Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism

by Russell A. Potter

Book Overview

Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0791426262
• ISBN13: 9780791426265
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Negro Please ...

...Drop your Baudrillard's, your Derrida's and other twisted old white men's tales, pomo doesn't have to be that hard. I think it's safe to say that outside Academia, most people interested in postmodernism are in it for the politics of reception: how we interprete and then reconstruct reality. White America has been trying to put this 'Black Noize' in its place for quite a while, w/o much success, and this book goes in depths, to connect Hip Hop within the African Diaspora, as another practice to reconstruct 'Blackness' and 'Whiteness', both from within and outside the Eurocentric discourse. The amazing thing about this book is its simplicity, no esoteric object-oriented writings, where each term convolutes into a web of meanings, no arcane knowledge or phD in phenomenology required here. Yet, it does get to the bottom of it all, Russel Potter reveals the constructed, mythic and dynamic form(s) of hip hop, or in postmodern terminology, Russel Potter signifies the tropes to reveal the symbolic exchange taking place within the various hip hop simulacra, and seduces the essentially simulated 'nature' of urban hyppereality imploding within the void of eurocentric and capitalistic discourses.

THIS IS A DoPE BOOK

This is the crack of hip hop books. it will put your postmodern mind in a vernacular that is gonna make you bangin' mixtapes like its going outta style. after i read ths book in my senior year of college i changed my career path, and now i run a hip hop record label. now thats crack.

Very interesting; really

I find it incredible that this affluent and priviledged white male with a two hundred thousand dollar education could possibly know so much about hip-hop. Of course no one should take seriously his claim that this is in some way a 'risky' undertaking, especially from a well-paid academic. Still, Potter knows his stuff, is capable of taking in a great variety of the cultural discourse surrounding hip-hop and making sense of it (at least sometimes). I suppose this is just the kind of dull-as-driftwood analysis of a vibrant musical culture, but, as he points out, what else did you expect from an academic? I recommend this book to anyone who wishes to be conversant in everything hip-hop; just try not to sound like a rich white guy worshipping at the fount of Black creativitiy, won't you?