence and wit. 5/5 Eklectiks Inc.
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Music World,
By The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers (RAWSISTAZ.com and BlackBookReviews.net) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Code-47: Memoirs of a Hip Hop Heist (Paperback)
CODE-47 is a well-written story about the good, bad, and ugly of the hip hop music genre, from Atlanta to California. Keith is an intelligent young man who chooses to use schemes, deceit, and other people to succeed, with no thought to how his antics may hurt others. Due to the excessive use of the "N", "B", and "F" words, in addition to a few other choice words, the story was not an enjoyable one for me.
Thomas knows how to spin a story; this would be an excellent fiction read, for someone to gain insight into the world of hip hop music. I hope the author will continue to write great stories with cleaner language. Reviewed by Toni Bonita of The RAWSISTAZ(tm) Reviewers
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