(Perseus Books)

www.perseusbooks.com

 BY ROXANA HADADI

A lot of people like to blame hip-hop for society's ills. More than a decade ago, Tipper Gore led congressional hearings about how bad gangster rap was for the United States. In 2002, Bill O'Reilly encouraged viewers to boycott Pepsi for their sponsorship of rapper Ludacris, because O'Reilly thought Ludacris' lyrics were a crappy example for children everywhere - and Pepsi would go on to drop Ludacris because of it. And in 2004, students at Spelman College, a historically black women's college in Atlanta, protested rapper Nelly's performance on their campus after his video for song "Tip Drill" showed him swiping a credit card through a girl's butt.

So to say that hip hop is dead - or at least gets a bad rap from modern society - isn't an understatement, and it's a phenomena that Tricia Rose explores in The Hip Hop Wars, a collection of various essays about "what we talk about when we talk about hip hop - and why it matters," according to the book's cover. The book, which Rose describes in her preface as an attempt to "arm young black men and women, and everyone else, with powerful critical tools so that they can expose and challenge the state of commercial hip hop," mainly discusses the problems with modern hip-hop and how it has been manipulated both by critics and by artists, capitalist decisions that "not only dumb down the music but minimize fan knowledge and constrain the conversation as a whole."

And Rose has done her homework. Each chapter, which range from discussing whether hip hop causes violence, actually reflect "ghetto culture," hurts black people, destroys America's values or demeans women, holds immense amounts of research, such as a variety of pertinent quotes from artists and critics at the beginning of each chapter and numerous details about hip-hop drama through the years, from negative criticism by Ronald Reagan back in the ‘80s to a description of the whole Don Imus "nappy-headed hoes" thing in 2007.

Yet the book's main downfall is its inherent preachiness: While it is essentially a tell-all of what hip-hop has done wrong in the past decades, it sometimes reads like a laundry list of ills and makes it seem like everyone and everything related to hip-hop is negative and demoralizing. Granted, this is Rose's inherent thesis, but it can be tedious to read, making The Hip Hop Wars not a book to read straight-through but instead one to be taken in small doses. When read in that way, however, it's an interesting, somewhat enlightening look at the criticisms against hip-hop, the culture surrounding the genre and what Rose thinks can be done to change both for the better. You may not agree, but hey, that's your prerogative.