Where You're At [Paperback]

Patrick Neate (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 2004

Spurred by his own deep love of the music and its central role in his life, but troubled by the current state of mainstream hip-hop culture, Patrick Neate sets off to discover if the music and culture that mean so much to him have retained true cultural vitality and significance anywhere in the world. Covering five continents and cities as diverse as New York, Rio, Tokyo, and Johannesburg, Neate discovers hip-hop reinventing itself internationally, locally, and individually. Spirited and idealistic, yet grittily insightful, Where You're At is a global tour of a small planet, with hip-hop, in all its multifarious forms, as the main character.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At first glance, one might not expect a British novelist to be a particularly insightful commentator on hip-hop, "the most elemental expression of contemporary America." But starting with a description of his first encounter with a rap record in the mid-1980s, Neate displays a sympathy and sensitivity to the musical genre many American critics would be hard-pressed to match. A trek to examine hip-hop's global influence begins with a visit to New York—and a willing acknowledgment that this city is only one facet of the complex American hip-hop scene. Neate's recognition of his own limitations increases his credibility as he drops in on the subcultures in Japan, South Africa and Brazil to see how fans are "keeping it real." He sees in hip-hop a powerful voice of protest against the status quo and is adamant about the need for its creators to wrest financial control of their music away from multinational media companies. His recommendation that American hip-hop artists start cultivating a deeper global political consciousness may come across as overly didactic, but it's the culmination of a consistent awareness of the ways in which non-Americans are already using the music to describe and define their lives.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Taking its title from an old Eric B and Rakim track called "I Know You Got Soul," Neate's book is not so much an analysis of worldwide hip-hop as it is "hip-hop's story of how it conquered the world and nobody noticed." Writing like an academic "b-boy," Neate takes us on a journey: he visits one of his favorite independent record labels in New York; goes clubbing in Tokyo, where hip-hop "may have more to do with style than substance"; and also drops in on the local scene in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Rio. From the violence of South Africa to the consumerist lunacy of Japan, Neate explores how the music created a different sort of globalism--that is, a process through which black America is assimilated by different cultures on many different continents. Neate, the author of the Whitbread-winning novel Twelve-Bar Blues (2002), is a compelling storyteller, and although he comes at his subject here as a fan, readers unfamiliar with the genre won't feel left out. A persuasive examination of the worldwide hip-hop phenomenon. Carlos Orellana
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade (August 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594480125
• ISBN-13: 978-1594480126
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 4.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #800,260 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get it -- now!, September 6, 2004

By 

Pearl (Stanford, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Where You're At (Paperback)

I picked this book up at a literary agency I was interning at this summer and I was completely blown away. I am not a hip-hop head (is this a British term?) myself -- in fact, metal and hard rock are my genres -- but this book manages to explore the dialectics of a marginalized subculture in a way that is immediate and enlightening, bringing the grim urban realities as well as the privileged suburban fantasizings involved in hip-hop subculture to life, offering a very intimate view into what drives this passion both for the author himself and for a variety of cultures and key cities around the globe.

It presents a variety of interesting socio-cultural issues without being pedantic, and best of all, the author is very unapologetic about making the book strictly his own -- his quest for his truth, his answers, all situated within possible truths and answers that may exist for other people.

For someone coming from the other side of the mythical music border (I know, I know, metal has grass-roots in hip hop) this book was an amazing read, and has offered me an inside glimpse into this genre that has heightened my respect and admiration for it even more. Just think what it could do for you -- a hip hop head!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Overview, Heartfelt, April 3, 2005

By 

Anna Billstrom "banane71" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Where You're At (Paperback)

The author intersperses personal experiences, interviews with rappers, record labels, and kids on the street to describe a movement of hip hop, or an explanation of what hip hop is today.
He pieces this book together very well, and its organization is a testiment to his skill as a writer and journalist.

I noticed a weak point in that the repetition of thequestion and answer of "what hip hop is" in almost every paragraph and chapter, if you have an issue with what it is, or a personal concern that is regarding it, you maybe more interested.

His span of the globe also has a kind of import to his thesis that he doesn't really explain (why give as much time/space to French and African hip hop, for example, in what I found was a very slender volume.) OK, I'm from the West Coast and the focus on NYC got a bit tiresome too.

Partway through the book I also realized that if I started reading this knowing it would be more about business and economics I wouldn't feel this little trace of disappointment.

I don't want to make it seem like it's a bad book, because it really is good. The guy knows his stuff, and the references to lyrics, songs etc. flow along really well as you're reading. I wish there were more people writing about hip hop, their experiences with it and history of it. I've already started a list of tracks I want to from this book!

There is a kind of problem with writing about hip hop without being a lyricist- especially in a musical genre that is so self-parodying and self-critizing. You just get bogged down in pretension or stiffness, maybe. But it usefully opens a dialogue about/on issues of sellout music, the underground, and the media. He is pretty self-conscious though of who is and how he appears to those he interviews, which at the same time displaces me, as a reader, even more than I usually am in approaching the culture/music.

One great part was the use of ebonics to lower/raise the speaker in certain situations- a white exec saying "yo dawg" (oh the number of times I have experienced this!) and a black kid responding "yo dawg" - has reverse effects on each speaker. The white exec gets to be "hip" the black kid gets to be shot down.

5.0 out of 5 stars great insight to hip-hop around the world, April 25, 2010

By 

Jason Jeansonne "Saint" (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Where You're At (Paperback)

if you are into hip-hop this is a great book to give you perspective of the hip-hop scenes around the world. really good read and interesting to see how the rest of the world has adopted hip-hop in their own way