Customer Reviews

Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture (Critical Perspectives on the Past)

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Droppin science is a collection of insightful essays from a variety of intellectuals about the social dynamics and history behind the music now known as hip-hop. Every hip-hop head or any music lover in general could benefit from this insightful collection. From the influences of the island cultures on rap to the history of dance, this book illuminates and expands the present discourse on rap. This is a book I will surely pass onto others in the hip-hop community.

Very interesting, with opinions that don't always duplicate what the last person said. I really enjoyed some of the essays of this book. It challenges white patriarchal assumptions about Black music, its relevance, and those who are trying to appropriate it for their own financial gain. Tricia Rose's book is also a good one.

I would recommend this to any Hip Hop fan as a book to read. It has a collection of essays on various aspects of Hip Hop. Some are quite amazing; a standout was one that researched the origins of Breaking and traced different moves to different parts of Africa. It is a very good book; people who read works by Nelson George or James Spady, or who are familiar with David Toop's "Rapattack", Jim Fricke's "Yes Yes Y'all" or Jeff Chang's "Can't Stop Won't Stop" will like this.

What a gem! For anyone interested in hip hop and cultural studies, this is a must read. In addition, the service and delivery was great!

At the time this 1996 book was published, editor William Eric Perkins was a Faculty Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois College House at the University of Pennsylvania, and an Adjunct Professor of Communications at Hunter College.

He writes in the Preface book, "No one has analyzed the complex interior of hip-hop culture, surveyed its many genres and personalities, examined its effect on the large white market, or acknowledged hip hop internationalization. The essayists in this book address those deficiencies and together put rap and hip hop culture into a wider framework of media and culture. They discuss the ongoing controversies about rap music within the context of contemporary debates about racial, class, and gender politics. With an acute historical vision, the contributors look at and beyond the rapidly changing trends in popular music. Their essays examine rap's significance to its makers and consumers as well as its cultural implications beyond music. Who makes this music and why? What does the making of this form of cultural expression mean in this time and place?"

Here are some quotations from the book:

"This (digital) technological breakthrough allowed DJs to exploit an infinite number of samples from vinyl, advertising jingles, television sitcom themes, and movie sound tracks. It is sampling and mixing that gives rap music its self-renewing character." (Pg. 8)

"More often than not, 'G-boys' are simply out to get paid, making funky jeep music, practicing the ancient art of playing the dozens, trying to be funny, and giving the people what they want. And when they address the problems of inner-city communities, we have to keep in mind that their sharpest critiques of capitalist America are derived from the same social and economic contexts that led a lot of homies to distrust black women and each other." (Pg. 147-148)

"The Beastie Boys' album Licensed to Ill offers a set of songs that, heard today, sound less like rap than like a postmodern potpourri of styles from blues-metal to sampled sounds, all borrowed, of course, from Black sources. It is inauthentic as rap because the appropriations lack the effrontery that inspired the first rap artists." (Pg. 189)